Speaker
Description
Social memory scholars have compellingly argued that a socially constructed past plays a paramount role in the articulation of national identities. Constructed by developing a historical master narrative that spells out a socially meaningful story of a people’s becoming, national memory is inscribed in various places (monuments, place names, memorial plaques) and is disseminated through different media (textbooks, banknotes, stamps). In this paper, I investigate the temporal structure of Romania’s public memory as codified in the national system of street names. Drawing on the complete dataset comprising all the street names in urban Romania (N = ~50,000), I investigate what historical period(s) are most represented in the country’s national memory. Methodologically, I analyse the years of birth and death of the personalities commemorated in Romania’s street nomenclature. The statistical results are presented through visual charts (“mnemograms”) that indicate the nineteenth century as Romania’s “mnemonic century.” This is accounted for in terms of the country’s political history, by pointing out how Romania was constructed as a nation-state during what I call the “short nineteenth century” (1848-1918). I conclude by arguing that Romania’s national memory is temporally structured to celebrate the nation-makers whose actions created the country during this historical period.
| Presenting author | Mihai S. Rusu |
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