Cultural Transformations After Communism PDF Download

Author: Barbara Törnquist-Plewa
Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
ISBN: 9187121824
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Focusing on the profound transformation in Central and Eastern Europe since the fall of the Iron Curtain, this record analyzes complex cultural dimensions, such as lifestyles, habits, value markers, and identity. Written by a group of experts, it presents case studies from the former communist countries that are members of the European Union today and attempts to answer crucial questions about the constructions of a new identity in the region: Have the processes of democratization and opening the borders produced mentality changes and new value systems? Is there a convergence of values and cultures between the new and old EU-members? Have there been backlashes in the processes of reconstructing national identities? This book is a valuable resource for anyone interested in European integration, issues of national identity, and the politics and culture of the post-Communist countries.

Author: John Czaplicka
Publisher: Woodrow Wilson Center Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Cities after the Fall of Communism traces the cultural reorientation of East European cities since 1989. Analyzing the architecture, commemorative practices, and urban planning of cities such as Lviv, Vilnius, and Odessa, the contributors to this volume demonstrate how history may be selectively re-imagined in light of present political and cultural realities. These essays show that while East European cities gravitate nostalgically toward Habsburg, Baltic, Imperial Russian, and Germanic pasts, they are also embracing new urban identities grounded in ethnic-national, European, Western, and global contexts. Ultimately, the editors argue that one can see a "New Europe" taking shape in these cities, where a strained discourse between different versions of the past and variously envisioned futures is being set in stone, steel, and glass.

Author: Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319787357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
Harnessing a cultural sociological approach to explore transformations in key social spheres in post-1989 Poland, Chmielewska-Szlajfer illuminates shifts in religiosity, sympathy towards others, and civic activity in post-Communist Poland in the light of Western influence over elements of Polish life. Reshaping Poland’s Community after Communism focuses on three major cases, largely ignored in Polish scholarship: (1) a hugely popular, faux-baroque Catholic shrine, which illustrates new strategies adopted by the Polish Catholic Church to attract believers; (2) Woodstock Station, a widely known free charity music festival, demonstrating new practices of sympathy towards strangers; and (3) the emergence of national internet pro-voting campaigns and small-town watchdog websites, which uncover changes in practical uses of civic engagement. In exploring grass-roots, everyday negotiations of religiosity, charity, and civic engagement in contemporary Poland, Chmielewska-Szlajfer demonstrates how a country’s cultural changes can suggest wider, dramatic democratic transformation.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 9780309059299
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
This ground-breaking new volume focuses on the interaction between political, social, and economic change in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States. It includes a wide selection of analytic papers, thought-provoking essays by leading scholars in diverse fields, and an agenda for future research. It integrates work on the micro and macro levels of the economy and provides a broad overview of the transition process. This volume broadens the current intellectual and policy debate concerning the historic transition now taking place from a narrow concern with purely economic factors to the dynamics of political and social change. It questions the assumption that the post-communist economies are all following the same path and that they will inevitably develop into replicas of economies in the advanced industrial West. It challenges accepted thinking and promotes the utilization of new methods and perspectives.

Author: Piotr Piotrowski
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1861899319
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 314

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Book Description
When the Iron Curtain fell in 1989, Eastern Europe saw a new era begin, and the widespread changes that followed extended into the world of art. Art and Democracy in Post-Communist Europe examines the art created in light of the profound political, social, economic, and cultural transformations that occurred in the former Eastern Bloc after the Cold War ended. Assessing the function of art in post-communist Europe, Piotr Piotrowski describes the changing nature of art as it went from being molded by the cultural imperatives of the communist state and a tool of political propaganda to autonomous work protesting against the ruling powers. Piotrowski discusses communist memory, the critique of nationalism, issues of gender, and the representation of historic trauma in contemporary museology, particularly in the recent founding of contemporary art museums in Bucharest, Tallinn, and Warsaw. He reveals the anarchistic motifs that had a rich tradition in Eastern European art and the recent emergence of a utopian vision and provides close readings of many artists—including Ilya Kavakov and Krzysztof Wodiczko—as well as Marina Abramovic’s work that responded to the atrocities of the Balkans. A cogent investigation of the artistic reorientation of Eastern Europe, this book fills a major gap in contemporary artistic and political discourse.

Author: Tibor Valuch
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633863775
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 508

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Book Description
By providing a survey of consumption and lifestyle in Hungary during the second half of the twentieth century, this book shows how common people lived during and after tumultuous regime changes. After an introduction covering the late 1930s, the study centers on the communist era, and goes on to describe changes in the post-communist period with its legacy of state socialism. Tibor Valuch poses a series of questions. Who could be called rich or poor and how did they live in the various periods? How did living, furnishings, clothing, income, and consumption mirror the structure of the society and its transformations? How could people accommodate their lifestyles to the political and social system? How specific to the regime was consumption after the communist takeover, and how did consumption habits change after the demise of state socialism? The answers, based on micro-histories, statistical data, population censuses and surveys help to understand the complexities of daily life, not only in Hungary, but also in other communist regimes in east-central Europe, with insights on their antecedents and afterlives.

Author: Kristen Ghodsee
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822351021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Through ethnographic essays and short stories based on her experiences in Eastern Europe between 1989 and 2009, Kristen Ghodsee explains why many Eastern Europeans are nostalgic for the communist past.

Author: Yale Richmond
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271046679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
Some fifty thousand Soviets visited the United States under various exchange programs between 1958 and 1988. They came as scholars and students, scientists and engineers, writers and journalists, government and party officials, musicians, dancers, and athletes&—and among them were more than a few KGB officers. They came, they saw, they were conquered, and the Soviet Union would never again be the same. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War describes how these exchange programs (which brought an even larger number of Americans to the Soviet Union) raised the Iron Curtain and fostered changes that prepared the way for Gorbachev's glasnost, perestroika, and the end of the Cold War. This study is based upon interviews with Russian and American participants as well as the personal experiences of the author and others who were involved in or administered such exchanges. Cultural Exchange and the Cold War demonstrates that the best policy to pursue with countries we disagree with is not isolation but engagement.

Author: Aga Skrodzka
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019088553X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 799

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Book Description
Stereotypes often cast communism as a defunct, bankrupt ideology and a relic of the distant past. However, recent political movements like Europe's anti-austerity protests, the Arab Spring, and Occupy Wall Street suggest that communism is still very much relevant and may even hold the key to a new, idealized future. In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, contributors trace the legacies of communist ideology in visual culture, from buildings and monuments, murals and sculpture, to recycling campaigns and wall newspapers, all of which work to make communism's ideas and values material. Contributors work to resist the widespread demonization of communism, demystifying its ideals and suggesting that it has visually shaped the modern world in undeniable and complex ways. Together, contributors answer curcial questions like: What can be salvaged and reused from past communist experiments? How has communism impacted the cultures of late capitalism? And how have histories of communism left behind visual traces of potential utopias? An interdisciplinary look at the cultural currency of communism today, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures demonstrates the value of revisiting the practices of the past to form a better vision of the future.

Author: Roderick MACFARQUHAR
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674040414
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 742

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Book Description
Explains why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, and shows his Machiavellian role in masterminding it. This book documents the Hobbesian state that ensued. Power struggles raged among Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Jiang Qing - Mao's wife and leader of the Gang of Four - while Mao often played one against the other.