Papers by Andrei Dalalau
Right-Wing Politics in Interwar Southeastern Europe: Between Conservatism and Fascism, 2023
The present article aims to offer an extensive understanding of the political radicalization of a... more The present article aims to offer an extensive understanding of the political radicalization of a well-known cultural group from interwar Romania, the self-styled Young Generation, by portraying its identity as a myth constructed on discursive repertoires and self-referential narratives to legitimize the gradual embracing of fascism.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anuarul Institutului de Istorie „George Baritiu” din Cluj-Napoca, 2023
The present paper intends to provide a preliminary analysis of the social status of the homosexua... more The present paper intends to provide a preliminary analysis of the social status of the homosexual minority in interwar Romania, applying the theoretical framework of „symbolic violence” defined by sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the case study represented by the „Credința” press scandal from 1934-1935. The scandal opposed director Sandu Tudor and the editorial staff of „Credința” newspaper on the one hand, and Petru Comarnescu, Al.Chr. Tell, Mircea Vulcănescu and Gabriel Negry (members of the Criterion Association), on the other hand. The novelty of this study consists in integrating the press scandal into the broader scheme of social and economic interactions between different agents from the social field, emphasising their competition for symbolic capital which would legitimise them in defining the nation. The study reached the preliminary conclusions that homosexuality was a cultural identity instrumentalised and then weaponised in order to gain public legitimacy and that attributing sexual meanings to a minority was produced by groups which arrogated themselves the monopoly of moral normativity.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Polis, 2023
The present study aims to offer a social and cultural analysis of the feminine literary circles i... more The present study aims to offer a social and cultural analysis of the feminine literary circles in communist Romania during the 1950s through two case studies: the German literary group from Sibiu and the literary circle from Baia Mare. The analysis aims to focus on the symbolic and cultural relations of the intellectual groups involved in the Securitate’s action of surveillance and control in order to offer a new perspective on the dynamics between the agents of the cultural field during the communist regime. The research hypothesis claims that interwar feminine intellectuals who were educated and socialized in the „old bourgeois regime”, were repressed by the Securitate through the interpretation of informal meetings as „hostile actions” that presumably endangered the cultural line of the regime. The case studies showed that the gender element neither influenced nor changed the Securitate’s methods of convicting the surveilled female intellectuals compared to men. The preliminary conclusion states that literary circles became instruments for the narrative construction of the political trials filed against targeted writers between 1958-1961. The Securitate distorted the cultural character of these forms of association by signifying them with subversive political motivations, regardless of their gender composition. Future research may consider literary circles avatars of interpersonal socialization under the form of informal meetings that combined elements of everyday small talks with bursts of cultural activities.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Historia, 2022
After a brief period of liberalization in 1956, cultural politics in communist Romania went throu... more After a brief period of liberalization in 1956, cultural politics in communist Romania went through an ideological radicalization between 1958 and the early 1960s, which led to intimidation campaigns, arrests, trials, and condemnations of several groups of interwar intellectuals. Director and actress Marietta Sadova was convicted in the 'Noica-Pillat' trial in March 1960. This paper aims to unravel the complex interaction between culture and politics through a qualitative analysis of Marietta Sadova's case study. The focus will be on the Securitate's surveillance, coercion methods, and narrative construction on one hand and the artist's surviving fascist identity, compromises made to survive, and the validity of cultural niches of existence on the other. The theoretical and methodological apparatus is built on new historiographical approaches to communist repression, including the ability of the secret police to construct and politically instrumentalize guilt narratives. The results suggest that the interaction between the interwar intellectuals and the communist authorities was neither unidirectional nor unitary but multilayered and mutually depended on negotiations and concessions, as well as on the secret police agents' newly acquired methods of creating and repressing 'hostile' social networks.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Acta Musei Napocensis. Historica, 2021
