and Balkan Europe
by IECOB & AIS Università di Bologna
This area collects information about a wide range of books, monographies and edited volumes concerning the countries and themes relevant to PECOB
Politics in Color and Concrete
Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary
by: Krisztina Fehérváry
published by: Indiana University Press
pp: 312
ISBN: 978-0-253-00994-4
price: $ 32
Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is
remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous — the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 1990s and reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment.
Krisztina Féherváry shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberalism. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.
About the author
Krisztina Fehérváry is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
PECOB: Portal on Central Eastern and Balkan Europe - University of Bologna - 117, c.so della Repubblica - Italy
