Description
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewThis is a thought-provoking and enlightening, if in places frustrating, collection of interdisciplinary essays that will be of benefit to social scientists interested in consumer lifeworlds under communist rule.
-- Gediminas Lankauskas, University of Regina * The Russian Review *
The volume is a useful study of Eastern European consumption during socialism and an invaluable tool with which to think about writing the histories of consumerism and state socialism in general. The provocative conclusions regarding socialism's failures as reverse echoes of our world today, with its own tortured relation to consumption, should, one hopes, resonate beyond the confines of the fields of Eastern European and socialist history.
-- Victor Petrov - University of Tennessee * H-Net (Socialisms) *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
1. The Pleasures of Backwardness / Zsuzsa Gille, Cristofer Scarboro, and Diana Mincytė
2. Consuming Dialogues: Pleasure, Restraint, "Backwardness," and "Civilization" in Eastern Europe / Mary Neuburger
3. Just Rewards: The Social Contract and Communism's Hard Bargain with the Citizen-Consumer / Patrick Hyder Patterson
4. Conceptualizing Consumption in the Polish People's Republic / Brian Porter-Szűcs
5. Oranges and the New Black: Importing, Provisioning, and Consuming Tropical Fruits and Coffee in the GDR, 1971–1989 / Anne Dietrich
6. VCRs, Modernity, and Consumer Culture in Late State Socialist Poland / Patryk Wasiak
7. The Enchantment of Imaginary Europe: Consumer Practices in Post-Soviet Ukraine / Tania Bulakh
8. The Late Socialist Good Life and its Discontents: Bit, Kultura, and the Social Life of Goods / Cristofer Scarboro
9. The Prosumerist Resonance Machine: Rethinking Political Subjectivity and Consumer Desire in State Socialism / Zsuzsa Gille and Diana Mincytė
Index
