Synopses & Reviews
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.
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"[A]n absorbing account of everyday life and embodied aesthetics in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. In it we learn how collections of things and people, structured in relation to each other by deeply-rooted historical forms of class consciousness, served the self-fashioning aims of Hungarians from 1950 to the late 1990s. This cultural history of style and consumption reveals much that is occluded in other studies of socialism and post-socialism: bodies, materialities, spaces, habitual orientations, commodity desires, lived historical dispositions, and diverse, sometimes clashing temporalities. 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
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"After 1989, we often heard that consumption failures caused communism's collapse; Fehérváry's brilliant analysis explains why this is both right and wrong.
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"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
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"Politics in Color and Concrete is a model for richly historical ethnography and an important contribution to the second generation of scholarship on post-socialist Europe.... [It]will be of great interest to scholars of socialism and post-socialism, class, consumer culture, and aesthetics alike." --Council for European Studies Indiana University Press Indiana University Press
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"[A] serious historical analysis inflected throughout by a sophisticated ethnographic sensibility.... [and] an important contribution to the second generation of scholarship on post-socialist Europe." --Reviews and Critical Commentary
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"Fehérváry's exemplary scholarship, both historical and ethnographic, takes us through both socialist modernism and post-socialist consumer modernism in the development of contemporary Hungary." --Daniel Miller, MaterialWorldblog.com
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"Fehérváry's book... joins a growing body of recent studies of consumption and everyday materialities under socialism. Few, however, so creatively explore socialist consumption's aesthetic and affective dimensions or trace continuities in consumer subjectivities across the pre-/post-1989 divide." --American Historical Review Indiana University Press
About the Author
Krisztina Fehérváry is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Qualities of Color and Concrete
1. Normal Life in the Former Socialist City
2. Socialist Realism in the Socialist City
3. Socialist Modern and the Production of Demanding Citizens
4. Socialist Generic and the Branding of the State
5. Organicist Modern and Super-Natural Organicism
6. Unstable Landscapes of Property, Morality and Status
7. The New Family House and the New Middle Class
Epilogue
Conclusion: Heterotopias of the Normal in Private Worlds