Leisure and Luxury - call for papers

Dear colleagues

The following call for papers may be of interest to you. I'd also be grateful if you would circulate this information to anyone working in the area.

David Crowley

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Leisure and Luxury in Socialist Europe after 1945 (working title)

Call for papers

Leisure and Luxury in Socialist Europe after 1945 will be the third in a series of edited volumes exploring the material culture and the spaces of socialism in Eastern Central Europe (Style and Socialism. Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, Berg, 2000; and Socialist Spaces. Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc, Berg, 2002 - see www.bergpublishers.com). With a focus on the texture and material of everyday experience, these books have tested the conventional models and explanations of Soviet-type societies. They have brought together the work of scholars from different disciplines including anthropology, social and economic history, art history and cultural geography.

The roles of leisure and luxury in Soviet-type societies have yet to receive thorough analysis, yet it is clear that both played central parts in the relations between authority and people. The essays in Leisure and Luxury in Socialist Europe after 1945 will debate the self-image of eastern Bloc states as societies driven by production and principles of social justice, as well as by Cold War projections which emphasised shortage and scarcity and corrupt luxury in the Bloc. Leisure was sometimes claimed as a licensed and organised product of socialist economics whereas, at other times, it was tolerated as an 'emollient' in a society rent by shortage and social tensions. The material signifiers of luxury - not least highly symbolic commodities like furs and imported clothes - required careful ideological negotiation to explain their presence and function in socialist societies. This book w
 ill interrogate the public discourses of leisure and luxury and the ways that they change!
 d between the 1940s and the 1980s.

A particular emphasis of this book is on the material and visual qualities of artefacts and spaces associated with leisure or identified as luxury. Leisure and luxury were not simply matters of rhetoric and discourse: they were materialised in things and in practices. We need to know more about their production and consumption. How, for instance, can we account for the particular forms of socialist advertising or socmodernist hotels? And what were the regimes of signification? What materials or design, for instance, signalled an imported product and what value was attached to such foreign things?

What were the social, political and cultural effects of leisure and luxury? What impact, for instance, did the limited but growing opportunities to travel within the Bloc through the period have on those who enjoyed this form of leisure and on their hosts? What were the effects of dacha ownership on the individual and on society?

We welcome proposals of papers dealing with any aspects of leisure and luxury in Central/ Eastern Europe in the post-1945 period. Papers can deal with specific historical and social settings or offer comparative analysis across location and time. We are particularly interested in receiving contributions that emphasise the role of material things and spaces in the discourses and practices connected with leisure and luxury.

The following bullet points indicate some of the areas that we would like to feature in the volume. This list is in no sense an exclusive register of subjects.


* Moral and ideological campaigns / discourse to shape consumption and leisure;
* Theories of leisure or luxury generated within the Bloc during the period;
* Socialist advertising;
* Representations of shortage and/or excess abroad;
* Retailing whether in the form of street markets, hard-currency shops, or 'yellow curtain' shops for nomenclatura / party members;
* Fashion, whether literally in terms of modish dress or more generally as 'positional consumption';
* Ritualised luxury such as weddings and funerals;
* Gifts such 'grace and favour' housing and prizes awarded for productivity;
* Materials identified with luxury;
* Practices around luxury food consumption, for instance, tort [gateau];
* Dressing up;
* Dacha / chata life;
* Socialist tourism, with a focus on the artefacts and spaces associated with it such as cruise ship cabin design, what to wear at the seaside, souvenirs, postcards;
* The reception / consumption of television and other forms of popular entertainment;
* Sites of organised leisure and culture such as cultural houses, hotels and theatres.

We are soliciting contributions of no more than 7,000 words that could be submitted in 12 months time. If you are interested in contributing to the volume, please send an abstract of 200-400 words by 29th February 2004.

Please address proposals or queries to

Dr. Susan E. Reid
Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies
University of Sheffield
Arts Tower
Western Bank
Sheffield
S10 2TN
t: 0114 222 7400
f: 0114 222 7416
e: [email protected]


David Crowley
Humanities
Royal College of Art
London SW7 2EU
t: 0207 590 4485
f: 0207 590 4490
e: [email protected]