The Future of (Post)Socialism

Description

If socialism did not end as abruptly as is sometimes perceived, what remnants of it linger today and will continue to linger? Moreover, if postsocialism is an umbrella term for the uncertain times of various transitions that followed in socialism's wake, how might the "post" be rendered complicated by the notion that the unfinished business of socialism continues to influence the trajectory of the future? The Future of (Post)Socialism examines this unfinished business through various disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that seek to illuminate the postsocialist future as a cultural and social fact. Drawn from the fields of history, ethnology, anthropology, sociology, economics, political science, education, linguistics, literature, and cultural studies, contributors analyze various cultural forms and practices of the formerly socialist cultural spaces of Eastern Europe. In so doing, they question the teleology of linear transitional narratives and of assumptions about postsocialist linear progress, concluding that things operate more as continued interruptions of a perpetually liminal state rather than as neat endings and new beginnings.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The “Radiant Future” of Spatial and Temporal Dis/Orientations
Dijana Jelača and Danijela Lugarić

Part I. New Approaches to (Post)Socialism: The Theory in Transition

1. The Endless Innovations of the Semiperiphery and the Peculiar Power of Eastern Europe
David Ost

2. Socialist Future in Light of Socialist Past and Capitalist Present
David M. Kotz

3. “Failing the Metronome”: Queer Reading of the Postsocialist Transition
Jelisaveta Blagojevićand Jovana Timotijević

Part II. (Post)Socialist Space(s)

4. “Brand” New States: Postsocialism, the Global Economy of Symbols, and the Challenges of National Differentiation
Robert A. Saunders

5. Putting the ‘Public’ in Public Goods: Space Wars in a Post- Soviet Dacha Community
Olga Shevchenko

6. Baku’s Soviet Vnye: The Post- Soviet Creation of a Soviet (?) Past
Heather D. DeHaan

Part III. Memories of the Future

7. Back to the Future of (Post)Socialism: The Afterlife of Socialism in Post- Yugoslav Cultural Space
Maša Kolanović

8. In Friction Mode: Contesting the Memory of Socialism in Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square
Sanja Potkonjak and Nevena Škrbić Alempijević

9. The Futures of Postsocialist Childhoods: (Re)Imagining the Latvian Child, Nation, and Nature in Educational Literature
Iveta Silova

Afterword
Gary Marker

Contributors
Index

Sujets

• History of Europe
• Eastern Europe

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 octobre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438471440
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Future of (Post)Socialism
SUNY SERIES, PANGAEA II: GLOBAL/LOCAL STUDIES

