[Commlist] CFP: Creative Dissent: Alternative Cultures During Socialism and Beyond, 1945-1991

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: “Creative Dissent: Alternative Cultures During 
Socialism and Beyond, 1945-1991”

Editors: Katalin Cseh-Varga, Martin Klimke, Burcu Peksevgen, Rolf 
Werenskjold and Marko Zubak

The comprehensive regulation of all sectors of society in the socialist 
states in Central, Eastern and Southeast Europe during the Cold War was 
not always a successful undertaking.

Dissenting and disobedient voices that opposed or ignored Party 
directives emerged within the political, social and cultural spheres of 
Warsaw Pact countries, frequently circumventing official spaces and 
obstructing the creation and functioning of state-sanctioned, 
class-conscious communities. This proposed volume seeks to explore the 
origins, practices, and transformations over time of alternative 
cultures in socialist Europe.

Ordinary people, intellectuals and cultural players responded to 
repression and control with creativity and inventiveness. In Yugoslavia, 
for instance, alternative youth culture flourished, creating a parallel 
universe to the highly politicized official culture. In Lithuania, to 
satisfy the intellectual hunger for thought other than orthodox Leftism, 
dissidents engaged with texts of the Daoist and Zen (Chan) Buddhist 
traditions. Artists in Romania built their own mail-art network to 
connect with like-minded artists from within and beyond the Iron 
Curtain. And self-publishing became a widely practiced mode of knowledge 
distribution outside of Party-run media.

What kind of grassroots or institutionalized protest phenomena are we 
dealing with in the alternative cultures of dissent in the Soviet and 
socialist influence zone? How did alternative cultures vary from country 
to country? And how were they different from their “Western” 
counterparts? Also, how do these socialist alternative cultures connect 
to other international/global perspectives?

We seek contributions that will center around the following three main 
focus areas: alternative information networks and transfers, virtual and 
physical spaces of dissent, and communities of disobedience.

With regard to these focus areas, we are seeking essays that aim to 
answer the following questions:

● What are the main genealogical, historiographical and methodical 
questions we need to ask about alternative culture during socialism?
● What were the origins of opposition in the decades previous to the 
Cold War and how did they (if at all) differ during the Cold War? And 
how did modes of opposition change after the socialist states’ turn 
towards democracy in the 1990s?
● How much was grassroots or institutionalized dissent determined by 
cultural transfer and the transmission of ideas across various borders?
● What kinds of dissidents and representatives of cultural dissent were 
referenced in non-socialist foreign media and publications?
● What were the “in-betweens” (or grey zones) in which dissent 
manifested itself, what actions did it generate, and what impact did it 
produce? How was dissent interlinked
with officially sanctioned cultural forms of expression, its 
institutions and media?
● How can we deconstruct the role of gatekeepers, myths, images, canons 
and borders in the history of alternative cultures?

Please send us an extended abstract of your proposed contribution (500 
words), with a brief bio (200 words) that also includes your name, 
affiliation and email address.

The editors will invite selected authors to present their papers at a 
publication workshop to be scheduled in 2020 in preparation for the volume.

Email submissions to (creativedissent2020 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(creativedissent2020 /at/ gmail.com)> until June 30, 2019.

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