"Remains of Socialism: Memory and Anxieties of the National in Postsocialist Hungary" by Maya Nadkarni

Maya Nadkarni

Deposited 2009

Abstract
My dissertation uses the discourse of remains to thematize the problem of Hungarian national identity in relation to its socialist past. "Remains of socialism" refer to those cultural objects and discursive sites -- whether physical relics, everyday practices and dispositions, or historical symbols, figures, narratives, and mythologies -- that were initially disavowed as mere remnants of an era inauthentic to both Hungary's national tradition and its newly capitalist aspirations. While such rejection of the recent past might appear to be the very condition of remaking Hungary as a democratic national subject ready for entrance into the new global order, I argue against considering these "remains" to be the mere leftovers of Hungary's political transition. Instead, the production of anachronism was an active process that Hungarians use to mediate between the socialist past and the postsocialist present, history and everyday, Soviet inheritance and Western future -- and in so doing, to construct the public culture of postsocialism through which these remains emerged as obtrusive visibilities. Rather than vanish into the dustbin of history, these new cultural forms thus became the very ground upon which Hungarians struggled to remake themselves as postsocialist subjects. Indeed, disenchantment with the divisive politics of national memory and the failed promises of Western consumer culture soon enabled these remains to return -- whether as the platform for new cultural or political identities, the source of new economies of affect, or the very proof of present-day democracy. Such recuperation of socialist remains challenged global regimes of cultural value, as well as local attempts to distance the socialist past in order to buttress competing claims to political legitimacy. Thus, while many scholars have focused upon national history as a crucial site through which cultures in transition struggle to articulate the terms of national identity and belonging, what distinguishes my work is its focus upon the productivity of putative inauthenticities: how the cultural detritus of Hungary's socialist era enabled new visions of a national subject distinct from both the Soviet past and the Western present.