Cold War Kitchen

by Oldenziel, Ruth; Zachmann, Karin

• ISBN13: 9780262151191
• ISBN10: 0262151197
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-31
• Publisher: Mit Pr

Summary

Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev's famous "kitchen debate" in 1958 involved more than the virtues of American appliances. Both Nixon and Khrushchev recognized the political symbolism of the modern kitchen; the kind of technological innovation represented in this everyday context spoke to the political system that produced it. The kitchen connects the "big" politics of politicians and statesmen to the "small" politics of users and interest groups. Cold War Kitchenlooks at the kitchen as material object and symbol, considering the politics and the practices of one of the most famous technological icons of the twentieth century. Defining the kitchen as a complex technological artifact as important as computers, cars, and nuclear missiles, the book examines the ways in which a range of social actors in Europe shaped the kitchen as both ideological construct and material practice. These actors-from manufacturers and modernist architects to housing reformers and feminists-constructed and domesticated the technological innovations of the postwar kitchen. The home became a "mediation junction" in which women users and others felt free to advise producers from the consumer's point of view. In essays illustrated by striking period photographs, the contributors to Cold War Kitchenconsider such topics as Soviet consumers' ambivalent responses to the American dream kitchen argued over by Nixon and Khrushchev; the Frankfurter Kuche, a European modernist kitchen of the interwar period (and its export to Turkey when its designer fled the Nazis); and the British state-subsidized kitchen design so innovative that it was mistaken for a luxury American product. The concluding essays challenge the received wisdom of past interpretations of the kitchen debate. Contributors: Esra Akcan, Liesbeth Bervoets, Cristina Carbone, Greg Castillo, Irene Cieraad, Shane Hamilton, Martina Hessler, Matthew Hilton, Julian Holder, Ruth Oldenziel, Kirsi Saarikangas, Susan E. Reid, Karin Zachmann Inside Technology series

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
Kitchens as Technology and Politics: An Introduction	p. 1
Staging the Kitchen Debate: Nixon and Khrushchev, 1949 to 1959
The American "Fat Kitchen" in Europe	p. 33
Postwar Domestic Modernity and Marshall Plan Strategies of Enchantment
Staging the Kitchen Debate	p. 59
How Splitnik Got Normalized in the United States
"Our Kitchen Is Just as Good"	p. 83
Soviet Responses to the American Kitchen
The Radiant American Kitchen	p. 113
Domesticating Dutch Nuclear Energy
Supermarket USA Confronts State Socialism	p. 137
Airlifting the Technopolitics of Industrial Food Distribution into Cold War Yugoslavia
European Kitchen Politics: Users and Multiple Modernities, 1890s to 1970s
The Frankfurt Kitchen	p. 163
The Model of Modernity and the "Madness" of Traditional Users, 1926 to 1933
Civilizing Housewives versus Participatory Users	p. 185
Margarete Schutte- Lihotzky in the Employ of the Turkish Nation State
"Consultation Required!"	p. 209
Women Coproducing the Modern Kitchen in the Netherlands, 1920 to 1970
Transatlantic Technological Transfer: Appropriating and Contesting the American Kitchen
The Nation State or the United States?	p. 235
The Irresistible Kitchen of the British Ministry of Works, 1944 to 1951
Managing Choice	p. 259
Constructing the Socialist Consumption Junction in the German Democratic Republic
What's New?	p. 285
Women Pioneers and the Finnish State Meet the American Kitchen
Spreading Kitchen Affairs: Empowering Users?
Exporting the American Cold War Kitchen	p. 315
Challenging Americanization, Technological Transfer, and Domestication
The Cold War and the Kitchen in a Global Context	p. 341
The Debate over the United Nations Guidelines on Consumer Protection
Selected Bibliography	p. 363
Contributors	p. 397
Index	p. 403
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