Fragmented Identities

Combining sharp observation, a native's ease in the city, and talent as a storyteller, Denise Roman spiritedly presents the myriad details and the diverging cultural strands of life in postcommunist Bucharest. Roman focuses on identity-formation and identity politics among youth, Jews, women, and queers. Observing postcommunist Romania with the dual vision of a native and a scholar, Denise Roman focuses on the fluid act of identity-formation, and the construction or absence of identity-politics, in several minority or disempowered groups: youth, Jews, women, and queers. Roman shows how both aesthetic and moral judgments are born from and embedded in popular culture. Fragmented Identities is rich in observation and analysis, broad in scope, and exuberant in its account of cultural innovation and discourse wrought in response to the end of Communism and the influence of globalization.