Post-socialist hybrids

Abstract

Focusing on the architectural and media design of the New European landscape of Poland, this article introduces the concept of `post-socialist hybridity' as a metaphor to capture the contradictions and ambivalences that have emerged in the post-Berlin Wall period. This hybridity is connected to Poland's spectral nationality: that is, the way in which socialism, although officially dead, continues to haunt the nation. As post-socialist transformations take place, they produce hybridized cultures of local specificities, involving a material and emotional architecture that mixes 'old', enduring socialist realities with the welcomed arrival of western goods, images and new models of desirable identities. This desire for instant westernization, globalization and refashioning of culture persists alongside the need to reassert Polishness and an ultranational ethos promoted most strongly through TV channels and radio programs belonging to conservative Catholic groups. To analyze these clashes, Kamil Turowski's photo-document `Streets of Crocodiles: Post-Socialist Globalization' is used, as well as radio and digital culture.