This project focuses on reconstructions of the private in narratives and memoirs by three migrant postcommunist women writers: Domnica Radulescu, Kapka Kassabova and Yiyun Li. Through looking at narrative and/ as performance particularly in the work of Romanian American author Domnica Radulescu, placed in a global perspective within the triangle Romania-Bulgaria-China represented by the authors chosen, but also through an interdisciplinary approach to the social/historical context through the lens of performance, I will examine the ways in which a necessary work of reparation of the damage done to private female life under communist surveillance is carried out in contemporary female diasporic writing. While I disagree with some recent views that state socialism benefited women’s private lives, I will aim to show that the three writers’ practice of narrative hybridization with other forms (theater, memoir and even poetry) is a way to voice the innermost depths of individual memory.

This study was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-2020-0035.