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CfP: Temporality and Material Culture under Socialism

Deadline April 16, 2021

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This conference focuses on the relationship between temporality and material culture in twentieth-century socialist regimes. We are primarily interested in looking at case studies from the USSR and Europe, but also from other geographical contexts such as Asia, Latin America, and Africa, especially from a comparative perspective. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions dealing with the intersection of temporality and architecture, public art, urban planning, design, and other spheres of material culture. 

In the last decades, “time” has increasingly become a research topic in itself: theoretical studies of changing experiences, perceptions, and conceptualizations of past, present, future (and even eternity) have taken off. These studies have spawned a wide-ranging discussion on the modern and postmodern temporalities, on the so-called “régimes d’historicité” (Hartog 2003), spanning several disciplines and national contexts. 

Researchers of socialist societies have been no strangers to this boom. Temporality figures as an important theme in recent scholarship on socialist culture, including architecture, painting, literature, photography, and cinema. One of the common pieces of reference of many of these works is Vladimir Paperny’s concept of “Culture Two”. However, as in Paperny’s study of Soviet architecture, socialist temporality typically figures as only one theme among many, rather than a subject proper. As a result, for instance, scholarship often draws upon clear dichotomies between past and future, without a rigorous critique of these categories themselves.

Accordingly, this conference seeks to foreground the analysis of socialist temporality as the main object of study. All the same, we believe that material culture provides a particularly effective “entry point” into the problem of time. Following the ideas developed by the “spatial turn”, especially in memory and cultural studies, this workshop emphasizes the fact that experiences of time are hardly separable from experiences of space. Thus, tackling the issue of temporality through the lens of material culture, we intend to ground the discussion of often-abstract concepts into their spatial and tangible incarnations.