The pleasure of continuity: Re-reading post-socialist nostalgia

Abstract

This article explores uses and modalities of the concept of post-socialist nostalgia in the still emerging field of cultural studies focused on the region of Central and Eastern Europe. It encapsulates both the cultural and socio-political forms of post-socialist nostalgia, defined as tinkering with the remnants of the socialist popular culture, television, fashion or design and reminiscing about social welfare under Communist Party rule. The main aim of this theoretical article is to demonstrate the anti-hegemonic dimension of post-socialist nostalgia, which disturbed the official memory politics that promoted discontinuity with the socialist past in the early post-transformation period of the 1990s. The dynamics in Czechoslovakia/Czech Republic in this period are presented to illuminate how discontinuity in memory politics was embedded in retroactive justice, legislation, the economy, etc. In contrast to these elitist discourses reducing the memory of socialism to its crimes, the pop-cultural post-socialist nostalgia (the lowbrow discourse less strictly policed for discontinuity) served as the venue through which continuity with socialism was redeemed. Reunion with one’s own past and reclaiming the right to remember the past fully is presented as a source of cultural pleasure, the backbone of both types of post-socialist nostalgia.