Belated Imaginaries or How to be Modern in Post-Socialist Romania.

Eastern Europe is generally not considered part of postcolonial geography. Major events of the colonial age such as the middle passage, the scramble for colonies, and the decolonization movement bypassed the region. Yet Eastern Europe provides an interesting playground for postcolonial politics precisely because it was excluded from the history of colonialism. Instead of participating in the Age of Light and Reason, alongside the great European powers, the region never gained full access to modernity. Foreign Ottoman rule, inter-ethic conflict, and a poor development record placed it on the periphery of modern civilization. Against this historical backdrop, I look at how the postsocialist Romanian intellectual class is engaged in a collective effort to restore the country's racial purity and civilizational credibility by importing Western models of government, civic attitudes, conducts, and lifestyles. To this end, I use articles from the weekly cultural magazine Dilema published between 1997 and 2009. Ironically enough, in Romania, emulating the West is supposed to serve an emancipatory function - it is meant to help Romanians organize themselves as modern white subjects. This effort, however, betrays a belated modernity inspired by Enlightenment principles of progress, rationality, and racial hierarchy, which have little to do with late modern conceptions of identity politics, environmentalism, and social justice currently circulating in the West. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]