ABSTRACT The official discourse during the communist regime in Romania (1948–1989) has not been paid much attention by researchers and the official visual discourse, addressing adults and children, even less so. My study aims to address this research gap and identify the identity markers of the Romanian territory during socialism by exploring spatial representations and the territorial identity that were produced through official visual imagery. Using qualitative discourse analysis and critical visual methodology, I analyse the visual construction, through discourse, of themes and places created starting with the 1950s and were featured repeatedly during the 1970s and 1980s Romania (the period of national communism), and which constructed and highlighted traits of the country’s territorial identity. To achieve the research aim, I explore three types of research materials and ways of realising spatial education and socialisation through (propaganda) images or a visual pedagogy of space: (1) photographs in three textbooks about the Geography of Romania – a tool in educating people’s representations of their homeland, (2) official (state-produced and distributed) picture postcards reflecting progress during socialist Romania, and (3) comics about work and class identities in Cutezătorii [The Daring Ones] youth magazine – a tool in the edutainment of Romanian communist pioneers. These three official visual discourses were part of a coherent cultural visual discourse about the socialist nation, pervading representations about Romania, about its urban area, and about who the Romanians were meant to have been. This plural discourse was constructed through the visual intertextuality of these three widely distributed media.
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