Cultural Cold War: Capitalist-Socialist Tensions, Alignment, and Negotiating Practices in Eastern European Consuming Cultures

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The panel seeks to question tensions, alignment and negotiating practices in Eastern European consuming cultures with the special focus on the Soviet Union, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia through different ideospheres of pre-Cold War and Cold War period. Consumption culture here is understood as a site of ideological and political struggle and a site of social transformation, particularly regarding gender and class roles. Whether we discuss material goods such as alcohol or tobacco or psychoanalytic discourse in order to explain new social types closely connected with the consumption (such as narcissism), specific values of all these topics are created in tensions between socialism and capitalism as the two biggest metanarratives of modernity in 20th Century. Issues regarding consumer culture such as its purposefulness, effectiveness or pleasure would be questioned not just as issues of material or economic culture in its narrow sense but as issues of symbolic values, ideological and political borders, and ultimately, a site of dynamic cultural struggle in their specific historical period

Sub Unit

• Literature: Central and Southeast Europe

Chair

• Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

Papers

• A Glass of Bulgarian Red: Drinking as Capitalist 'Remnant' or Socialist 'Good Life?' - Mary Catherine Neuburger, U of Texas at Austin

• Close Encounter with US Capitalism: Economic Imagery of the West in Yugoslav Travel Writings - Maša Kolanovic, U of Zagreb (Croatia)

Discussants

• Dijana Jelaca, Brooklyn College

• Tanja Petrovic, Scientific Research Centre SAZU (Slovenia)