Veronika Pehe, "Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture" (Berghahn Books, 2020)

New Books in Sociology · Jun 21, 2021 · 1h 19m

Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. Veronika Pehe's Velvet Retro: Postsocialist Nostalgia and the Politics of Heroism in Czech Popular Culture (Berghahn Books, 2020) locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature…