Review of Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary

ADAM FABRY

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe

Taylor & Francis

Año: 2017 vol. 25 p. 283 - 285

0965-156X

This article reviews critically "Politics in Color and Concrete: Socialist Materialities and the Middle Class in Hungary", written by Krisztina Fehérváry, and published by Indiana University Press (2013). It argues that Fehérváry provides a highly interesting, and much-needed, counter-story to dominant narratives of socialist materialities and consumer culture in Hungary. Having said this, Fehérváry?s narrative of everyday life in socialist Hungary at times ends up reproducing some of the same "binary oppositions" that still haunt the mainstream literature on "actually existing socialism" (e.g. the idea that socialism was "bad", whereas capitalism is "good"). Also, the volume could have benefited from comparisons with aesthetic regimes elsewhere in the Soviet bloc. Yet, despite these minor shortcomings, Fehérváry?s work will be of great interest to scholars interested in developing a critical and interdisciplinary understanding of aesthetics and material culture in Eastern Europe from the late 1940s to the present.