Motherlands in Europe. Economic Subalternity and Fantasies of Family in Contemporary Romanian Literature of Migration

This paper sets out to analyze fictional and autobiographical Romanian narratives, published between 2010 and 2014, that engage with westward economic migration within Europe, focusing on the context of EU-15. My main argument is that these narratives, which convey an experience of economic subalternity, cast light on the problematic nature of the EU as a neocolonial enterprise, even though they fail to articulate a full-blown progressive politics of mobility. I further examine how their particular narrative features - defined by monoglossia, sentimentalism, and enclosure - suggest the failure of the constructivist idea of Europeanness that hailed the advent of post-nationality and the promise of mobility as social progress. The texts I analyze uncover and respond to this failure by forging conservative worldviews that are primarily invested in romanticizing family bonds and affective communities. Based on these findings, I open a theoretical debate and try to explain that fiction of contemporary economic migration partakes, alongside the emergent corpus of refugee literature, in a world-literary shift, from the polyphonic, cosmopolitan paradigm of postcolonial fiction, to less sophisticated narrative forms that reassert the value of authenticity and national homogeneity and retaliate against multiculturalism and hybridity.