Și eu am trăit în comunism by Ioana Pârvulescu

In order to render a better image of the social and political context in which all this happened, I offer a brief review of Romanian television during that period, which has been characterized as the most absurd media in Europe, and I discuss the practice of watching foreign TV in socialist Europe.

I will analyse the way in which the image of the relevant Others, the Yugoslavs, is discursively constructed by the interlocutors who got acquainted with them by watching Yugoslavian television.

This chapter is based on a series of interviews with Romanians from Timişoara, who represented a fervent audience of Yugoslav television in the last decades of communist rule. Nevertheless, those living in the close vicinity of state borders had the privilege of watching foreign television, which had a strong signal in these regions, and thus of getting accustomed to the reality of the neighbouring countries, of learning their languages, and of finding out about the Western way of life and values. 1 Romanians were forced to live in the self-sufficiency imposed by a ruler trying to prevent his citizens from any form of contact with the rest of Europe. This period of Romanian history, the last years of the totalitarian communist regime, was characterized by an ever-growing and ubiquitous personality cult of Nicolae Ceauşescu. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice.This chapter offers insight into the way the Others, Yugoslav neighbours, were perceived by the Romanians watching Yugoslavian television in the 1980s in Timişoara, the biggest city of the Romanian Banat. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice. Click ‘Customise Cookies’ to decline these cookies, make more detailed choices, or learn more. Third parties use cookies for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalised ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

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Și eu am trăit în comunism by Ioana Pârvulescu