Fragmented Identities
Popular Culture, Sex, and Everyday Life in Postcommunist Romania
By (author) Denise Roman
Publication date:
16 April 2007Length of book:
192 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9780739121184
Observing postcommunist Romania with the dual vision of a native and a scholar, Denise Roman focuses on the fluid act of identity-formation, and the construction or absence of identity-politics, in several minority or disempowered groups: youth, Jews, women, and queers. Roman shows how both aesthetic and moral judgments are born from and embedded in popular culture. Fragmented Identities is rich in observation and analysis, broad in scope, and exuberant in its account of cultural innovation and discourse wrought in response to the end of Communism and the influence of globalization.
Ms. Roman is anything but a detached traveler, although she does bring to her writing a most insightful and often amusing account of the state of politics and identity in Bucharest. But this is politics and identity in no common understanding of those terms. Skillfully teasing her own innovative interpretations from the insights of historians, sociologists, political, feminist, and cultural theorists, Ms. Roman . . . dismantle[s] old conceptions and convincingly reconstruct[s] new ones about the 'politics of life' in Eastern Europe today. By brilliantly bringing together disparate strands of thought in truly innovative, provocative, and sometimes even sly ways, she has written not only an outstanding piece of academic scholarship, but a real 'page turner.'