Rural Life in Late Socialism Wilcox, Phill; Rigg, Jonathan; Nguyen, Minh T.N.
European journal of East Asian studies,
02/2021, Letnik:
20, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
Late socialist countries are transforming faster than ever. Across China, Laos and Vietnam, where market economies coexist with socialist political rhetoric and the Communist party state’s ...rule, sweeping processes of change open up new vistas of imaginaries of the future alongside uncertainty and anxiety. These countries are three of very few living examples that combine capitalist economics with party state politics. Consequently, societal transformations in these contexts are subject to pressures and agendas not found elsewhere, and yet they are no less subject to global forces than elsewhere. As all three countries maintain substantial rural populations, and because those rural areas are themselves places of change, how rural people across these changing contexts undertake future making is a timely and significant question. The contributions in the issue address this question by engaging with lived experiences and government agendas across Laos, China and Vietnam, showing a politics of development in which desire and hope are entangled with the contradictions and struggles of late socialism.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture is the first comprehensive English-language volume covering a rich history of Soviet artistic and literary underground. The international team of the ...Handbook’s contributors treats Soviet cultural nonconformism as a phenomenon with its own history and internal logic, idiosyncratic principles, and invisible normativity. The Handbook represents an attempt to outline the map of this realm and at the same time to draft a history of the Soviet non-official culture from the 1930s to the end of the USSR. Opening with a chapter “Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture” that defines scholarly categories specific for Soviet underground culture(s), the volume begins the historical review with the discussion of the underground’s precursors and early representatives in the 1930–1950s and continues with the section on underground cultural institutions and infrastructures that emerged in the late 1950s and developed in the 1960s and 1970s. The volume presents several approaches to mapping of the underground that include chapters on nonconformist cultures in Ukraine, Belarus, Baltic countries, Central Asia, and provincial cities of Russian Federation; analysis of groups shaped around religious and cultural identity, as well as queer and feminist underground circles. The volume approaches aesthetic aspects of the Soviet underground through the analysis of its forms and multi-media languages (performances, rock music, photography, and film along with literature and visual art) and a variety of lifeworlds, the central category of the volume, through which its contributors define the aestheticized lifestyle idiosyncratic for each artistic circle that generates artworks, along with performative and communicative practices.
Eesti nõukogude loojak Väljataga, Märt
Keel ja kirjandus,
02/2024, Letnik:
67, Številka:
1–2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This essay explores the emergence and evolution of a literary and artistic trend in Soviet Estonia from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. During this period, young philologists, poets, artists and ...essayists re-discovered the decadence of the fin-de-siècle and its Estonian expressions as a significant source of inspiration. Generally, in the official Soviet jargon, ‘decadence’ was a highly derogatory term, used during Stalin’s rule to stigmatize all of Western bourgeois culture. Consequently, patriotic scholars, even in the face of easing circumstances, were hesitant to associate early 20th century artists with decadence, as that would have meant condemning them. By the late 1970s, the atmosphere had liberalized enough to make engaging with the motifs and attitudes of decadence less perilous. This shift also provided a means to counter the activism of the 1960s generation, whether loyal to the authorities or dissident. In 1978, Germanist Linnar Priimägi marked the initial steps of the neo-decadence trend with the theoretical manifesto “Decadence as a Cognitive Constant” and the generational manifesto “Tartu Autumn”, co-written with art historian Ants Juske. The former text associated decadence with the appreciation of dispassionate beauty, while the latter expressed refined indolence as the main characteristic of the young generation. References to the decadents of the early 20th century became common among the younger generation of poets, including Doris Kareva, Aado Lintrop, Indrek Hirv, Ilmar Trull, and Hasso Krull. This was accompanied by the rehabilitation of Estonian and Russian decadence in academic literary studies. The emergence of the neo-decadence trend may be attributed to late-Soviet social fatigue and stagnation, the generational desire to distinguish from the dominant 1960s generation, and the growing influence of postmodernism as a departure from the international constructivist and austere style of high modernism. Contemporary criticism occasionally discussed signs of Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism in culture, sometimes drawing parallels between the emerging postmodernism and Hellenistic imperial culture.
