Politics in Color and Concrete, livre ebook

Winner, 2014 William E. Douglass Prize in Europeanist AnthropologyHonorable Mention, Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social StudiesHungarian Studies Association Best Book Prize Honorable Mention, 2016 Laura Shannon Prize

Author websitePolitics in Color and Concrete website New Anthropologies of Europe series page on Facebook

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.

Introduction: The Qualities of Color and Concrete
1. Normal Life in the Former Socialist City
2. Socialist Realism in the Socialist City
3. Socialist Modern and the Production of Demanding Citizens
4. Socialist Generic and the Branding of the State
5. Organicist Modern and Super-Natural Organicism
6. Unstable Landscapes of Property, Morality and Status
7. The New Family House and the New Middle Class
Epilogue
Conclusion: Heterotopias of the Normal in Private Worlds