Post-communist Nostalgia

"...the term 'post-communist nostalgia' will continue to be used, abused, and debated. However, this illuminating book shows that the term evokes multiple phenomena that have arisen, and will continue to arise." ⢠Pol-Int

"This book serves an invaluable function by capturing the rich complexity of nostalgia and marking a moment when questions of postmodern historiography can be applied to a past, the recent Communist one, for which the pressures toward absolute evaluations are immense. [It] summarizes some of the scholarship that one might include with the "contemporary history" of the region...This volume should have broad general appeal across a market for post-Communist cultural studies and the study of memory." ⢠H-Habsburg

"Overall, this an impressive set of essays that makes a weighty contribution to the study of nostalgia in the European East after socialism. It adds significantly to the burgeoning literature on the infinitely complex and fascinating subject of social remembrance... Scholars and students interested in how memory works (and fails) will find much to appreciate in Post-Communist Nostalgia." ⢠Anthropology of East Europe Review

"The volume is refreshingly iconoclastic... its overall character is kaleidoscopic but all the more fascinating and insightful." ⢠S¼dosteuropa

"This volume nicely illustrates that nostalgia talk is symptomatic of ongoing struggles over the 'truths' of postsocialist history... [It]makes an important ethnographic and theoretical contribution to memory, history, and identity studies in the region and beyond. By exploring the complex and often unpredictable social life of socialism in the realm of memory (Berdahl), it illustrates that sometimes, as Todorova claims, it can be very hard to predict what our pasts are going to be." ⢠Slavic Review

"These lively essays make for the rare collection that is greater than the sum of its parts. Bookended by a substantive Foreword and Afterword, they upend the standard 'diagnosis of nostalgia' found across the former Soviet bloc, refuting the popular conception that Eastern Europeans are somehow haunted by the past, and illustrating the repertoire of contemporary post-socialist cultural politics at its most sophisticated." ⢠Bruce Grant, New York University