CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2008
| Author | Vasylova, Valentyna |
|---|---|
| Title | Bukovina Region in the Collective Memory of Ukraine and Romania: Representation in History Textbooks |
| Summary | This thesis aims to investigate how the historical region of Bukovina is reconstructed in Ukrainian and Romanian collective memories, and identify the implications for the respective regional and national identities. My enquiry is threefold: the attitude of the two nations to Bukovina, the interrelation of their narratives on the regional history, and perception of each other. I provide an overview of the historical context in which Bukovina was shaped as a region and analyze the mythology connected with Bukovinian identity. The methodology of the thesis is comparative discourse analysis of these representations in national and regional Romanian and Ukrainian history textbooks published in the post-communist period. In this context, I regard schoolbooks as “sites of memory” and identity-building tools. I explain the relation of the national identities towards the region by Smith’s theory of “ethnoscape”, residing in inalienable association between a nation and a particular territory, what results in national appropriation of this territory. The research established that Bukovina is “an overlapping ethnoscape” for Ukrainian and Romanian national imaginaries; therefore, they preserve divergent versions of the history of the region. Moreover, the analyzed sources exhibit mutually ignoring discourses on each other, which creates an effect of mental “remoteness” between the neighboring states. |
| Supervisor | Hrytsak, Yaroslav |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2008/vasylova_valentyna.pdf |
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