HAND OVER HEART: NATIONAL IDENTITY AND RITUAL IN THE ROMANIAN ANTHEM
HAND OVER HEART: NATIONAL IDENTITY AND RITUAL IN THE ROMANIAN ANTHEM
Author(s): Anca UrsaSubject(s): Romanian Literature, Period(s) of Nation Building
Published by: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai
Keywords: national anthem; analysis of the imaginary; social ritual; nation; identity legitimization;
Summary/Abstract: Hand over heart: National Identity and Ritual in the Romanian Anthem. In the past 150 years Romania has had five anthems that appeared in different stages of the nation that they symbolically legitimized. The present anthem, Deșteptă-te, române! (Awaken thee, Romanian!), based on the lyrics of a poem created during the 1848 revolution, is the product of the 19th-century romantic imaginary and thematizes important values for the moment of the creation/discovery of the ethnic-national solidarity, similar to the majority of European manifestos from that time. However, the former revolutionary song becomes an official national anthem in 1990, when the social projections and national values had long belonged to another paradigm, and it continues to dominate community rituals through unexpected structuring mechanisms.
Journal: Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai - Philologia
- Issue Year: 65/2020
- Issue No: 1
- Page Range: 229-242
- Page Count: 14
- Language: English
