Search Result

Srl

Item

ID: 109169

Everyday encounters with the global behind the iron curtain: imagining freedom, desiring liberalism in socialist Romania / Sajed, Alina

Sajed, Alina	Journal Article
	0 Rating(s) & 0 Review(s)

Publication

2011.

Summary/Abstract

This article challenges the liberal assumption that socialist societies were closed or isolated entities, and that it was the 1989 revolutionary moment that both freed them and integrated them into global dynamics. Everyday encounters with a particular vision of the global had already shaped the political imagination of ordinary Romanians prior to 1989. Such encounters constituted their instruction into concepts of liberalism and the liberal subject, freedom and democracy. By looking at informal (and illicit) networks of consumption of both goods and ideas (such as tuning into Radio Free Europe and Voice of America), I seek to explore the sensorial dimension of everyday politics in communist Romania and to illustrate how such a sensorial experience reinforced the imagined distance between a free and prosperous 'outside' and an impoverished and oppressive 'inside'. I use Michel de Certeau's theorizing on the everyday, and Ashis Nandy's preference for the 'non-player' as the ordinary hero of violent political projects, to go beyond the framework of power and resistance, and to explore the more nuanced practices of coping, survival and subversion.

Key Words

Liberalism ; Romania ; Political Imagination ; Everyday Encounters ; Imagining Freedom ; Socialist Romania ;
Indian Politics - 1921-1971

Links

'Full Text'

In Basket

Export

ID: 160077

Lebanese Football: Imagining a Defiant and United Lebanon? / Mouawad, Jamil

Mouawad, Jamil	Journal Article
	0 Rating(s) & 0 Review(s)

Summary/Abstract

The growing literature on sports in Lebanon tends to portray football as often implicated in the production of sectarian belonging and national disintegration. This article lays out key features of the complex politicization of sports in Lebanon vis-à-vis the discourse of national unity. It shows how the ruling elite uses sports to reaffirm its position as custodian of the hegemonic discourse of national unity that revolves around religious communities living together. It further demonstrates how normal citizens through everyday practices, and when not under the dominion of the elites, tend to ‘imagine from below’ a country that is not only powerful and defiant but also able to compete with the very countries that reputedly interfere in its domestic politics.

Key Words

Lebanon ; Sectarianism ; Football ; National Unity ; Everyday Encounters

Links

'Full Text'

In Basket

Export