Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania by Emanuela Grama

Abstract

Reviewed by: Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania by Emanuela Grama Maria Bucur Emanuela Grama. Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2019. 268 pp. “Heritage” entrepreneurship has been an important site for constructing legitimacy and accumulating power in the modern world. Though presumably revolutionary in ideology and goals, state socialist regimes have also used this memorialistic framework to articulate the cultural legitimacy of their ascent to power. How that heritage discourse has fared in the post-socialist world is at the heart of the analysis Emanuela Grama offers in Socialist Heritage: The Politics of Past and Place in Romania. By focusing on a neighborhood in Bucharest that has been dubbed “the Old City,” Grama takes us through a journey of how the heritage discourse was first constructed and operationalized through archaeological, historiographic, and urban planning activities under state socialism, and then repurposed as well as contested after 1989, with results that show profound fissures in the ability to deploy “heritage” as a successful legitimating tool. Though the author focuses on a relatively small site of heritage building and negotiation, the case study is meant to represent a larger trend in Romania. The overall argument of the book can be divided into two parts. To begin with, Grama shows how after 1948 Romanian architects, archaeologists, and members of the Politburo turned the Old City neighborhood in Bucharest into an object of personal attention on the part of these various players. Uncovering and restoring medieval ruins became a way to gain visibility and resources from the political leadership. These heritage entrepreneurs eventually helped grow the Marxist-nationalist brand of historical narrative about the past that culminated under Nicolae Ceaușescu. Historians joined the chorus by unearthing or simply adhering to a historical materialist [End Page 563] discourse imposed by the Marxist ideological straight jacket dictated by the Politburo, for the sole purpose of aligning historical narratives—together with archives, archaeological sites, and thus any representation of the past through institutional means—with the ideology of the Romanian Communist Party. Within that universe of constrained access to power, entrepreneurial professionals constructed discourses and practices that advanced a dialectic inscribed in the urban landscape, for the purpose of bolstering the claims of the political leadership to have played the revolutionary role of liberating the nation from the shackles of capitalist oppression. That argument was made most powerfully over two decades ago by Katherine Verdery, who appears quite frequently in the footnotes. I see the current contribution as a distinct articulation of the theoretical insights made in National Ideology under Socialism (Verdery 1995), confirming the workings of hierarchies of institutional and discursive power detailed in that analysis of knowledge making under state socialism. It is in tying that analysis of power relations among the communist elites to the lived environment—in short, as material and not just intellectual consequences of those struggles—that this book deepens our understanding of state socialism. And by starting Socialist Heritage with the reactions of someone who lives in that area today, Grama makes clear that revealing the consequences of these contests for the citizens of this lived environment is ultimately the stake of her work. The book excels especially when she brings in the concept of heritage as a means for governance and shaping the everyday experience of the bucureșteni (Bucharesters). The first three chapters are dedicated to exploring how various knowledge makers became heritage entrepreneurs and helped turn streets and buildings in the Old City into so many signposts of the political order that dominated Wallachia’s medieval period. The focus here is on the political negotiations among intellectual and professional elites of the early state socialist period. Archaeological speculation became historiographic certainty about evidence of specific forms of feudalism that would enable the telling of a longer story about class struggle and the dialectics of power in the premodern period, enabling the Romanian Communist Party to generate a genealogy of oppression and struggle that fit neatly with the Marxist dictates of the Politburo as articulated both in Bucharest and in Moscow. But, ironically, the specific inflections of the archaeological and historio-graphic speculations...