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Author: Judd Stitziel
Publisher:
Published: 2005-08
Total Pages: 280
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStitziel examines the story of communist haute couture, fashion shows, seasonal clearance sales, the textile and garment industries, and everyday consumer practices, exploring the paradoxical causes, forms, and consequences of East Germany's attempt to create a communist consumer culture during the Cold War.
Author: Krisztina Fehérváry
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-09-16
Total Pages: 323
ISBN-13: 0253009960
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA historical anthropology of material transformations of homes in Hungary from the 1950s o the 1990s. 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. “A major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.” —Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York “Politics in Color and Concrete explains why the everyday is important, and shows why domestic aesthetics embody a crucially significant politics.” —Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago “The topic is extremely timely and relevant; the writing is lucid and thorough; the theory is complex and sophisticated without being overly dense, or daunting. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.” —Brad Weiss, College of William and Mary
Author: Katherine Pence
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2008
Total Pages: 390
ISBN-13: 9780472069743
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book explores the ways in which modernity shaped the relationship between socialist state and society in East Germany. The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship has tended to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens. experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: what did modernity mean for East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life so as to bring into sharper focus the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around socialist modernity shaped the views, memories and actions of East Germans over four decades. the Cold War, Eastern Europe, the history of communism, European social history and the history of everyday life, gender history, as well as modernity and socialist popular culture.
Author: Aga Skrodzka
Publisher:
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 799
ISBN-13: 019088553X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKLooking at monuments, murals, computer games, recycling campaigns, children's books, and other visual artifacts, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures reassesses communism's historical and cultural legacy.
Author: Andrew Reilly
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-12-10
Total Pages: 161
ISBN-13: 1350091936
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow does a style become a fashion? Why do trends spread and decline? Introducing Fashion Theory explores these questions and more to help you quickly get up-to-speed with fashion theories, from scarcity to conformity, through clear practical examples and fascinating case studies. This second edition, re-titled from Key Concepts for the Fashion Industry, includes expanded coverage on cultural appropriation, corporate greenwashing, and the criminal world of counterfeit goods. - Illustrated examples, from Apple's post-postmodernist iWatch to Savage X Fenty's body image message on diversity - Covers core fashion theories, from trickle-down to trickle-up, to political dress and conspicuous consumption - Filled with learning activities, key terms, chapter summaries, and discussion questions to inspire and inform
Author: Donna Harsch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2018-06-26
Total Pages: 371
ISBN-13: 0691190402
DOWNLOAD EBOOKRevenge of the Domestic examines gender relations in East Germany from 1945 to the 1970s, focusing especially on the relationship between ordinary women, the Communist Party, and the state created by the Communists, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The book weaves together personal stories from interviews, statistical material, and evidence from archival research in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Merseburg, and Chemnitz to reconstruct the complex interplay between state policy toward women and the family on the one hand, and women's reactions to policy on the other. Donna Harsch demonstrates that women resisted state decisions as citizens, wageworkers, mothers, wives, and consumers, and that in every guise they maneuvered to overcome official neglect of the family. As state dependence on female employment increased, the book shows, the Communists began to respond to the insistence of women that the state pay attention to the family. In fits and starts, the party state begrudgingly retooled policy in a more consumerist and family-oriented direction. This "domestication" was partial, ambivalent, and barely acknowledged from above. It also had ambiguous, arguably regressive, effects on the private gender arrangements and attitudes of East Germans. Nonetheless, the economic and social consequences of this domestication were cumulatively powerful and, the book argues, gradually undermined the foundations of the GDR.
