New Challenges in Romanian Historiography

The essays in this selection attempt to introduce significant trends and figures in contemporary Romanian historiography in the larger context of paradigmatic cultural debates.  By focusing on the various institutional, generational and intellectual dynamics, Constantin Iordachi and Balázs Trencsényi’s review article The Chances of Renewal: Ten Years of Romanian Historiography (1989–1999) seeks to analyze the nature of the conflict between those who aim at integrating the modern methodologies and canons into the Romanian intellectual framework, and those who are committed to the traditional national-communist discursive tradition.  In his essay Cioran and the Romanian Stigma: Radical Definitions of Identity, Sorin Antohi gives an elaborate inter­pretation of the young Emil Cioran's radical political-existential constructions of “Romanianness”, and contextualizes the two paradigmatic Romanian national identity-discourses (of self-hatred and self-exaltation) from the Romantic period on.  In The National and Denominational Identity of Romanians in Transylvania at the Beginning of the Modern Age, Sorin Mitu provides a tableau of the various modalities of national and denominational identity among the Romanians of Transylvania and stresses the complexity of the debates around the Romanian religious communities in the nine­teenth century.  Finally, in his “The California of Romanians”: the Expansion of Roma­nia’s Frontier into Northern Dobrudja, 1878–1913, Constantin Iordachi studies the inte­gra­tion of Northern Dobrudja into the Romanian nation-state in the late-nineteenth century.  In Iordachi’s interpretation, this territory served as a kind of internal ‘frontier zone’ of economic and national expansion, profoundly influencing the long-term mech­anisms of ethnic colonization, cultural homogenization and economic modernization in the process of Romanian state-building.