The Oxford handbook of communist visual cultures / edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak.

Format
Book
Language
English
Εdition
1st ed.
Published/​Created
New York : Oxford University Press, 2019-2020.
Description
1 online resource.

Details

Subject(s)
Editor
Library of Congress genre(s)
Series
Oxford handbooks online. [More in this series]
Summary note
The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures critically examines and historically reconstructs the visual practices that have accompanied social transformations initiated by communist ideals in various parts of the world in the twentieth century. Bringing together diverse and broadly understood visual texts, including architecture, interior design, cartoons, computer games, fashion, photography, film and television, this volume explores how communism engages the visual. It is divided into five themed sections, focusing, respectively, on materiality; institutional factors and theoretical discourses; international and intercultural dimensions; visual production and strategic spectacles; and after-images, memory, and legacy of communist visual cultures.
Bibliographic references
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Source of description
Description based on online resource; title from home page (viewed on June 24, 2019).
Contents
  • Introduction: The Communist Vision Today
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Part I: MATERIAL CULTURES, TECHNOLOGIES, INDUSTRIES
  • Chapter 1: Socialist Domestic Infrastructures and the Politics of the Body: Bucharest and Havana
  • Ideology as Infrastructure
  • From Avant-Gardes to Mass Housing
  • The Case of Bucharest
  • The Case of Havana
  • The Aesthetic Project of Domesticity
  • Bodies and Infrastructure
  • Chapter 2: Architecture in Series: Housing and Communist Idealism
  • Interwar Origins of Communist Housing Programs
  • The Mass Housing Question, c. 1945
  • Postwar Prefabrication and the Panel
  • Conclusion
  • Chapter 3: Restating Classicist Monumentalism in Soviet Architecture, 1930s-early 1950s
  • Reviving Neoclassicism at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century
  • The Avant-Garde Alternative: Monumental in Scale, Muted in Stylistic Voice
  • Transition to Classicist Monumentalism: The Palace of the Soviets
  • Monumentalism as Expression of Postwar Soviet Triumph
  • Post-Stalinist Simplification
  • Post-Soviet Postscript: The Monumental Legacy Abides
  • Chapter 4: Esfir Shub's K.Sh.E. (1932) and the Movement of Energy
  • Energy in Soviet Visual Culture
  • Montage and the Soviet Photo Poster
  • Mobilizing Facts
  • The Coming of Sound-Promise and Frustration
  • K.Sh.E. and Sound-Energy
  • Postscript
  • Chapter 5: Soviet Wall Newspapers: Social(ist) Media of an Analog Age
  • What Were Wall Newspapers?
  • A Socialist Shadow in the Long History of "New" Media?
  • "Social" Reading, Social Corrective, and Social Organization
  • The Material: A Low-Tech, Hybrid, Mobile, and Destructible Medium
  • The Visual: Remix and the Ready-to-Use Cultures of Communist Iconography
  • Conclusion: The Cultural Heritage of Soviet Wall Newspapers
  • Chapter 6: Red Stars, Biorhythms, and Circuit Boards: Do-It-Yourself Aesthetics of Computing and Computer Games in Late Socialist Czechoslovakia
  • Biorhythms: A Popular Use of Serious Machines
  • The Culture of "Bastlení": Extending Hardware through Bricolage
  • Hammer and Sickle Just for Laughs: Irony and Subversion in Amateur Computer Games.
Other title(s)
Communist visual cultures
ISBN
  • 9780190885540
  • 0190885548
  • 9780190885557
  • 0190885556
  • 9780190885564
  • 0190885564
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