Tragicomedia Occidentului: emigrația economică în romanele și filmele românești din anii ’90
The Tragicomedy of the Occident: Depictions of Economic Migration in the Romanian Novel and Film of the 1990s
Abstract: Our article examines the narrative registers and forms adopted in the 1990s by the Romanian novelists, screenwriters and film directors in order to portray the phenomenon of economic migration to the West. Our focus is on the intriguing and paradoxical employment of tragicomic, melodramatic, burlesque-grotesque and sensational narrative techniques as the Romanian collective imaginary during the 1990s witnessed the peak idealization of emigration in Western Europe and in The United States of America. This process of idealization is also fueled by the fact that, despite the political ban has been lifted after 1989, legislative and economic constraints continued to limit the actual experience of the so-called “free world.” The corpus of our article comprises two cult films of the period, Asfalt tango (1996, Nae Caranfil) and Cristian Mungiuʼs Occident (2002), as well as two novels authored Grid Modorcea and S. Dinger, all of which share the struggle to depict the tensions between the uncritical embrace of Western story-world and the bleak, if not dramatic, reality of migration.
Keywords: economic migration, Westcentrism, tragicomic, Romanian novel and film, the 1990s.
Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-1207, within PNCDI III.
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