Monica CIOBANU & Mihaela ŞERBAN (eds.), Between the Memory and Post-Memory of Communism in Romania. Fluid Memories, London: Routledge, 2025

Abstract

The implicit question running through the volume edited by Monica Ciobanu and Mihaela Şerban is: what happens when those who remember a difficult and foundational past have no direct image, nor many opportunities to confront those for whom that past was once a present, and today’s present was imagined as a promising future? Combining diverse disciplinary perspectives (spanning sociology, anthropology, history, and more), fields of inquiry (memory studies, heritage studies, museum studies), and methodological approaches (ethnography, archival research, document and social media analysis, and more), the authors adopt several empirical foci: the Romanian State Secret Police Archive (chapters 1 and 2), property taking and restitutions practices and policies (chapter 3), legal proceedings and trials (chapter 4), royal monuments (chapter 5) and communist statues (chapter 8), TV series as commented on YouTube (chapter 6), cinematic productions (chapter 7), private museum initiatives depicting daily life under communism (chapter 9), vernacular and community-driven memorialization initiatives (chapter 10), and grassroots advocacy for underrepresented victims of communism (chapter 11). Undoubtedly, the volume represents an original and valuable contribution to memory studies and, more specifically, to the study of memory of communism in the context of the coming of the generation of postmemory.