Download or read book The postsocialist contemporary written by Octavian Esanu and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2021-11-23 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The postsocialist contemporary joins a growing body of scholarship debating the definition and nature of contemporary art. It comes to these debates from a historicist perspective, taking as its point of departure one particular art programme, initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros. First implemented in Hungary, the Soros Center for Contemporary Art (SCCA) expanded to another eighteen ex-socialist countries throughout the 1990s. Its mission was to build a western ‘open society’ by means of art. This book discusses how network managers and artists participated in the construction of this new social order by studying the programme’s rise, evolution, impact and broader ideological and political consequences. Rather than recounting a history, its engages critically with ‘contemporary art’ as the aesthetic paradigm of late-capitalist market democracy.
Download or read book The Postsocialist Contemporary written by Octavian Esanu and published by Rethinking Art's Histories. This book was released on 2021-11 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book engages with the historical paradigm of 'contemporary art' by examining a programme initiated in Eastern Europe by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros in the 1990s. The Soros Centers for Contemporary Art played a leading role in popularising the norms and conventions of 'contemporary art' throughout the region.
Download or read book Postsocialism and Cultural Politics written by Xudong Zhang and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-04-25 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Xudong Zhang offers a critical analysis of China's 'long 1990s', the tumultuous years between the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and China's entry into the World Trade Organisation in 2001.
Download or read book Crisis and the Everyday in Postsocialist Moscow written by Olga Shevchenko and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-17 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ethnography of postsocialist Moscow in the late 1990s, Olga Shevchenko draws on interviews with a cross-section of Muscovites to describe how people made sense of the acute uncertainties of everyday life, and the new identities and competencies that emerged in response to these challenges. Ranging from consumption to daily rhetoric, and from urban geography to health care, this study illuminates the relationship between crisis and normality and adds a new dimension to the debates about postsocialist culture and politics.
Download or read book Postmodernism and the Postsocialist Condition written by Boris Groys and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2003-09-30 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Berlin Wall was coming down, the Soviet Union was dissolving, Communist China was well on its way down the capitalist path. Artists, seeing it all first-hand, responded with a revolution of their own. What form this revolution took emerges in this volume.
Download or read book Velvet Retro written by Veronika Pehe and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.
Download or read book Postsocialist Modernity written by Jason McGrath and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines Chinese culture under the age of market reforms. Beginning in the early 1990s and on into the new century, fields such as literature and film have been fundamentally transformed by the forces of the market as China is integrated ever more closely into the world economic system. As a result, the formerly unified revolutionary culture has been changed into a pluralized state that reflects the diversity of individual experience in the reform era. New autonomous forms of culture that have arisen include avant-garde as well as commercial literature, and independent film as well as a new entertainment cinema. Chinese people find their experiences of postsocialist modernity reflected in all kinds of new cultural forms as well as critical debates that often question the direction of Chinese society in the midst of comprehensive and rapid change.
Download or read book Masquerade and Postsocialism written by Gerald W. Creed and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2011-01-24 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jacket.
Download or read book The Peasant in Postsocialist China written by Alexander F. Day and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radical new appraisal of the role of the peasant in post-socialist China, putting recent debates into historical perspective.
