Ruralism and Literature in Romania

Description

In 2012, Vaier Simion Cosma started a series of conferences in Telciu, a village in the county of Bistriţa-Năsăud, aimed at contextualizing Romanian rurality. Since 2015, when Cosma co-opted Freiburg-based Romanian researcher Manuela Boatcă—then a Professor at Freie in Berlin—the conferences in Telciu have been amongst the highest-ranking events in the contemporary Romanian academic landscape, and an important center of the Eastern European decolonial studies, reuniting figures such as Madina Tlostanova, Julie Klingerm, Daniela Gabor, Don Kalb, Julia Roth, and Vintilă Mihăilescu. After 2017, when scholars such as Cornel Ban joined the organizing committee, the series of events gained momentum. The conference had already begun to earn notoriety, as Cornel Ban himself heard about it from an American scholar who was talking about this small Romanian village at a book launch in New York. In other words, things turned global. This was unexpected, if we consider the relatively small interest Romanian literary studies take nowadays in the rural itself, despite the major role it played in nineteenth and twentieth- century literature and social praxis. Academics from prestigious universities in the United States, Europe, and all over the world were discussing decolonial theory, postcolonial frames of thought, and Marxist theory in a small Romanian village. The rural met contemporary theory, and theory now needs the rural more than ever, since postcolonial theory and decolonial theory felt obliged to include the rural as well in its sphere of interest.