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Most studies of the postwar order in the Soviet bloc have concentrated on such concerns as politics, economics, labour relations, etc., with little attention to the way that state socialism affected the seemingly mundane aspects of life. It is our premise that material culture - from street fashion to public sculpture, from the design of state buildings, from wall paper to monumental art - can help us to understand the experience of state socialism as lived by ordinary people. It can also illuminate the interaction between official rhetoric and state command on the one hand and the popular applications of its material culture on the other.
The proposed anthology is intended to investigate aspects of material culture in Eastern and Central Europe from the consolidation of the Soviet bloc within Europe from around 1948 to the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. These two decades fall within two contrasting periods: first, the period of stalinisation of Eastern Europe and High Stalinism in culture, during which Soviet political and cultural authority was established in the satellite states and newly annexed republics. Secondly, from Stalin s death in 1953, the period of destalinisation, economic and cultural reform, expansion of international relations and increased cultural exchange. This period saw the birth of consumer or 'goulash' socialism and a reengagement with modernity which in the Soviet Union at least was articulated in debates about the nature of the contemporary style . How was socialist 'contemporaneity' or modernity construed in different parts of Eastern Europe, given their varying historical experiences of modernisation?
We propose compiling a collection of essays which will approach aspects of visual and material culture critically in relation to politics and ideology, historical and national contexts. It will reexamine - from an assumption of difference rather than uniformity, relative mutuality rather than unidirectional command - the interactions between Moscow and her satellites in cultural policy formation, implementation, and consumption. Thereby we aim to destabilise the model of total cultural control, according to which a uniform aesthetic of socialist realism was imposed by Moscow on all cultural production within its sphere of influence in the postwar period, and passively consumed by the subject peoples.
A publisher has agreed to publish this proposed volume in 1999, and a number of contributors have already offered essays. We, as editors of this forthcoming book, are still seeking contributions which fit within the general themes described above. In particular we are interested in essays which deal with aspects of Czechoslovak and Hungarian material and visual culture; comparative studies which deal with cross currents in Central / Eastern Europe; and research which addresses socialist masculinities / femininities.
If you would like to contribute to this collection of essays, please send proposals for inclusion as soon as possible or in any case by 15 January 1998.
Further details can be sent on request.
Susan E. Reid, University of Northumbria
<susan.reid@unn.ac.uk>
David Crowley, University of Brighton
<dc87@brighton.ac.uk>
Postal address:
David Crowley / School of Historical and Critical Studies / University of Brighton / 10-11 Pavilion Parade / Brighton, BN2 1RA
Fax: +1273 641935
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