Politics in Color and Concrete

Fülszöveg

Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Russia Eastern Europe
Material culture in socialist Eastern Europe is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Krisztina Fehervary revisits this history by focusing ori domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s, developing an innovative approach to the materiality of daily life. By analyzing the colors, objects, and spaces that made up this lived world, she demonstrates how the aesthetics of everyday experience were politicized. Her study shows that current standards of living and ideas about normalcy are not merely products of postsocial ist transitions or neoliberalism, but have roots in late socialist consumer culture. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.
KRISZTINA FEHERVARY is
Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Russia Eastern Europe
Material culture in socialist Eastern Europe is remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Krisztina Fehervary revisits this history by focusing ori domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s, developing an innovative approach to the materiality of daily life. By analyzing the colors, objects, and spaces that made up this lived world, she demonstrates how the aesthetics of everyday experience were politicized. Her study shows that current standards of living and ideas about normalcy are not merely products of postsocial ist transitions or neoliberalism, but have roots in late socialist consumer culture. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.
KRISZTINA FEHERVARY is
Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
NEW ANTHROPOLOGIES OF EUROPE Matti Bunzl and Michael Herzfeld, editors
"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." —Brad Weiss,
College of William and Mary Vissza