Description
Book SynopsisSince the fall of the Iron Curtain, formerly socialist countries have gone through manifold transformations, whilst remnants of socialism remain ubiquitous. The volume explores various spaces of the postsocialist landscape, presenting a mixture of real and imaginary spaces, of memory and nostalgia, of aesthetic and political symbolism, of the global East and the global South, of academic and essayistic writing. It casts a glance at the heterogeneous relics of socialism and their transformation in very different parts of the world. From the description of (post-)socialist interiors, façades, neighborhoods, parks, monuments, and objects towards the imaginary spaces of literature, the contributors describe the concreteness and intimacy of some of the places that span across and even beyond of what is left of the "second world" today.
Table of ContentsIntroduction; The Ideological Park: How the Tsar's Garden in Kyiv Became a Modern Political Space; The Last Soviet City; Spaces of Detachment; (Re)Inventing (East) Central Europe: Literary Expeditions into a Lost Space; Postsocialist Hybridities: Finding a Place in Kyrgyzstan; Space under Siege. Sarajevo during and after the War; The Limits of Central Planning: Rudimentary Town Centers in the Planned Cities of Stalinstadt and Sztálinváros; Neighborhood Socialism: A Memoir from 1960s Sofia; Mourning the Microrayon: An Essay in Affective Geography; (Re)Mapping National Space: The One Hundred Tourist Sites of Bulgaria and Their Metamorphoses; The Monument de la Renaissance africaine and Global Routes of (Socialist) Monumentalism: New York, Moscow, Pyongyang, Dakar; The Gendered Anxieties of Apartment Living in North Korea, 1953-65; Unreal Estate: Postsocialist China's Dystopic Dreamscapes; Authors.
