Fashioning Socialism

Fashioning Socialism PDF Author: Judd Stitziel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Stitziel examines the story of communist haute couture, fashion shows, seasonal clearance sales, the textile and garment industries, and everyday consumer practices, exploring the paradoxical causes, forms, and consequences of East Germany's attempt to create a communist consumer culture during the Cold War.

Fashioning Socialism

Fashioning Socialism PDF Author: Judd Stitziel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book Here

Book Description
Stitziel examines the story of communist haute couture, fashion shows, seasonal clearance sales, the textile and garment industries, and everyday consumer practices, exploring the paradoxical causes, forms, and consequences of East Germany's attempt to create a communist consumer culture during the Cold War.

Politics in Color and Concrete

Politics in Color and Concrete PDF Author: Krisztina Fehérváry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253009960
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
A historical anthropology of material transformations of homes in Hungary from the 1950s o the 1990s. 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. “A major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.” —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “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 “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

Socialist Modern

Socialist Modern PDF Author: Katherine Pence
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472069743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which modernity shaped the relationship between socialist state and society in East Germany. The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship has tended to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens. experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: what did modernity mean for East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life so as to bring into sharper focus the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around socialist modernity shaped the views, memories and actions of East Germans over four decades. the Cold War, Eastern Europe, the history of communism, European social history and the history of everyday life, gender history, as well as modernity and socialist popular culture.

Clothing

Clothing PDF Author: Robert Ross
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745657532
Category : Design
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
In virtually all the countries of the world, men, and to a lesser extent women, are today dressed in very similar clothing. This book gives a compelling account and analysis of the process by which this has come about. At the same time it takes seriously those places where, for whatever reason, this process has not occurred, or has been reversed, and provides explanations for these developments. The first part of this story recounts how the cultural, political and economic power of Europe and, from the later nineteenth century North America, has provided an impetus for the adoption of whatever was at that time standard Western dress. Set against this, Robert Ross shows how the adoption of European style dress, or its rejection, has always been a political act, performed most frequently in order to claim equality with colonial masters, more often a male option, or to stress distinction from them, which women, perhaps under male duress, more frequently did. The book takes a refreshing global perspective to its subject, with all continents and many countries being discussed. It investigates not merely the symbolic and message-bearing aspects of clothing, but also practical matters of production and, equally importantly, distribution.

Envisioning Socialism

Envisioning Socialism PDF Author: Heather Gumbert
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472900951
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.

Synthetic Socialism

Synthetic Socialism PDF Author: Eli Rubin
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469606771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.

Style and Socialism

Style and Socialism PDF Author: Susan Emily Reid
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This fascinating book takes as its premise the notion that material culture can help explain the experience of state socialism as lived by ordinary people in Eastern Europe. It provides a revealing window through which to examine the interaction between official state rhetoric and state command on the one hand, and the popular applications of the state's material products on the other. From street fashion to modern art, from the design of state buildings to wallpaper, interconnections between politics and ideology, cultural policy formation and consumption are shown to be a matter of complex negotiation.

Advertising, Sex, and Post-Socialism

Advertising, Sex, and Post-Socialism PDF Author: Elza Ibroscheva
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739172670
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
Advertising, Sex, and Post-Socialism explores the role of advertising and the consumption it promotes in changing cultural perceptions of sex and femininity across the Balkan region. Elza Ibroscheva theorizes how the marketing of gender identities that has taken place in the years of post-socialist transition has fundamentally affected the social, economic, and political positioning of women. Advertising is one of the major “factories” of cultural signification, and as such, serves as the most ubiquitous vessel of global norms of gendered selves. In addition, advertising serves as a literacy tool for learning the grammar of consumption, studying the ideologies of femininity and sex before and after the collapse of the socialist project, as well as the prevailing portrayals of femininity in advertising in present day Bulgaria. This book provides a revealing look at the mechanisms of how post-socialist norms of sexual behavior are being engendered, and what role media play in this transformative process.

Socialism with a Human Face

Socialism with a Human Face PDF Author: Gary B. Magee
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811906645
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 372

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Book Description
East Germany’s economic history is typically told as a story of the unravelling of an inherently flawed system. Yet, while the system’s inefficiency is undeniable, its economic history was much richer than its comparatively poor economic performance suggests. For many who lived there, it was a system that, over its forty years, was capable of achievements and generally functioned at bearable levels. This book combines the insights of behavioural economics with archival research to peel away layers of rhetoric and assumptions about the East German economy and explore aspects of that underlying functionality. Through a series of cases studies that examine the establishment of socialist workplaces, the searches for productivity growth and efficiency, and the emergence of financial crisis, the book considers the system from the perspective of the humans who operated it and made the decisions that made it work. Unencumbered by political preconceptions, it offers a more realistic understanding of East German economic history than that derived from stagnant debates about the clash of systems. The new perspectives and approaches presented demonstrate that, extracted from its Cold War context, East Germany’s economic history can be analysed for what it was, rather than for what it symbolised.

Socialist Escapes

Socialist Escapes PDF Author: Cathleen M. Giustino
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857456709
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
During much of the Cold War, physical escape from countries in the Eastern Bloc was a nearly impossible act. There remained, however, possibilities for other socialist escapes, particularly time spent free from party ideology and the mundane routines of everyday life. The essays in this volume examine sites of socialist escapes, such as beaches, campgrounds, nightclubs, concerts, castles, cars, and soccer matches. The chapters explore the effectiveness of state efforts to engineer society through leisure, entertainment, and related forms of cultural programming and consumption. They lead to a deeper understanding of state–society relations in the Soviet sphere, where the state did not simply “dictate from above” and inhabitants had some opportunities to shape solidarities, identities, and meaning.