On Your Own in a One-and-Unequal World: Forms and Worldviews in Contemporary Romanian Narratives of Emigration

This article examines the political and world-literary location and outlook developed in the contemporary Romanian literature that details labor emigration. To that end, I bring under joint scrutiny the fields of postcolonialism, postcommunist and migration studies, to argue that fiction about postcommunist economic emigration cannot be adequately addressed within the cosmpolitan, postnational paradigm that was celebrated by postcolonialism. I also discuss how this Romanian literary archive that translates an experience of economic subalternity could engage with Wallerstein-inspired world-systems theories and comparative frameworks that posit global capitalism as the matrix of world-literature. In approaching my choice set of novels (written by Radu Aldulescu, Liliana Corobca, Liliana Nechita, Dan Lungu, Ioana Baetica Morpurgo), I explore questions of form and genre, to inquire what modes of storytelling account for the subjectivities born out of capitalist precarity and whether testimonial forms of writing are better suited to expose the “situational consciousness” of the peripheral subject. My main argument is that, while the narrative features displayed through these novels indicate the difficulty to provide a critical account of world-systemic unevenness, they manage to expose the fragmentation enforced by capital on social communities.