Full Description
This edited volume offers an original exploration into the ways in which Soviet culture and experience of time were unique, examining the temporalities expressed in the world of socialist things: from the objects of everyday life to urban architecture.
Grounding the analysis of Soviet temporalities in their material incarnations not only lends concreteness to discussions of temporal culture, but also draws out ways in which the specificities of Soviet things—and their planning, design, manufacture, and consumption—mediated and produced particular ways of experiencing, perceiving, and representing time. As such, Time and Material Culture turns a new page in the study of the temporal and material culture of Soviet socialism and, in doing so, contributes to broader debates on the changing experiences of time in the global twentieth century. The book integrates interdisciplinary perspectives as well as regional approaches sensitive to the multinational nature of the Soviet project.
Time and Material Culture will be useful to academics, upper-level undergraduates, and graduate students interested in twentieth-century cultures of time.
Contents
Introduction: Soviet Temporal and Material Cultures in Dialogue Part 1: Alternatives, Dissonances, and Disjunctions 1. Chronopolitics: Restoring "Backward" Spaces to Modern Time in Soviet Baku after WWII 2. Soviet Industrial Time and Nonscalable Temporalities: Telling Time with Hydraulic Seas 3. The Golden Age of Soviet Heritage: An Alternative Presentism? 4. Conflicting Temporalities of Socialist Urbanity: Modernisation vis-à-vis Architectural Heritage in the Development of Minsk Part 2: Representations, Imaginations, and Narratives 5. Last Stop, Communism: Time as Space in Early Soviet Political Posters 6. From Survey to Inspiration: Accommodating Pre-Soviet Materiality in Soviet Lviv (1940s-1960s) 7. Immortalising Yurts? The Temporalities of Nomadic Architecture in Stalinist Central Asia 8. Hybrid Temporality Unveiled: Bridging People and State in the Late Soviet Union Through the Amateur Filmmaking Kit Part 3: Bodies, Experiences, and Perceptions 9. Stitches in Time: Maiakovskii's Overcoat and Temporal Self-Fashioning in the Soviet Union 10. Poets' "Hand" on Display: Soviet Literary Museums as Curators of Sacral Materiality 11. Socialist Time in Fashion: The Late Soviet Interpretation Conclusion: The Matter of Time