Saïd Amir Arjomand and Wolf Schäfer, editors
THE FUTURE OF
(POST)SOCIALISM
Eastern European Perspectives
Edited by John Frederick Bailyn, Dijana Jelača, and Danijela Lugarić
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2018 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bailyn, John F., editor. | Jelača, Dijana, 1979- editor. | Lugarić-Vukas, Danijela, 1979- editor.
Title: The future of (post)socialism : Eastern European perspectives / edited by John Frederick Bailyn, Dijana Jelača, and Danijela Lugarić.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2018] | Series: SUNY series, Pangaea II: global/local studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017054954| ISBN 9781438471433 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438471440 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Post-communism—Europe, Eastern. | Socialism—Europe, Eastern. | Europe, Eastern—History—1989-
Classification: LCC DJK51 .F884 2018 | DDC 335.0947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017054954
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In memory of Svetlana Boym
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction. The “Radiant Future” of Spatial and Temporal Dis/Orientations
Dijana Jelača and Danijela Lugarić
PART 1. NEW APPROACHES TO (POST)SOCIALISM: THE THEORY IN TRANSITION
Chapter 1. The Endless Innovations of the Semiperiphery and the Peculiar Power of Eastern Europe
David Ost
Chapter 2. Socialist Future in Light of Socialist Past and Capitalist Present
David M. Kotz
Chapter 3. “Failing the Metronome”: Queer Reading of the Postsocialist Transition
Jelisaveta Blagojević and Jovana Timotijević
PART 2. (POST)SOCIALIST SPACE(S)
Chapter 4. “Brand” New States: Postsocialism, the Global Economy of Symbols, and the Challenges of National Differentiation
Robert A. Saunders
Chapter 5. Putting the ‘Public’ in Public Goods: Space Wars in a Post-Soviet Dacha Community
Olga Shevchenko
Chapter 6. Baku’s Soviet Vnye : The Post-Soviet Creation of a Soviet (?) Past
Heather D. DeHaan
PART 3. MEMORIES OF THE FUTURE
Chapter 7. Back to the Future of (Post)Socialism: The Afterlife of Socialism in Post-Yugoslav Cultural Space
Maša Kolanović
Chapter 8. In Friction Mode: Contesting the Memory of Socialism in Zagreb’s Marshal Tito Square
Sanja Potkonjak and Nevena Škrbić Alempijević
Chapter 9. The Futures of Postsocialist Childhoods: (Re)Imagining the Latvian Child, Nation, and Nature in Educational Literature
Iveta Silova
Afterword
Gary Marker
Contributors
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Table 4.1. Sampling of Nation Brand Report Rankings—Top 10
Table 4.2. Brand Estonia Videos Featuring Jüri
Figure 4.1. Welcome to Estonia Logo
Figure 5.1. A typical look of a Soviet-era dacha at Novoogradnoe. Photograph by the author, 2011.
Figure 5.2. The two dachas visible on this photograph have the broken rooflines that could earn their owners an admonition at a Party meeting. The dirt road (“line”) in front of the properties was a prime space for children’s games. Photograph by the author, 2014.
Figure 5.3. A post-Soviet brick kottedzh on a dacha plot. Photograph by the author, 2014.
Figure 5.4. A post-Soviet kottedzh towers over its next-door neighbors. Photograph by the author, 2014.
Figures 5.5 and 5.6. Varieties of blind fencing. Photographs by the author, 2014.
Figure 5.7. The machine gun aiming at the road from the balcony of a recently constructed kottedzh . Photograph of the author, 2007.
Figures 5.8, 5.9, and 5.10. The remotely controlled private entrance from the highway and a view of the road, before and past the owner’s kottedzh . Photographs by the author, 2007, 2013.
Figures 5.11, 5.12, and 5.13. The view on the playground in the first and second years of its existence. The sign on the entry gate informs the visitors that the space is accessible only to those who possess the key. Photographs by the author, 2013, 2014.
Figure 8.1. Countermemory protest; Tito is the villain. Photo by Nenad Jovanović, May 2012.
Figure 8.2. Countermemory commemoration—roses on the fence of the University of Zagreb building. Photo by Sanja Potkonjak, December 2014.
Figure 8.3. Counter-countermemory protest (detail). Photo by Nenad Puhovski, June 2017.
Figure 8.4. Counter-countermemory protest. Photo by Nenad Puhovski, June 2017.
Figure 9.1. Landscape of Soviet modernization.
Figures 9.2, 9.3, and 9.4. Landscapes of Soviet modernization and nature.
Figures 9.5 and 9.6. Nature inhabited and animated by nature’s spirits and deities.
Figures 9.7 and 9.8. Images of the Latvian countryside in post-Soviet textbooks.
PREFACE
The chapters in this volume stem primarily from “The Future(s) of Post-Socialism” symposium held at Stony Brook University, April 17–18, 2015. The event was organized by the Stony Brook University Post-Socialism Research Institute, with support from the Humanities Institute of Stony Brook and the Departments of European Languages, History, Cultural Analysis and Theory, and also from the College of Arts and Sciences, under then-dean Nancy Squires, the Office of the Provost, Stony Brook University, and the SUNY Russia Programs Network. Two presentations given at the symposium, those of Zsuzsa Gille (“What Is the ‘Post’ in Postsocialism?”) and Georgyj Kasianov (“Total Recall: Identity Building and Politics of Memory in Ukraine at the Turn of the Millennium”), do not appear in the volume. Two chapters in the volume, those of Blagojević and Timotijević and of Potkonjak and Škrbić Alempijević, were not presented at the symposium.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book took shape as an organic collaboration among all involved. As editors, we wish to first and foremost thank all contributors for their participation and dedication to the volume at hand. In particular, Gary Marker has been invaluable to this project—first as our fellow co-organizer of the symposium “The Future(s) of Post-Socialism” held at Stony Brook University in April 2015, and subsequently as author of the afterword for this volume.
Our gratitude also goes to the editors at SUNY Press, for their support and guidance, especially Michael Rinella, and to Wolf Schaefer as series coeditor at SUNY Press. We are also most grateful to two anonymous reviewers who helped shape the final manuscript in deeply constructive ways. Danijela Lugarić expresses her gratitude to the Croatian Science Foundation (project no. 6077; “Neomythologism in the culture of the 20th and 21st century”) for financial and logistic support.
John Bailyn would like to thank Musa and Yury Goldberg, parents of Svetlana Boym, for their beautiful hospitality in pre-postsocialist Leningrad, and for forging a bridge with Svetlana that predates her work on nostalgia and memory and all of our work on postsocialism.
Finally, we wish to thank our partners and children for their emotional and logistical support in seeing this project through.
INTRODUCTION
The “Radiant Future” of Spatial and Temporal Dis/Orientations
Dijana Jelača and Danijela Lugarić
THE UNFINISHED BUSINESS OF (POST)SOCIALISM
The future, as a vector of spatial and temporal orientation, by its very nature perpetually evades our full grasp. At the same time, it remains a key focus on the epistemological horizon of our intellectual endeavors. In The Future as Cultural Fact , Arjun Appadurai calls for laying “the foundations of an anthropology of the future […] that can assist in the victory of a politics of possibility over a politics of probability” (2013: 3). The volume at hand answers one such call. It is invested in illuminating the unfinished business of (post)socialism through various disciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches that seek to illuminate the (post)socialist future as a cultural and social fact. The analyses of various cultural forms and practices put forth in this volume illustrate the conceptual complexities of the formerly socialist cultural space(s) of Eastern Europe, and by doing so, question the teleology of linear transitional narratives, and of the assumptions about postsocialist linear progress. By focusing on the “unfinished business of (post)socialism,” we aim to reflect a sense that, when it comes to socialism and its temporal successor, postsocialism, things operate more as continued interruptions of a perpetually liminal state rather than as neat endings and new beginnings. If socialism did not end as abruptly as is sometimes perceived, what remnants of it linger today and will continue to linger