Fabricating Remembrance and Perpetuating Repression: Nation-Building and the “Romanian Soul”
Fabricating Remembrance and Perpetuating Repression: Nation-Building and the “Romanian Soul”

Summary/Abstract: Using the playtext of the theatrical performance Romanian History Abridged, which premiered in Cluj in 2021, I investigate the way in which Lacanian psychoanalysis relates to the repression of historical facts, and the perpetuation of a mythicized version of Romanian history. This state-sponsored practice favors the preservation of the ongoing Romanian identity crisis, which, I argue, describes national culture. In the article I also explain the way in which the play deconstructs the dominant nationalist discourse through various theatrical devices such as the Verfremdungseffekt, and the employment of satire and irony, which are used to question, reposition and decontextualize such founding myths as the Daco-Roman ethnogenesis thesis, and the treatment of fascist figures like Corneliu Zelea Codreanu and Ion Antonescu in current Romanian historical narratives.

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