Download or read book Exhibiting the Past written by Kirk A. Denton and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Mao era, China’s museums served an explicit and uniform propaganda function, underlining official Party history, eulogizing revolutionary heroes, and contributing to nation building and socialist construction. With the implementation of the post-Mao modernization program in the late 1970s and 1980s and the advent of globalization and market reforms in the 1990s, China underwent a radical social and economic transformation that has led to a vastly more heterogeneous culture and polity. Yet China is dominated by a single Leninist party that continues to rely heavily on its revolutionary heritage to generate political legitimacy. With its messages of collectivism, self-sacrifice, and class struggle, that heritage is increasingly at odds with Chinese society and with the state’s own neoliberal ideology of rapid-paced development, glorification of the market, and entrepreneurship. In this ambiguous political environment, museums and their curators must negotiate between revolutionary ideology and new kinds of historical narratives that reflect and highlight a neoliberal present. In Exhibiting the Past, Kirk Denton analyzes types of museums and exhibitionary spaces, from revolutionary history museums, military museums, and memorials to martyrs to museums dedicated to literature, ethnic minorities, and local history. He discusses red tourism—a state sponsored program developed in 2003 as a new form of patriotic education designed to make revolutionary history come alive—and urban planning exhibition halls, which project utopian visions of China’s future that are rooted in new conceptions of the past. Denton’s method is narratological in the sense that he analyzes the stories museums tell about the past and the political and ideological implications of those stories. Focusing on “official” exhibitionary culture rather than alternative or counter memory, Denton reinserts the state back into the discussion of postsocialist culture because of its centrality to that culture and to show that state discourse in China is neither monolithic nor unchanging. The book considers the variety of ways state museums are responding to the dramatic social, technological, and cultural changes China has experienced over the past three decades.
Download or read book Ethical Eating in the Postsocialist and Socialist World written by Yuson Jung and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2014-02-21 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current discussions of the ethics around alternative food movements--concepts such as "local," "organic," and "fair trade"--tend to focus on their growth and significance in advanced capitalist societies. In this groundbreaking contribution to critical food studies, editors Yuson Jung, Jakob A. Klein, and Melissa L. Caldwell explore what constitutes "ethical food" and "ethical eating" in socialist and formerly socialist societies. With essays by anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, this politically nuanced volume offers insight into the origins of alternative food movements and their place in today's global economy. Collectively, the essays cover discourses on food and morality; the material and social practices surrounding production, trade, and consumption; and the political and economic power of social movements in Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Lithuania, Russia, and Vietnam. Scholars and students will gain important historical and anthropological perspective on how the dynamics of state-market-citizen relations continue to shape the ethical and moral frameworks guiding food practices around the world.
Download or read book Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art written by Madina Tlostanova and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-02-08 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles the intersections of postcolonial and postsocialist imaginaries and sensibilities focusing on the ways they are reflected in contemporary art, fiction, theater and cinema. After the defeat of the Socialist modernity the postsocialist space and its people have found themselves in the void. Many elements of the former Second world experience, echo the postcolonial situations, including subalternization, epistemic racism, mimicry, unhomedness and transit, the revival of ethnic nationalisms and neo-imperial narratives, neo-Orientalist and mutant Eurocentric tendencies, indirect forms of resistance and life-asserting modes of re-existence. Yet there are also untranslatable differences between the postcolonial and the postsocialist human conditions. The monograph focuses on the aesthetic principles and mechanisms of sublime, the postsocialist/postcolonial decolonization of museums, the perception and representation of space and time through the tempolocalities of post-dependence, the anatomy of characters-tricksters with shifting multiple identities, the memory politics of the post-traumatic conditions and ways of their overcoming.
