Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania
This book analyzes the political and social transformations of the former socialist bloc through the lens of heritage. The topic is important as speaks to issues of of heritage building and identity formation more generally. While the focus is on Romania, similar strategies and outcomes can be traced to countries throughout the European Union.
The book is written in a clear and engaging way, which is a hallmark of the New Anthropologies of Europe series at IU Press. As such it will have an interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists and historians working on heritage studies as well as those studying memory studies, Romania, the European Union, and socialism.
The author has a strong social media presence. She will be amenable to marketing the book aggressively at conferences and talks.
"1129919010"
Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania
This book analyzes the political and social transformations of the former socialist bloc through the lens of heritage. The topic is important as speaks to issues of of heritage building and identity formation more generally. While the focus is on Romania, similar strategies and outcomes can be traced to countries throughout the European Union.
The book is written in a clear and engaging way, which is a hallmark of the New Anthropologies of Europe series at IU Press. As such it will have an interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists and historians working on heritage studies as well as those studying memory studies, Romania, the European Union, and socialism.
The author has a strong social media presence. She will be amenable to marketing the book aggressively at conferences and talks.
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Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania
This book analyzes the political and social transformations of the former socialist bloc through the lens of heritage. The topic is important as speaks to issues of of heritage building and identity formation more generally. While the focus is on Romania, similar strategies and outcomes can be traced to countries throughout the European Union.
The book is written in a clear and engaging way, which is a hallmark of the New Anthropologies of Europe series at IU Press. As such it will have an interdisciplinary audience of anthropologists and historians working on heritage studies as well as those studying memory studies, Romania, the European Union, and socialism.
The author has a strong social media presence. She will be amenable to marketing the book aggressively at conferences and talks.
Emanuela Grama is Associate Professor of Anthropology and History at Carnegie Mellon University.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Tensed Urban Visions: Making Bucharest into a Socialist Capital
2. Matters of State: Archaeology, Materiality, and State-Making
3. Time-Travelling Houses and Histories Made Invisible
4. Lipstick and Lined Pockets: Strategic Devaluation and Postsocialist Wealth
5. Displacements: Property, Privatization, and Precarity in a Europeanizing City
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
"
Socialist Heritage is a poignant account of much more than heritage. Emanuela Grama offers instead an ethnographic history of Romania and its recent political economic transformations, as well as continuities, by way of Bucharest's Old Town. Alternately forgotten and valorized, ruined and reconstructed, and commodified and set apart as a national treasure, Old Town stands as a complex hieroglyphic that, creatively excavated, makes the reader understand more clearly Romania's insertion into a neoliberal capitalist order while offering a novel perspective on social distinctions, political power, and placemaking under socialism.
"
Doug Rogers
In this beautifully presented historical ethnography, Bucharest's Old Town comes to life. In Grama's telling, the residents of Old Town include not just the people who have lived there—Romanians and non-Romanians, elites and non-elites—but also the very material things of the city district itself, from mailboxes to ruins and from ornate facades to planning files. Often to advance state visions and usually in the name of "heritage," these Old Town residents have been made and remade with dizzying frequency over the past seventy years. In these layered transformations, Grama deftly shows, lie lessons about heritage and history that are instructive far beyond the socialist and postsocialist world.
John Collins
Socialist Heritage is a poignant account of much more than heritage. Emanuela Grama offers instead an ethnographic history of Romania and its recent political economic transformations, as well as continuities, by way of Bucharest's Old Town. Alternately forgotten and valorized, ruined and reconstructed, and commodified and set apart as a national treasure, Old Town stands as a complex hieroglyphic that, creatively excavated, makes the reader understand more clearly Romania's insertion into a neoliberal capitalist order while offering a novel perspective on social distinctions, political power, and placemaking under socialism.
Irina Livezeanu
This is a rich analysis of Romanian socialism and post-socialism through the lens of Bucharest's Old Town. Grama challenges readers to understand the intricate games that powerful elites played with the buildings, ruins, and infrastructure at different political moments in a district whose social and ethnic composition changed dramatically after the Second World War.