The present study aims to analyze the relationship between the so‑called ‘bourgeois’ intellectual... more The present study aims to analyze the relationship between the so‑called ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals (socialized and educated in prestigious cultural groups in the interwar society) and the Romanian secret police, the Securitate, from three perspectives: repression, re‑education, and social reinsertion. The main argument is that all three phases corresponded to Politburo’s political approaches directly related to the evolution of internal or international political events of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The sources used are the Securitate files of the persons convicted in the ‘Noica–Pillat trial’ from 1960. The research method is qualitative analysis combining an institutional approach of the Securitate files with a case study. Consequently, the article focuses on the case of Constantin Noica, a prominent Romanian intellectual. He was sentenced to prison in 1960, pardoned in 1964, and later used by the regime in power service. The Securitate used Constantin Noica’s friendship with Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade to attract prestigious intellectuals back to Romania and enhance the nationalist orientation of the regime through philosophy.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Politikon, 2021
After the collapse of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, political parties were faced with t... more After the collapse of the communist regime in Eastern Europe, political parties were faced with the necessity of building political legitimacy. This research aims to find out how political myths were instrumentalized by political leaders during the presidential campaigns in order to gain popular support. In the first part, the article focuses on defining "myth" as a legitimizing political instrument. In the second part four political myths used in the early 1990s in Romania are being analyzed: the myth of the interwar period, the myth of original democracy, the myth of political reform and the providential man. The method used is political discourse and party platform analysis. The results suggest that, during the early 90s, different political groups tried to build their legitimacy using political myths instead of rational politics, which ended up in their failure to address the real issues of a changing society.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anuarul Institutului de Investigare a Crimelor Comunismului Românesc și Memoria Exilului, 2021
The purpose of the article is to analyse the process of constructing the ideological portrait of ... more The purpose of the article is to analyse the process of constructing the ideological portrait of the class enemy towards the politically non-involved intellectuals in communist Romania in the 1950s. The ideological construction of the enemy has been carried out by the communist party through the Securitate secret police. The research hypothesis is that the communist regime has instrumentalized the class enemy in order to justify repression and gain political legitimacy, alongside with obtaining increased political control over target groups in society. The method used is ideological analysis, followed by a case study concerning the Noica-Pillat trial from 1960. In the first part, the article deals with the evolution of the concept of „enemy” starting from Karl Marx and continuing with communist leaders from the Soviet Union and Romania. The second part aims to exemplify the ideological repression through the case study. The results suggest that the ideological figure of the enemy was a discursive construction used by the communist authorities to annihilate its real or fictitious opponents.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Historia, decembrie 2020, 2020
In recent years, many works dealing with the phenomenon of the Legionary Movement have appeared. ... more In recent years, many works dealing with the phenomenon of the Legionary Movement have appeared. The scholars tried to understand the Iron Guard from a synchronous historiographical perspective called the "new consensus", theorized by Roger Griffin. In this context, the present article aims to analyse the works of Oliver Jens Schmitt, Tatiana Niculescu, Roland Clark and Traian Sandu. In their work, the writers adopt a broader understanding of the legionary phenomenon as an indigenous version of European fascism, reconfiguring Captain Codreanu's image in two provocative biographies. Clark’s book analyses the local and regional activity of the Iron Guard while Sandu’s work uses sociological research. A first part aims to compare the authors’ interest on researching the subject, as well as the methodological similarities and differences between their books. Each work is analysed separately, seeking to observe traits of their specificity and originality. The second part focuses on the common elements of each author, followed by a section of comparative perspectives, where we observe how the student activity and the religious spirit (two support pillars of the Iron Guard) may involve multiple valences of historiographical interpretation.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Revista Memoria, 2020
Marin Preda a inaugurat în literatura română celebra expresie a timpului care "nu mai avea răbdar... more Marin Preda a inaugurat în literatura română celebra expresie a timpului care "nu mai avea răbdare", o sintagmă subtilă a simțului istoric pe care percepția societății îl are asupra evoluțiilor politico-sociale aflate în plină destructurare. Anul 1989 marchează punctul culminant al acestei implacabile evoluții a timpului care „apăsa” greu pe umerii țărilor comuniste aflate sub cenzură, control, privare de libertate și raționalizare a alimentelor, într-un decor sumbru al inerției funcționării unui sistem politic comparat cu o stafie, în cuvintele lui Alain Besancon.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Revista Philohistoriss, Jan 2021
