Longing for the West: The literary utopia of consumption in communist Romania

Abstract

The main focus of this study develops around the symbolic potential of consumption as a social phenomenon and its multiple spheres of social manifestation. Given that the literature insists upon the implications of consumption upon individual and social identity construction, this analysis lays emphasis on the influences of a certain type of consumption, strictly determined by the political regime, in a given socio-political space and well-defined time-frame—communist Romania—on the citizens’ political, cultural, and even on literary identity. I have come to identify a type of “subversive consumption” which is shaped as a declaration of adhesion to the free Western world and, implicitly, as a rejection of state ideology. This strategy of revendicating another political, social and cultural descendance through consumption also manifests itself in the literary works of the poets of the so-called ‘80ist Literary Movement. Given communist poverty and all sorts of interdictions, certain imported goods, as well as certain cultural products, gained a deeply subversive value that was later taken up and transformed into “intentional communication” (Hebdige) and manifesto by the young poets.