Reading Cutezătorii and Watching Jackie Chan: Romanian Children and the Communist Propaganda in 1970s and the 1980s
Reading Cutezătorii and Watching Jackie Chan: Romanian Children and the Communist Propaganda in 1970s and the 1980s

Summary/Abstract: This article will explore an instance of creative resistance to the intrusion of communist authorities in Romanians’ everyday life during the decades of late socialism – the 1970s and 1980s. It will analyse how Romanian children appropriated and renegotiated the propaganda messages that the Romanian Communist Party communicated through media artefacts targeting children. The article will briefly present the Romanian children’s media, with an emphasis on the ideological tenets communicated through these outlets, and the principal rituals of childhood during the Ceauşescu era, particularly those associated to pioneership. This section will be complemented by an analysis of ethnographic interviews with Romanian immigrants from Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area, who recalled their response to the indoctrinatory messages they received during the Ceauşescu era. The analysis will be anchored in Michel de Certeau’s canonical study of everyday living practices. His conceptual pair strategies, usually understood as the appanage of the powerful, and tactics, the space of manoeuvre for the ‘weak’, will be discussed in relation with the social context of late socialism. It will be argued that strategies and tactics are not situated on positions of adversity, but are rather engaged in a relation of complicity, very useful when attempting to reconstitute the social context of socialism.

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