The papers focuses on several aspects of Sergei Eisenstein's movie construction and techniques, d... more The papers focuses on several aspects of Sergei Eisenstein's movie construction and techniques, defining its conceptual and desired ideological goal towards the audience. The main goal of the paper is to demonstrate how Eisenstein turned cinematography into an ideological means of Soviet propaganda by editing movies in a way that had an emotional impact on the audience. Before Potemkin, cinema was considered an extension of literature and poetry-an instrument of telling a story-but Eisenstein managed to change that and create a synthesis between the revolutionary state of Soviet Russia and the artistic life. We will try to approach Eisenstein observing his montage techniques such as close-up shots, parallel and simultaneous narrative constructions, the intercuts between two different events, the innovative movement of the cameras, the unique shooting angle and so on. Finally, we aim to analyze how those montage innovations were used in the Battleship Potemkin movie.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Revista Philohistoriss, Jul 2020
The paper focuses on several aspects of the protestant attitude in the vast field of the internat... more The paper focuses on several aspects of the protestant attitude in the vast field of the international relations, based on both the history and the geography of Protestantism and neo-Protestantism. The issue I will address relate to the development of neo-Protestantism in Asia and South America and the inadequacy between the philosophical idealism of the early church and the modern political theories, a conflict which strives to produce an apolitical stance among neo-Protestant believers. The sources consist of quantitative researches from "fact-tanks" and "think-tanks" and from various studies belonging to religious phenomena scholars. The article consists of several parts dealing with topics such as the geography of (Neo)Protestantism, the birth of the principles of tolerance and pluralism, followed by the relationship between democracy and religion and a case study referring to the position of American Protestant Associations on the Iraq war.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Book Reviews by Andrei Dalalau
Ministry of Culture - the National Museum of the History of Transylvania, 2023
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Acta Musei Napocensis Historica, 2023
The names of Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Eugen Ionescu genuinely have a worldwide resonance a... more The names of Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, and Eugen Ionescu genuinely have a worldwide resonance and are the subject of national pride in the Romanian cultural sphere. But how exactly can we define a generation of intellectuals whose memory still stirs up both admiration and controversy in the public space, and why is the interwar debate still heated? Is it because of the Romanian society’s inability to come to terms with its fascist past or due to the reproduction of a nationalist paradigm of understanding history?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Historia, 2022
One of the most famous quotes attributed to Joseph Stalin, although
initially enounced in 1932 b... more One of the most famous quotes attributed to Joseph Stalin, although
initially enounced in 1932 by German journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky,
says: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The deaths of millions are a
statistic”. Regardless of its real or fictional author, the cynic statement
refers to the horrors of totalitarian repression that was able to dehumanize
the tragedy of millions of human losses. By indexing depersonalized
destinies in never-ending lists of names, codes, or aliases, totalitarian
authorities collapsed all the emotion, suffering, and tribulation of life
stories under one cold and empty unit of analysis: numbers. However, one
author decided to bring the statistics back to life to understand victimhood
and state repression in the late 1950s and early 1960s in communist
Romania. Catalogul absenților (The Absentees’ Catalogue) is Radu
Vădeanu’s most recent book, published in 2022 at Mega Publishing House
from Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Anuarul Institutului de Istorie Orală, 2019
Ioan Stanomir is a Romanian literary critic, essayist and political scientist. He is a professor ... more Ioan Stanomir is a Romanian literary critic, essayist and political scientist. He is a professor at the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Bucharest, known for his research on constitutionalism, conservatism and cultural studies.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Historia, Dec 2018
Marius Turda is a specialist in the research of the history of eugenics, racism and nationalist i... more Marius Turda is a specialist in the research of the history of eugenics, racism and nationalist ideologies in Central and South Eastern Europe, contributing through his works in drawing guidelines on European eugenics with an inherent teaching purpose: to educate the general public and the younger generations on sensitive topics such as racism and ethnic discrimination.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Academic Life by Andrei Dalalau
by Dragan Bakić, Dušan Fundić, Aleksandar Stojanović, Andrei Dalalau, Dimitrios Soulakakis, Filip Lyapov, Gözde Emen-Gökatalay, Igor Vukadinović, Ivana Vesic, Maja Vasiljevic, Raul Carstocea, Vasilije Dragosavljevic, and Vladimir Cvetkovic An international conference entitled "The Right-Wing Parties and Intellectuals in Interwar South ... more An international conference entitled "The Right-Wing Parties and Intellectuals in Interwar South Eastern Europe: Between Conservatism and Fascism" was held in the Great Conference Hall of the Hotel Majestic in Belgrade on 7-8 April 2022. The conference was part of the ongoing project "The Serbian Right-Wing Parties and Intellectuals in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1934-1941" supported by the Science Fund of the Republic of Serbia, PROMIS, Grant No. 6062708, SerbRightWing.
