Critique & Humanism | 43 | 2014 | Youth Cultures of Socialism and Post-socialism: Lifestyles, Conformism and Rebellion
issue editors: Tom Junes and Elitza Stanoeva
issue: 43, 1-2/2014
ISSN: 0861-1718
Contents
"Hunters of overseas rags and foreign currency": Stiliagi in the Cold War Soviet Union, 1945-1964
This essay will examine stiliagi, a youth counterculture centered on consuming “western,” especially American, cultural and material products. This paper argues that Soviet “westernized” youth arose as a means of searching for an identity alternative to the heroic veteran, side-stepping offi cial authority, and fashioning a taste-based hierarchy as a means of acquiring social status and power. The stiliagi represented part of a broader wave of postwar spectacular countercultures in both capitalist and socialist contexts, suggesting clear parallels between how developed, industrialized societies reacted to the stresses brought by war and the peacetime transition. Similarly, the societal response to such countercultural youth in both the Soviet Bloc and in western Europe and America combined coercion with co-optation, in general shifting toward the latter by the early 1960s, though the ideological and structural differences explain some divergences in their respective approaches.
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Youth subcultures in Bulgaria in the 1970s and 1980s
The text analyzes the emergence and development of youth subcultures in Bulgaria in the 70s and 80s. It tries to put the problem in a broader context, including various aspects of the attitude of the communist regime to youth in general, the role of the Komsomol in the process, and attempts to control the protest potency among Bulgarian youth. Along with this, it tries to follow the process on the other side of the Iron Curtain – the evolution of the old and new countercultures that are copied, borrowed, but also enriched and domesticated by their followers in Bulgaria. In this sense, the social nature of youth subcultures in Bulgaria remains dualistically divided between imitation and authenticity. Despite this, however, it embodies the authentic rebellion of young people in Bulgaria against the conformism of their parents’ generation, against the oppressive system and against the inertness of life. The article draws parallels with the emergence of major subcultural movements on the West – hippies, rockers, heavy metal fans, punks and wavers – and the subsequent birth of their counterparts in Bulgaria. The approach is historical – anthropological, crossing between archival materials and the fi eldwork of the author in the form of interviews, surveys, external observations. The article ends by tracing the experience of the regime in the years of Gorbachev’s „perestroika“ to look for forms of peaceful coexistence with the subcultures, but also for their domestication and re-education.
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Mediating subculture: Radio Študent and the late socialist Yugoslav punk
This paper revisits the familiar relationship between the subcultural practices and their discursive media interpretations from two innovative angles. First, it analyzes how this particular dynamic unfolded under specifi c conditions of late socialism. Second, it turns the focus away from the mainstream media and looks closely at a small outlet that emerged around subculture itself. More precisely, I refl ect on the complex role that Ljubljana’s Radio Študent played in the birth and proliferation of the punk subculture that developed in the late 1970s Yugoslavia. After sketching the unique institutional framework within which this medium emerged, I show how the radio’s early coverage of local punk in its most sensitive formative stage helped to forge a wider subculture around it. Radio Študent not only legitimized the new cultural phenomenon, but shaped its meaning on a long run, providing it with strong political connotations that came to dominate all later discussions and perceptions of local punk. Indicatively, the political tone was not one of subversion, but of invigoration, since punk was framed, even if at odds with the reality, as a new socially committed youth lifestyle. Rock critics and promoters that gathered around Radio Študent picked up marginalizing elements of the original punk idiom and insisted on the intrinsic social relevance of its local variant, turning it into an openly politicized movement.
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Between political and apolitical: Youth counterculture in communist Poland
This article addresses the role of youth counterculture under Communism in Poland. More precisely, it will focus on some specifi c countercultural movements such as the Bikiniarze, hippies and punks in their historical context as well as briefl y discuss the importance of rock music and the signifi cance of certain fashion trends during the Communist era. Although the appearance of these countercultural youth movements after the Second World War in Poland paid tribute to transnational infl uences – mainly from the West despite the Cold War rift – they also possessed some explicit national characteristics which will be underlined and refl ected on. Despite the fact that these countercultural movements had a relatively small number of adherents, they nonetheless had wider reverberations among respective generations of youth. Moreover, these countercultural movements were de facto apolitical, but since they rejected the offi cially projected and ideologically ‘correct’ youth lifestyle they were perceived by the regime as a political threat. This article therefore argues that youth counterculture in Poland not only represented a mode of resistance to Communist rule by its adherents, but that its infl uence as a consciousness-raising phenomenon among respective generations of youth constituted an impediment for the regime to win over the ‘hearts and minds’ of said generations.
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"Oceans of pain": The sea as memory and metaphor in Angolan poetry and rap music
The essay examines the way Angolan poets have resorted to images of the Atlantic Ocean as a source of national identity as well as a way of articulating revolt. By focusing on the history of the ocean as a means of transporting slaves from the Angolan coast to the Americas, the poets highlight the negative impact of colonialism on the national territory, presenting the international slave trade as the pivotal experience of destruction – of both identity and memory – that has had repercussions up to our days. On the other hand, the ocean is also the connecting point between African Angolans and their descendants who were spread out by the slave trade all over America and Europe. The same space that features as a source of loss is thus turned into a powerful means of transnational alliance, appealing to ethnic as well as cultural ties between Africans. These images become especially interesting when regarded against the background of the historical and political context in which the poems were composed. Hence, the paper compares poems by famous Angolan authors of the years of struggle for independence from colonialism (the 1960s) and post-colonial socialism (the 70s and 80s) with more contemporary texts by poets/rappers of the current young generation of Angolans, many of whom have adopted the rhetoric of revolution. By allowing the texts to enter into a dialogue with each other, the analysis aims at highlighting the role of the Atlantic as a source of Angolan identity, which itself has undergone signifi cant changes in the past 50 years.
