SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures critically examines and historically reconstructs the visual practices that have accompanied social transformations initiated by communist ideals in various parts of the world in the twentieth century. Bringing together diverse and broadly understood visual texts, including architecture, interior design, cartoons, computer games, fashion, photography, film and television, this volume explores how communism engages the visual. It is divided into five themed sections, focusing, respectively, on materiality; institutional factors and theoretical discourses; international and intercultural dimensions; visual production and strategic spectacles; and after-images, memory, and legacy of communist visual cultures. Thirty-two chapters written by an international team of scholars from their unique disciplinary perspectives investigate the ways in which communism uses visual aesthetics to articulate its value system and to implement its improvement project. The contributors ask how communist visual culture defines itself as a culture of specific media, specific forms, and specific practices. Supported by archival research and historical analysis, this volume is a call to examine the communist visual culture in a range of media and theoretical dimensions, toward a shared goal of reimagining it beyond the existing ways of thinking about it as a defunct project.