University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Doctoral Dissertations Dissertations and Theses October 2019 “You Can Be a Good Romanian, but not a Romanian”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Romanian History Textbook Narrative Razvan Sibii University of Massachusetts Amherst Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2 Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Recommended Citation Sibii, Razvan, "“You Can Be a Good Romanian, but not a Romanian”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Romanian History Textbook Narrative" (2019). Doctoral Dissertations. 1764. https://doi.org/10.7275/14950126 https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations_2/1764 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Dissertations and Theses at ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. “You Can Be a Good Romanian, but not a Romanian”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Romanian History Textbook Narrative A Dissertation Presented by RAZVAN SIBII Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY September 2019 Department of Communication © Copyright Razvan Sibii 2019 All Rights Reserved “You Can Be a Good Romanian, but not a Romanian”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Romanian History Textbook Narrative A Dissertation Presented By RAZVAN SIBII Approved as to style and content by: _______________________________________________________ Leda Cooks, Chair ___________________________________________________ Stephen Olbrys Gencarella, Member _______________________________________________________ Donna LeCourt, Member _________________________________ Sut Jhally, Department Head Communication DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my father and to the four ladies in my life: my daughter, my wife, my mother and my cat. My father didn’t get to see me do this, but I know he’d be ecstatic to know that I’m living the best life I know how. He is the main reason I love storytelling. My daughter is everything to me. I love her more than life itself. My wife is an integral part of who I am now. Most things in my life, including some much more consequential than this dissertation, would not be in my life if it weren’t for her. Thank you, bella! Much as I try, I will never be able to tell my mother how much I love her. She is an absolutely amazing woman. My kitty, Muffin, has been an anchor and a role-model in my life for the past 15 years. She taught me much about love. I am the luckiest man alive. ABSTRACT “YOU CAN BE A GOOD ROMANIAN, BUT NOT A ROMANIAN”: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF THE ROMANIAN HISTORY TEXTBOOK NARRATIVE SEPTEMBER 2019 RAZVAN SIBII, B.A., AMERICAN UNIVERSITY IN BULGARIA M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Leda Cooks Employing a version of the Critical Discourse Analysis methodology that privileges close textual readings, I examine in this dissertation the manner in which contemporary Romanian history textbooks put forward an essentialist view of ethnonational identity by tracing through history the development of a putatively homogenous “proto-Romanian” entity. I seek to show how the “Getae-Dacian” and “Daco-Roman” identity categories acquired their thing-ness and their boundaries as a result of deliberate rhetorical work performed by Romanian historiographers with the help of such heuristics as “Romanization,” “ethnogenesis” and the nation-as-family metaphor. I also scrutinize how the textbooks treat the two ancient texts that contain some of the earliest references to the “Getae” and the “Dacians” (that is, Herodotus’s v Histories and Strabo’s Geography), with a focus on metadiscursive elements dealing with source attribution and credibility. My data consists of several dozen history textbooks written for grades 4th through 12th, as well as a handful of seminal works of historiography that have set the general tone of the Romanian historical narrative between the two world wars, during the Communist period, and after 1989. My critique of the historical narrative pushed by these textbooks is complemented by a series of proposals consisting of strategies meant to stimulate the student-readers’ critical thinking abilities with regards to the politically sensitive issues of ethnic identity, ancestry and rights. These proposals range from different word choices, to the liberal use of metalanguage, to the advocating of a joint Romanian-Hungarian textbook. The wider goal of this critical pedagogy project is to steer the Romanian history textbook towards the promotion of an open-ended national identity narrative that emphasizes potentialities rather than clarities, beginnings rather than closures, ambiguity and paradox rather than linearity and clarity, and choice rather than predestination. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .........................................................................................................................v CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................1 A. The Personal Stakes ....................................................................................................5 B. Research Questions ...................................................................................................12 C. Description of Chapters .............................................................................................13 II. IDENTITY ....................................................................................................................19 A. Stuart Hall’s Critical Project .....................................................................................21 B. Critical Pedagogy ......................................................................................................36 C. The “Genome Revolution” ........................................................................................42 III. METHODOLOGY ......................................................................................................60 A. Discourse Analysis ....................................................................................................61 B. Ethnomethodology ....................................................................................................62 C. Critical Discourse Analysis .......................................................................................64 D. Theoretical Imperialism ............................................................................................67 E. Ideological Commitment ...........................................................................................71 F. Methodological Standards .........................................................................................78 G. Data ...........................................................................................................................92 IV. ROMANIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY ...........................................................................97 A. The Chroniclers .........................................................................................................99 vii B. The Transylvanian School .......................................................................................109 C. Historiography in the New Romanian State ............................................................113 D. The Professionals ....................................................................................................118 E. The Communist Period ...........................................................................................122 F. The Case of the Treatise of Romanian History ......................................................130 G. History Education after 1989 .................................................................................132 H. The Textbooks ........................................................................................................134 V. ANALSYIS I...............................................................................................................140 A. Sources: Transparency and Evaluation ...................................................................142 1. Herodotus’s Histories ......................................................................................145 2. Strabo’s Geography .........................................................................................152 3. Not “made up,” but “processed” ......................................................................156 4. “According to the father of history…” ............................................................162 5. Recommendations I .........................................................................................176 B. Ideographs: The Workhorses of Forced Homogeneity ...........................................180 1. Same language, same people?..........................................................................185 2. Getae-Dacian “kinship” ...................................................................................192 3. The “Proto-Indo-Europeans” and “ethnogenesis” ...........................................194 4. One language, one people? ..............................................................................202