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The seminars of the 1980s: Between the critical micro-public and verbal action
Discussion with Alexander Kiossev and Deyan Deyanov
moderator – Miglena Nikolchina
participants – Angel Angelov and Andrey Raychev
March 7th, 2014, Plovdiv,
Bulgaria
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Beyond resistance: Some reflections on Russian street youth
The paper analyzes the accounts of the members of street gangs in Russia in the late Soviet period and at a time of transition to capitalism. It argues that resistance to law and authority among troublesome youth does not preclude them from sharing dominant ideologies and identifying with the normative majority.
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Appropriations of urban space as resistance: The Soviet army monument in Sofia
The Soviet Army Monument in Sofi a has been a topic of a variety of social debates and discords for decades. While some focus on its meaning and location in the city center, arguing about its potential removal, new generations use the place, ascribing new meanings and interpretations. Confronting the power discourse, civil initiatives such as gay prides, marijuana decriminalization events and electronic dance music „street parades” use the symbolic meaning of the place to claim regard of the human rights and the freedom of expression. On the other hand, it has evolved as a medium for street art’s social criticism and contemporary art actions, focused on broader issues such as the conscious use of public space by citizens and provoking public debates on the contemporary way of living in the city. Meanwhile, young citizens have been transforming the space in a more casual way through everyday practices like hanging out, practicing urban sports and partying. All these appropriations reinterpret the monument and the surrounding park, converting it into a place of freedom, alternative lifestyles and anti-consumerism. The uses of the public space as an act of resistance reconcile social and political consciousness and leisure in a bottom-up search for “humane” places created by people for people.
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Politics of space: The #ДАНСwithme protest movement on the stage of post-socialist Sofia
#ДАНСwithme is the longest lasting anti-government protest in the history of Bulgaria. Acting as a temporary intervention into the urban fabric of Sofia, it was a battle for the access to ‘truth’ in the public sphere. Through it, a particular discursive critique and practical critical ethos were developed, which were aimed at uncovering the overarching relations of power and dominant systems of truth hidden behind the regime of façade democracy. It is argued in this paper that #ДАНСwithme functioned as a specific kind of diagnosis of the present because it generated distinct battles for the access to truth both about the present through the past and about the present through the future.
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The 2013 university occupation: Searching for meaning
The text is a critical examination of three interpretations of the 2013 student occupation that took place in Sofi a University and other universities. The first positions it within the framework of the so-called “summer protests”, triggered by the appointment of a controversial media mogul as chief of national security, though it also develops its own messages and practices. The second interprets the occupation as a critique of that same protest, while the third rationalizes it as a relatively successful attempt to build an “autonomous student republic”, with little to do with the wave of protests that hit the country in 2013. The text is mostly devoted to the last two interpretations, as the author fi nds the first well supported by the events. The second, it is argued, piggybacks on influential critiques of the wave of protests that hit the world after 2008, so the strategy of the author here is to criticize it by defl ating those infl uential critiques. The third is critically appreciated on its own merits. It offers an ex post facto rationalization of the events with “ontological” claims, reducing the multifaceted character of the student occupation to fi t a highly ideological construct – autonomism, as its single meaning. The autonomism thesis is criticized as depraving the events of their vital context, as misinterpreting the organization and character of the autonomous decision-making of collective bodies and as attributing single ideology to a diverse student body, with diverse motivations and ideological commitments.
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Banitza
A self-presentation of the youth online magazine Banitza provided by two
of its editors.
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Behind Marx's hidden abode: For an extended conception of capitalism
A lecture of Nancy Fraser published in New Left Review and reprinted here with the journal’s permission.
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Parity: The grammar of contestation and its readings and misreadings by the protests
Interview with Nancy Fraser by Dimitar Vatsov
Dartmouth College, May 8th, 2014
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Critical theory after the end of progress: Contextualism, de-colonization and politics
nterview with Amy Allen by Dimitar Vatsov
Dartmouth College, June 4th, 2014
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Narratives on the Bulgarian apocalypse
Thе article aims at analyzing the apocalyptic narratives on present-day Bulgaria, which in the last years of the economic and fi nancial crisis enjoy increasing media popularity and tend even to become the dominant analytical discourse in Bulgarian media. The main thesis of the article is that the apocalyptic narratives constitute a kind of discourse viruses that threaten to diminish considerably our cognitive capacities as well as to restrict our practical capacities. That is why we should decisively oppose their unimpeded dissemination. The analysis is focused on three types of apocalyptic narratives: 1) narratives that explain the stated ill-fortunes of the country through conspiracy theories, more precisely through a plot of external and/or internal enemies willing to demolish Bulgaria; 2) narratives that ascribe our failures to an insurmountable cultural or mental insuffi ciency of Bulgarian people; 3) narratives that ascribe our calamities to equally insurmountable divisions of the nation − on the level of values, mentality or social status − that obstruct the possibility of any positive development.
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