Decoding Satirical Posters from the Second Half of the Soviet Era

• In Event: Ephemera and Scavenger History, or the Struggles of Feeding Cultural Memory from History’s Waste Baskets

Abstract

This presentation will examine the challenges of reading the visual and verbal idioms of satirical posters produced in the Soviet Union from the 1950s to the early 1990s. It will discuss the different kinds of work required to unpack the dense allusivity of these works, both at the level of their iconography and at the level of their referentiality, as well as the challenges of cataloging these artifacts so they can be discovered by interested researchers.

Author

• Thomas Francis Keenan, Princeton U