This article studies the fictionalization of late Eastern-European socialism in contemporary Romania, namely the literary projection of the 1980s in Mircea Cărtărescu’s autofictional novel Solenoid ...(2015). The novel is an ample, paranoid, metaphysical, and counterfactual autobiography that uses a late-communist backdrop to create a metaphorically skewed representation of the self and the world. In order to describe this narrative structure as an emergent subgenre of the postmodern maximalist novel, we coined the term ‘maximalist autofiction.’ We then discussed Cărtărescu’s option for maximalist autofiction and the effects this literary choice has had on his representation of Romanian late socialism. This option is influenced by the author’s biography, as well as by his own relationship with the memory burden of socialism in today’s post-Cold War world. Cărtărescu uses hyperbole, metaphysical parody, and a maximalist surrealist imagination to propel the discussion of socialism and cultural peripherality beyond the dated parameters of the East/West dichotomies.
Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last ...years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.
The paper analyzes trade and supply services for the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) builders during the years 1974-1989. It describes the distribution system of goods, the forms of consumer ...behavior as well as consumption practices among participants of the project. The sources used for this study include office documents and statistics of the Soviet Ministry for Transport Construction, of building companies and municipalities, as well as of party and public organizations, next to oral testimonies given by former BAM construction workers that the author recorded during fieldwork. The author analyzes the establishment of trade enterprises and their technical equipment. Important is that the BAM trade network was created in a short time, and was meant to be temporary. During the whole period the system was plagued by a shortage of retail and warehouse facilities, and by insufficient support. At the same time, a special supply regime was in place to attract labor to BAM, and also to contribute to the subsistence of the population in the new development areas. While personal testimonies described trade services exclusively as privileged, the documentary evidence shows that the supply system faced difficulties similar to problems in ordinary Soviet trade. As a privilege regime came in combination with systemic malfunctions in the trade industry, specific practices were developed for the distribution and consumption of goods. Many of these practices were continued by local residents in the post-Soviet period.
The article provides insight into one of the most prevalent forms of the second economy in the Estonian SSR - small-scale speculation and black market profiteering - through the results of narrative ...research conducted among a small group of speculators who were involved in the smuggling of Western goods behind the Iron Curtain between the mid-1970s and late-1980s. The empirical material comprises five in-depth interviews that focus on various illegal and semi-illegal practices and strategies employed to establish and sustain the flow of contraband consumer items.
Boris Eikhenbaum’s 1927 essay on the literary environment (literaturnyi byt) marks an important conceptual turning point in the formalist approach to the study of literature, shifting the focus from ...immanent analysis of the text to what he called “literature’s social mode of being.” This article revisits Eikhenbaum’s approach as a point of departure for the study of late socialist literature. It explores literary periodicals in the 1960s through the lens of a bibliographical dataset which was developed as part of the digital humanities project Soviet Journals Reconnected.11The digital humanities project Soviet Journals Reconnected was developed during a year-long fellowship at the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton and I am indebted to Natalia Ermolaev, Jean Bauer, Miranda Marraccini, Tom Mazanec, and Claude Willan for their support and feedback. I would like to thank Marijeta Bozovic for including me in this special issue and the two anonymous reviewers from Russian Literature for their suggestions. This project was made possible by Indiana University Library’s generous agreement to share the raw data of the digitized ‘Letopis’ zhurnal’nykh statei’. Applied to this data, quantitative methods reveal the emergence of centrifugal forces and a fragmented mode of literary production during this period. By providing a detailed discussion and documentation of computational methods and putting them into a dialogue with studies of the literary environment in the vein of Eikhenbaum, this article highlights the connections and potential research uses of digital humanities approaches for the Slavic field.
PDF
