Bogdan Ştefănescu, Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature, is Professor of English with the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest where he teaches critical theory, British literature, the rhetoric of nationalism, and the comparative study of postcolonialism and postcommunism. He is the author of Patrii din cuvinte (Nations out of Words, 2016), Postcommunism/Postcolonialism: Siblings of Subalternity (2013), and Romanticism between Forma Mentis and Historical Profile (1999, 2013), co-author of Postcolonialism/Postcommunism. Dictionary of Key Cultural Terms (2011), and co-editor of Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps (2011)—all from Bucharest University Press. He has contributed articles and reviews for Slavic and East European Journal, The Literary Encyclopedia, The James Joyce Literary Supplement (Miami, Fl), The Bloomsbury Review, Krytyka (Kiew), ESSACHESS – Journal for Communication Studies (l’Agence universitaire de la Francophonie/AUF), Miscellanea Posttotalitariana Wratislaviensia (Wroclaw), and chapters in collective volumes from Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), Bloomsbury Publishing, Brill|Rodopi (Amsterdam), University of Krakow Publishers, Aracne Editrice (Rome). His literary translations—mostly from Romanian into English—have appeared in fifteen books from Romanian and US publishers. Prof. Ştefănescu is a founding member of the Romanian Society for British and American Studies and he served as deputy director of the Romanian Cultural Institute in New York (2005-2007). He is currently Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Bucharest and editor-in-chief of University of Bucharest Review (http://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/), a literary and cultural studies academic journal.
The People versus the People. On „Nationalism”, „Populism”, and Other Academic Myths – A Few Distinctions and a Case Study.
The talk will focus on the construction of “the people” in recent Romanian public discourse and will compare how national interest and popular representation features in the would-be “nationalist”/”populist” discourse of the governing coalition with the oppositional discourse of its spontaneous protesters in the social media and during the rallies of February 2017. While the ruling political circles in Romania employ a discursive arsenal that resembles that of other anti-EU politicians in European nations, it also has its peculiarities. In order to determine its nature, its affiliations and its special character, I will be proposing a few terminological clarifications regarding the use in the common discourse of academics and public intellectuals of such terms as “nationalism”, “populism”. My approach to the construction of national self-images is a discourse-based constructivism built on the categories of Hayden White’s typology of historiographic discourse and the imagological distinctions of François Hartog.