Author: Rebecca Arnold
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-10-22
Total Pages: 160
ISBN-13: 0191579114
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFashion is a dynamic global industry that plays an important role in the economic, political, cultural, and social lives of an international audience. It spans high art and popular culture, and plays a significant role in material and visual culture. This book introduces fashion's myriad influences and manifestations. Fashion is explored as a creative force, a business, and a means of communication. From Karl Lagerfeld's creative reinventions of Chanel's iconic style to the multicultural reference points of Indian designer Manish Arora, from the spectacular fashion shows held in nineteenth century department stores to the mix-and-match styles of Japanese youth, the book examines the ways that fashion both reflects and shapes contemporary culture. Using historical and contemporary examples, it gives a clear understanding of how fashion has developed since the renaissance, while raising questions about its status, ethical credibility, and influence on consumers. The book provides insight into the structure of the fashion industry and how fashions are designed, promoted and consumed, in relation to relevant historical, social and cultural contexts. It is structured thematically, to look at the role and development of designers, the growth of shopping and the different businesses involved in making and selling fashionable clothes. Fashion's relationship to the wider culture is also explored, by considering its representation in art and collaborations between designers and artists, the moral controversies surrounding fashion, and attempts to produce ethical clothing, and the effects of globalisation on the fashion trade. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Author: Siobhan Magee
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-27
Total Pages: 153
ISBN-13: 1000182290
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this ethnography of Krakowian society, Siobhan Magee explores essential questions on the relationship between fur and culture in Poland. How can wearing a fur coat indicate someone's political views in Krakow, beyond their opinion on animal rights? What kinds of associations are given to someone wearing a fur coat in Poland? And what impact does generational difference have on the fur-wearing traditions of modern day Krakowians? Magee looks further into detailed analyses of conversations held relating to fur, including why fur is an apt inheritance for a grandmother to pass on to her granddaughter; what it was like trading fur on 'black markets' during socialism, and why some anti-fur activists link fur to patriarchal power and the Roman Catholic Church. In so doing, it becomes clear how fur is an evocative textile with an uncommonly rich symbolic and historical significance."Magee's research uncovers the symbolic and historic significance that fur evokes in relation to culture in Poland. In her investigations, her ethnography becomes a means for understanding generational difference in Poland. Written with reference to extensive fieldwork, Magee goes on to show how the classification of generation can be a much more accessible indicator and measure of difference than other categories, including sexuality, class and faith. Thus, 'generation' and 'inheritance' are shown to be uniquely powerful idioms with which to discuss power and social change in Poland. A new contribution to material culture and the sensory turn, this will be of interest to scholars of anthropology, ethnography, eastern Europe and material culture and textiles.
Author: Gregory Claeys
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2024-12-10
Total Pages: 608
ISBN-13: 0691236682
DOWNLOAD EBOOKHow the utopian tradition offers answers to today’s environmental crises In the face of Earth’s environmental breakdown, it is clear that technological innovation alone won’t save our planet. A more radical approach is required, one that involves profound changes in individual and collective behavior. Utopianism for a Dying Planet examines the ways the expansive history of utopian thought, from its origins in ancient Sparta and ideas of the Golden Age through to today's thinkers, can offer moral and imaginative guidance in the face of catastrophe. The utopian tradition, which has been critical of conspicuous consumption and luxurious indulgence, might light a path to a society that emphasizes equality, sociability, and sustainability. Gregory Claeys unfolds his argument through a wide-ranging consideration of utopian literature, social theory, and intentional communities. He defends a realist definition of utopia, focusing on ideas of sociability and belonging as central to utopian narratives. He surveys the development of these themes during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before examining twentieth- and twenty-first-century debates about alternatives to consumerism. Claeys contends that the current global warming limit of 1.5C (2.7F) will result in cataclysm if there is no further reduction in the cap. In response, he offers a radical Green New Deal program, which combines ideas from the theory of sociability with proposals to withdraw from fossil fuels and cease reliance on unsustainable commodities. An urgent and comprehensive search for antidotes to our planet’s destruction, Utopianism for a Dying Planet asks for a revival of utopian ideas, not as an escape from reality, but as a powerful means of changing it.
Author: John Pickles
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2016-03-03
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 1118632893
DOWNLOAD EBOOKArticulations of Capital offers an accessible, grounded, yet theoretically-sophisticated account of the geographies of global production networks, value chains, and regional development in post-socialist Eastern and Central Europe. Proposes a new theorization of global value chains as part of a conjunctural economic geography Develops a set of conceptual and theoretical arguments concerning the regional embeddedness of global production Draws on longitudinal empirical research from over 20 years in the Bulgarian and Slovakian apparel industries Makes a major intervention into the debate over the economic geographies of European integration and EU enlargement
