Sonic (Infra)politcs and the Romanian Danubian Death Canals

• In Event: Danube, beyond the Blue: Riparian Power and Musical Affect in Southeast Europe

Abstract

From 1949-1953, Romanian communist leader Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej, in line with Stalinist policies, used political prisoners as forced labor in the excavation and construction of the Danube-Black Sea Canal. The Canal symbolized the regime’s commitment to industrialization and economic development, showcasing Romania’s purported geopolitical strength. Dire conditions in the labor camps lead to thousands of deaths. Construction stopped abruptly in July 1953 but the canals and labor camps endured as keystones in the Romanian imaginary of communist-era repression. When the project was re-initiated in 1973 by Nicolae Ceaușescu, State propaganda obscured the marred history of the canal, rebranding what had become known as the “Death Canal” to the “Blue Freeway” (Magistrala Albastră). Cultural references to the canal abound in 20th-century Romanian cultural production—literature, memoires, and music. This paper explores how sonic cultural production, particularly through one Romani song (a version of which was released in 1972 on the State-run record label Electrecord), mediates memory of the Danubian Death Canals. The song’s “infrapolitical” poetics transform the Danube from signifier of communist-era repression into a metaphoric modality for liberation as water is endowed with both unrestrained fugitivity and metaphorized as a repository of hardship. Tracing the complex interplay between history, memory, and artistic expression, this paper elucidates the hidden transcript, whose indiscernibility is rendered legible to Romani insiders by “virtue of its polyvalent symbolism” (Scott 1990: 158). Thus, sound enacts a counterhistory in which anti-hegemonic collectivities emerge through private, poetic, and affective negotiations of history.

Author

• Ioanida Costache, Stanford U