The collapse of state socialism ushered in dramatic political and economic change, producing new freedoms and opportunities, but also new challenges and disappointments. Focusing on laborers, professionals, youth, women, sexual minorities, foreign students, and emigrants, Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe explores these multifaceted changes and people’s varied experiences of them. The featured narratives complicate hegemonic representations of transformation, revealing ruptures and continuities, progress and reversals. Highlighting the multi-directionality of change over the last thirty years, the book reappraises 1989 as an epochal event for all.
Foreword: Mapping Heres and Theres, by Cristofer Scarboro
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Everyday Postsocialism in Eastern Europe: Continuities, Ruptures, and Alternative Temporalities, by Jill Massino and Markus Wien
PART I: SOCIOECONOMIC TRANSFORMATIONS
1. “People Knew They Wouldn’t Have to Scrape Dry Chocolate if They Called Me In”: Industry, Subjectivity, and the Long Transformation, by Joanna Wawrzyniak
2. How Foreigners Destroyed our Factory: Repressed Memories of a Czech Flagship Sugar Plant, by Ondřej Klípa
3. From Risk to Risky: Hungary’s Second Economy and Its Transition to the Market after 1989, by Annina Gagyiova
PART II: THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION
4. “There’s a Lot of Talk About Tolerance, but That’s Just Words”: Being Gay in Postsocialist Poland, by Agnieszka Kościańska
5. Reinventing Postsocialism as Heteronationalism: (Dis)continuities and Frictive Biopolitics in Orbán’s Hungary, by Hadley Z. Renkin
6. Eradicating Socialist Internationalism: The Expulsion of Foreign Students in Postsocialist Bulgaria, by Raia Apostolova
PART III: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW
7. The Specter of Sex: Continuities and Changes in Sex Education in Postsocialist Romania, by Beatrice Scutaru and Luciana Jinga
8. No Country for (Poor) Women: Reproductive Rights, Conservatism, and Neoliberalism in Postsocialist Romania, by Corina Doboș
PART IV: ORIGIN STORIES
9. The “Turncoat” as a Social Form: Tracing Everyday Moral Grammars of Justice in Post-1989 East Germany and Czechia, by Till Hilmar
10. From Steppe to State: Alternative Histories, Amateur Knowledge, and the Search for Origin in Post-1989 Bulgaria, by Victor Petrov
11. “I’m An Outsider, I’m An Insider, And Oh, How Happy I Am”: Narratives of Former Communist Party Members in Hungary, by Sándor Horváth
PART V: HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS
12. Children of the Wende: Everyday Experiences of the Postsocialist Transformation in (East) Germany, by Friederike Kind-Kovács
13. Out of Sight but Not Out of Mind: The Romanian Diaspora and Politics at Home, by Sergiu Gherghina and Raluca Farcas
Contributors
Index