Post-imperial Encounters

Svetlana Suveica, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Germany.

Winner of the 2023 Society for Romanian Studies biennial book prize!

The Book Prize Committee - Camelia Craciun, Raluca Grosescu, and Cristian Cercel (chair) - agreed unanimously to award the prize to Svetlana Suveica for her Post-Imperial Encounters: Transnational Designs of Bessarabia in Paris and Elsewhere 1917-1922 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2022). Suveica's impressive monograph brings up new perspectives on the incorporation of Bessarabia to Romania at the end of the First World War, decidedly moving away from teleological accounts centred on the nationalist ideology underlying narratives about the formation of Greater Romania. Drawing on a meticulous research in archives in nine countries, Suveica brings to the fore previously unexplored stances and positions with respect to Bessarabia's future in the context of the demise of the Russian Empire. The scope of the theoretical apparatus she employs is as broad as her engagement with primary and secondary sources in five languages. Post-Imperial Encounters does a great job in showing the contingent and situational character of belonging and of identities of ethnopolitical actors, in relationship with political processes unfolding in a time of radical uncertainty. In dealing at length with Russian and Bessarabian émigrés, Suveica implicitly invites the field of Romanian Studies to expand its own area of interest towards an engagement with previously neglected actors.