Spectacular Politics and Everyday Performance: Tracing Music from Ceauşescu’s Romania to Multicultural America

Drawing from fieldwork conducted throughout the United States and Canada, this dissertation examines the continued performance of socialist-era music within the Romanian-American community. It addresses why a community largely made up of people who sought to leave the country during the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu continue to perform music tied to that period by tracing the historical performance and reception of multiple genres, ranging from traditional peasant music to folk rock. The dissertation begins by examining the nationalization of Romania’s music industry under the early socialist regime (1944-1965), and locates the difficulties Communist Party members confronted in delineating a clear aesthetic policy for the newly socialist country. It then introduces ways the Ceauşescu regime in particular used mass performance as a means of cultivating a sense of nationalist and socialist subjectivity within the populace, and argues that this project ultimately failed to maintain Ceauşescu’s cult of personality due to the ideological contradictions that developed during the era. These contradictions allowed citizens the opportunity to approach the music at mass performance in a polysemous fashion. After discussing the development of these genres during the socialist era in Romania, the dissertation then turns to accounts on the performance of the music within the Romanian American community. First, it considers the extent to which the performance of the music acts nostalgically for Romanian-Americans, especially in comparison to the ways nostalgia may be musically manifested in postsocialist Romania. Second, it interrogates the notion that these socialist-era genres act to create a sense of cultural solidarity or diasporic consciousness within the community, by examining first how the performance of this music serves to separate the community along historically-developed class lines, and second how assimilation processes act to disrupt any sense of ethnic or national solidarity. The dissertation concludes by arguing that the ideological contradictions that came out of the Ceauşescu era granted socialist-era music a polysemous character, which in turn greatly allowed their perpetuation within the immigrant community. At the same time, the social environment during the Ceauşescu era, coupled with assimilation processes within the immigrant community and continuing class divisions, also contributed to the immigrant community’s difficulty in establishing strong communal bonds

VALEDICTORY OPINIONS OF MR. JUSTICE HOLMES

Mr. Justice Holmes was ninety on March 8, 1931. That anniversary brought him a shower of birthday congratulations and tributes in writing and print, which included thoughtful appraisals of his work up to then as scholar and judge. But that work was not yet done. There remained a little finishing canter before coming to a standstill. The aging justice was to participate in the work of two more terms of court before his retirement on January 12, 1932. In Holmes\u27s quiver, waiting to be fired off, were a dozen opinions which now grace the pages of volume 283 of the United States Reports, and a half-dozen in volume 284. These final utterances of an acknowledged master of judicial craftsmanship constitute our present theme

The Task of the Federal Judiciary [Essay]

After first examining the structure and power of the federal court system, Senior United States District Judge Edward Dumbauld reviews the role of the federal judiciary in society. The writer advocates that courts should not be expected to solve all problems and abolish all evils which exist in society and proposes the narrowing of subject matter jurisdiction and the abolition of diversity jurisdiction to enable the federal courts to concentrate on matters of genuine national concern