Over the two days 24 papers were presented both on-site and online via Zoom (three presenters were, unfortunately, unable to join us) divided into seven thematic panels. There was a nice mixture of both established and emerging scholars from the field coming from a number of countries. Professor António Costa Pinto from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, delivered a keynote lecture “Building Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism. A Global View” on the second day of the conference.
The organizers, Dragan Bakić, Dušan Fundić and Rastko Lompar from the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, would like to extend their thanks to all the participants. It is their intention to publish an edited volume consisting of the conference proceedings which will, hopefully, be out in print next year.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Papers by Andrei Dalalau
Book Reviews by Andrei Dalalau
MINISTERUL CULTURII
MUZEUL NAŢIONAL DE ISTORIE A TRANSILVANIEI
ACTA MVSEI
NAPOCENSIS
60/II
HISTORICA
2023
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
https://amn-historica.mnit.ro/ro/download/?id=365&tk=a644a5987583c64c6b87157b0b2b6de1f1688367&fbclid=IwAR0n9xwpC-P0xXkt9kp21QnKwh5k6eHMHOM77DbN8qfC8VeENNm4-HqgK2w
initially enounced in 1932 by German journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky,
says: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The deaths of millions are a
statistic”. Regardless of its real or fictional author, the cynic statement
refers to the horrors of totalitarian repression that was able to dehumanize
the tragedy of millions of human losses. By indexing depersonalized
destinies in never-ending lists of names, codes, or aliases, totalitarian
authorities collapsed all the emotion, suffering, and tribulation of life
stories under one cold and empty unit of analysis: numbers. However, one
author decided to bring the statistics back to life to understand victimhood
and state repression in the late 1950s and early 1960s in communist
Romania. Catalogul absenților (The Absentees’ Catalogue) is Radu
Vădeanu’s most recent book, published in 2022 at Mega Publishing House
from Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Academic Life by Andrei Dalalau
Over the two days 24 papers were presented both on-site and online via Zoom (three presenters were, unfortunately, unable to join us) divided into seven thematic panels. There was a nice mixture of both established and emerging scholars from the field coming from a number of countries. Professor António Costa Pinto from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, delivered a keynote lecture “Building Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism. A Global View” on the second day of the conference.
The organizers, Dragan Bakić, Dušan Fundić and Rastko Lompar from the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, would like to extend their thanks to all the participants. It is their intention to publish an edited volume consisting of the conference proceedings which will, hopefully, be out in print next year.
MINISTERUL CULTURII
MUZEUL NAŢIONAL DE ISTORIE A TRANSILVANIEI
ACTA MVSEI
NAPOCENSIS
60/II
HISTORICA
2023
Cluj-Napoca, Romania
https://amn-historica.mnit.ro/ro/download/?id=365&tk=a644a5987583c64c6b87157b0b2b6de1f1688367&fbclid=IwAR0n9xwpC-P0xXkt9kp21QnKwh5k6eHMHOM77DbN8qfC8VeENNm4-HqgK2w
initially enounced in 1932 by German journalist and writer Kurt Tucholsky,
says: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The deaths of millions are a
statistic”. Regardless of its real or fictional author, the cynic statement
refers to the horrors of totalitarian repression that was able to dehumanize
the tragedy of millions of human losses. By indexing depersonalized
destinies in never-ending lists of names, codes, or aliases, totalitarian
authorities collapsed all the emotion, suffering, and tribulation of life
stories under one cold and empty unit of analysis: numbers. However, one
author decided to bring the statistics back to life to understand victimhood
and state repression in the late 1950s and early 1960s in communist
Romania. Catalogul absenților (The Absentees’ Catalogue) is Radu
Vădeanu’s most recent book, published in 2022 at Mega Publishing House
from Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
Over the two days 24 papers were presented both on-site and online via Zoom (three presenters were, unfortunately, unable to join us) divided into seven thematic panels. There was a nice mixture of both established and emerging scholars from the field coming from a number of countries. Professor António Costa Pinto from the Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, delivered a keynote lecture “Building Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism. A Global View” on the second day of the conference.
The organizers, Dragan Bakić, Dušan Fundić and Rastko Lompar from the Institute for Balkan Studies SASA, would like to extend their thanks to all the participants. It is their intention to publish an edited volume consisting of the conference proceedings which will, hopefully, be out in print next year.