Download or read book Comradeship written by Kate Fowle and published by . This book was released on 2019-04-23 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comradeshipcollects 16 essays by the forward-thinking Slovenian curator, museum director and scholar Zdenka Badovinac (born 1958). Appointed director of Ljubljana's Museum of Modern Art in 1993 in the wake of Slovenian independence, Badovinac has become an influential voice in international conversations rethinking the geopolitics of art after the fall of communism. She is a ferocious critic of unequal negotiations between East and West and a leading historian of the avant-garde art that emerged in socialist and post-socialist countries at the end of the last century. One of the longest-serving and most prominent museum directors in the region, Badovinac has pioneered radical institutional forms to create a museum responsive to the complexities of the past, and commensurate with the demands of the present. Collecting writing from disparate and hard-to-find sources, as well as new work, this book offers a transformative perspective on a major thinker. It is a crucial handbook of alternative approaches to curating and institution-building in the 21st century. A dialogue between Badovinac and art historian J. Myers-Szupinska introduces her history and ideas. Comradeshipis the third book in the series Perspectives in Curatingby Independent Curators International. "Whip smart, politically astute, curatorially inventive: Zdenka Badovinac is nothing less than the most progressive and intellectually rigorous female museum director in Europe. This anthology includes key essays accompanying her series of brilliant exhibitions in Ljubljana, and is essential reading for anyone interested in the differences between former East and former West. For anyone seeking curatorial alternatives to the neoliberal museum model of relentless expansion and dumbed-down blockbusters, Badovinac is a galvanizing inspiration." -Claire Bishop, author of Artificial Hells
Download or read book Politics in Color and Concrete written by Krisztina Fehérváry and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A historical anthropology of material transformations of homes in Hungary from the 1950s o the 1990s. Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe. “A major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.” —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Politics in Color and Concrete explains why the everyday is important, and shows why domestic aesthetics embody a crucially significant politics.” —Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago “The topic is extremely timely and relevant; the writing is lucid and thorough; the theory is complex and sophisticated without being overly dense, or daunting. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.” —Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary
Download or read book Post socialist Informalities written by Abel Polese and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-10-19 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a comprehensive collection of key scholarship on informality from the whole post-socialist region. From Bosnia to Central Asia, passing through Russia and Azerbaijan, the contributions to this volume illustrate the multi-faceted and complex nature of informality, while demonstrating the growing scholarly and policy debates that have developed around the understanding of informality. In contrast to approaches which tend to classify informality as ‘bad’ or ‘transitional’ – meaning that modernity will make it disappear – this edited volume concentrates on dynamics and mechanisms to understand and explain informality, while also debating its relationship with the market and society. The authors seek to explain informality beyond a mere monetaristic/economistic approach, rediscovering its interconnection with social phenomena to propose a more holistic interpretation of the meaning of informality and its influence in various spheres of life. They do this by exploring the evolving role of informal practices in the post-socialist region, and by focusing on informality as a social organisation determinant but also looking at the way it reshapes emergent social resistance against symbolic and real political order(s). This book was originally published as two special issues, of Caucasus Survey and the Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe.
Download or read book Gendering Postsocialism written by Yulia Gradskova and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gendering Postsocialism explores changes in gendered norms and expectations in Eastern Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dismantlement of state socialism in these regions triggered monumental shifts in their economic landscape, the involvement of their welfare states in social citizenship and, crucially, their established gender norms and relations, all contributing to the formation of the postsocialist citizen. Case studies examine a wide range of issues across 15 countries of the post-Soviet era. These include gender aspects of the developments in education in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Hungary, controversies around abortion legislation in Poland, migrant women and housing as a gendered problem in Russia, challenges facing women’s NGOs in Bosnia, and identity formation of unemployed men in Lithuania. This close analysis reveals how different variations of neoliberal ideology, centred around the notion of the self-reliant and self-determining individual, have strongly influenced postsocialist gender identities, whilst simultaneously showing significant trends for a “retraditionalising” of gender norms and expectations. This volume suggests that despite integration with global political and free market systems, the postsocialist gendered subject combines strategies from the past with those from contemporary ideologies to navigate new multifaceted injustices around gender in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.
Download or read book Cultural Landscapes of Post Socialist Cities written by Mariusz Czepczynski and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The cultural landscapes of Central European cities reflect over half a century of socialism and are marked by the Marxists' vision of a utopian landscape. Architecture, urban planning and the visual arts were considered to be powerful means of expressing the 'people's power'. However, since the velvet revolutions of 1989, this urban scenery has been radically transformed by new forces and trends, infused by the free market, democracy and liberalization. This has led to 'landscape cleansing' and 'recycling', as these former communist nations used new architectural, functional and social forms to transform their urbanscapes, their meanings and uses. Comparing case studies from different post-socialist cities, this book examines the culturally conditional variations between local powers and structures despite the similarities in the general processes and systems. It considers the contemporary cultural landscapes of these post-socialist cities as a dynamic fusion of the old communist forms and new free-market meanings, features and democratic practices, of global influences and local icons. The book assesses whether these urbanscapes clearly reflect the social, cultural and political conditions and aspirations of these transitional countries and so a critical analysis of them provides important insights.
