Consuming Russia

by Barker, Adele Marie

• ISBN13: 9780822322818
• ISBN10: 0822322811
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-06-01
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops-from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. InConsuming Russiaeditor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia. The contributors examine how the people of Russia reconcile prerevolutionary elite culture-as well as the communist legacy-with the influx of popular influences from the West to build a society that no longer relies on a single dominant discourse and embraces the multiplicities of both public and private Russian life. Barker brings together Russian and American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. These experts fuse theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to analyze the rise of popular culture, covering topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children and advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, and spectator sports. They consider detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism and queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, and graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, and the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russiars"s political and economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizensrs" cultural production and consumption. This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, and to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture. Contributors.Adele Marie Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Nancy Condee, Robert Edelman, Laurie Essig, Julia P. Friedman, Paul W. Goldschmidt, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Anna Krylova, Susan Larsen, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy, Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, Tim Scholl, Adam Weiner, Alexei Yurchak, Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky

Author Biography

Adele Marie Barker is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of The Mother Syndrome in the Russian Folk Imagination and coeditor of Dialogues/Dialogi: Literary and Cultural Exchanges between (Ex) Soviet and American Women, also published by Duke University Press.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Rereading Russia

The Culture Factory: Theorizing the Popular in the Old and New Russia

Popular Culture

Public Offerings: MMM and the Marketing of Melodrama

Gagarin and the Rave Kids: Transforming Power, Identity, and Aesthetics in Post-Soviet Nightlife

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Holy Rus' and Its Alternatives in Russian Rock Music

Popular Children's Culture in Post-Perestroika Russia: Songs of Innocence and Experience Revisited

Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv

In Search of an Audience: The New Russian Cinema of Reconciliation

There Are no Rules on Planet Russia: Post-Soviet Spectator Sport

Saying "Lenin" and Meaning "Party": Subversion and Laughter in Soviet and Post-Soviet Society

Going to the Dogs: Pet Life in the New Russia

Sexualities

Publicly Queer: Representations of Queer Subjects and Subjectivities in the Absence of Identity

Queer Performance: "Male" Ballet

Pornography in Russia

Society and Social Artifacts

Body Graphics: Tattooing the Fall of Communism

Communism as Kitsch: Soviet Symbols in Post-Soviet Society

From the Toilet to the Museum: Memory and Metamorphosis of Soviet Trash

Paranoid Graffiti at Execution Wall: Nationalist Interpretations of Russia's Travail

"Christianity, Antisemitism, Nationalism": Russian Orthodoxy in a Reborn Orthodox Russia

Suspending Disbelief: "Cults" and Postmodernism in Post-Soviet Russia

Contributors

Index

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