Inviting Papers for the Seminar "Cultural Realities of Real Existing Socialism (1945-present)"
at ACLA’s 2017 Annual Meeting at Utrecht, the Netherlands, July, 2017

Clara Masnatta (clara.masnattaici-berlin.org)

Cold War Socialist and Communist cultural production is often studied according to a top-down model pitting the official regime-endorsed production against alternative cultural realities bubbling up under the dictates of socialist realism. Recent scholarship has challenged this model, yet efforts towards critical comparative approaches are in order in our age of global history re-writing national narratives.

This panel seeks to interrogate both the official top-down and nation-driven writing of (art) history and culture on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, the former Yugoslavia, and Cuba. We invite contributions that explore the broken boundaries between official and underground cultures and artistic exchanges within and beyond the Socialist realm. In particular, we are looking for interventions that are wary of fetishizing dissidence and employ an international perspective into the ways these cultural and political contexts are characterized and reduced to monolithic oppositional entities. What is official or "underground" art? How does art cross borders, both national and doctrinal? Should we remap socialist realism? Can fresh methodologies reevaluate the international dimension of socialist culture, if there is one? Papers can include research on a variety of cultural objects, fine arts, "artistic" and "non-artistic" forms of photography, film, theatre, and literature. We hope to generate a cross-medium discussion about how we make scholarship about Cold War cultures that complicates the received historical models and methodologies through focused case-studies.

Please submit your paper proposal before the September 23 deadline at
http://acla.org/node/add/paper?seminar=12321

Feel free to contact the Seminar organizers with any questions
Clara Masnatta clara.masnattaici-berlin.org
Sarah Goodrum segoodrumgmail.com