Romanian Popular Culture
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Romanian cultural forms and to ‘westernize’ the local forms, which had been cre
ated under imposition before 1990. When the opportunity came, the sudden and
violent liberation from any sort of coerciveness and censorship led to an almost
indiscriminate ‘borrowing’ and constant ‘adaptation’ of non-Romanian popular
culture forms, which have invaded the market in the post Cold War decade both
from the west and from the east. The interesting thing is that the sudden openness
of the Romanian pop culture market resulted in a double ‘invasion’: from the west
(mainly from America) and from the east (meaning the South Balkans and Middle
East and excluding Russia). There have been, therefore, two major characteristics
of post-1990 popular culture in Romania: on the one hand, there has been the drive
to recuperate what was lost in the darker communist period of the 1970s and 1980s
in order to bridge the almost twenty-year gap of ‘socialist mass culture’; on the
other hand, there has been the import of ready-made, ‘westernized’ cultural forms
(basically American), to which a number of oriental forms have been added re
cently. In other words, Romanian pop culture has suffered both ‘global’ and ‘re
gional’ influences.
Why would a formerly French-oriented, romance-language-speaking country
like Romania prefer Anglo-American cultural models? Could it be due to a sort of
nostalgia which the Romanians still feel about America’s failure in ‘solving’ the
communist problem in Eastern Europe immediately after World War II? Or could
it be due to the ever-growing invasion of American culture on the European market
in general, and to the feeling which Romanians may have that, by quickly embrac
ing Western forms, European integration and NATO affiliation may become faster
and easier? Or could it be due to the fact that English has increasingly become the
second language of the Romanians and that its intense study in schools, coupled
with the impact of the Internet in the past decade, have paved the way to the overall
adoption of American cultural models? And if the answer to the last question were
affirmative, why would oriental forms of popular culture become hybridized with
Romanian forms?
With regard to the first major characteristic of post-Cold War popular culture
in Romania, the recuperation drive, it mainly concerns, I think, television culture
and has become obvious in the kind of movies and soap operas that have been
broadcast, or re-broadcast, on both public and private Romanian TV channels.
P