Abstract
In this chapter, the author proposes a keen look at Domnica Rădulescu's novel Black Sea Twilight, representative for women literary prose of the Romanian diaspora after the Cold War (post-1989). The chapter highlights a strong voice discussing Western Europe and Romania the encounter of the two spaces (East and West), from the standpoint of a Romanian woman and a refugee writer. Furthermore, the analysis highlights the concept of cultural and spatial creolization and brings to the forefront the concept of circular creolization in order to compare, contrast East and West and, hopefully, add new perspectives to previous ways of analyzing diasporic writings. Specifically, the analysis zooms in on text close reading of Domnica Rădulescu's above-mentioned novel. The approach demonstrates interesting insights into emigrant fiction framed by concepts such as creolization, circular creolization and showcases a type of analysis not readily available with the traditional analytical toolbox of exile/diaspora studies.
TopSpatial And Cultural Creolization
The fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and ensuing global re-arrangements, have forwarded the idea that in the competition between East and West the latter gained and the majority of discourses, be they economic, political or cultural, have been based on the clear opposition between the two spaces. The concepts of diaspora, of culture as “site of travel” (Clifford, 1992), have stressed the in-between acting agent in the nature of the migratory practices, forged on the background of globalization’s connective features and the associated globalism, which flattens experience into a rather homogeneous practice of local and global sameness. These re-arrangements have brought to light the limited power of comprehension for contemporary issues if pending on a clear-cut opposition, deeming that total difference is a thing of the past, as what matters is the “infinite experientiality, the myriad processes of cultural fissure and fusion that underwrite contemporary forms” (Brah, 1996, p. 208).
Globalization overlapped boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, of belonging and otherness, of us and them and forced scholarly work to conceptualize the world in terms of syncretism as the new hegemon of all things, porous boundaries have become habits of the mind, while the politics of location have eased transplantation and territorial re-insertion.
The argument, hence, is that globalizing and diasporizing agencies that underwrite East and West are created not only by their native but also by those who migrate and become at various points indigenous, just as the native may choose to diasporize. The two geographic and cultural formations include this entanglement of cultures and traditions while at the same time allowing a mirror-like image of each-other in the eye of the counter Other.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Migration: The action of moving from one place to another.
Immigrant: Person who arrived in a country other than the place of origin.
Exile: To be away from one's original space of living (village, town, state, territory, country), and refused permission to return, or threatened with incarceration or capital punishment upon decision to return.
Creolization: Originally, the process of languages mixing to produce new ones, used especially to refer to mixtures of local languages with foreign languages; here, the process of mixing space, culture, societies.
Emigrant: person departed from a country to settle somewhere else.
Diasporan: An individual part of diaspora.
Diaspora: A group of people who spread from one original country to other countries, forming communities in the new countries.