Table of contents:

Joes Segal: ‘Introduction. Socialist Culture and Modernity’.

Susan E. Reid:
‘Makeshift Modernity. DIY, Craft and the Virtuous Homemaker in New Soviet Housing of the 1960s’.
Reid draws on oral history and material culture to apply the concept of modernity to Soviet housing projects, showing how the inhabitants actively shaped their environments in accordance with their own views, translating the ideological rhetoric of socialist modernity into personal vernacular. Reid argues that these appropriations cannot be understood in terms of modernity or anti-modernity, but that they were fundamental signs of agency.

Vladimir Kulic:
‘New Belgrade and Socialist Yugoslavia’s Three Globalizations’.
Kulic analyses how the key symbolic spaces of New Belgrade were shaped by three globalisation projects and investigates how they participated in the shaping of socialist Yugoslavia’s global imaginaries.

Christina Schwenkel:
‘Traveling Architecture. East German Urban Designs in Vietnam’.
Schwenkel discusses an architectural project in Vinh City, Vietnam, where East German architects and urban planners took up the reconstruction process after the American air strikes between 1964 and 1973, showing that this is not a simple case of socialist modern architecture being imposed on a socialist Third World Country.

April Eisman:
‘From Economic Equality to ‘Mommy Politics’. Women Artists and the Challenges of Gender in East German Painting’.
Eisman looks at the impact of East Germany’s gender policies on women painters across four decades. She argues that these policies, despite not having achieved the stated goal of true equality, had a positive impact on women artists, and especially painters.

The themed issue on Chinese Modernity (vol. 2, no. 3), guest edited by Gotelind Müller-Saini, sheds light on the historiography of modernity in China. The articles discuss three different periods and three different experiences: Republican China, Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).

Table of contents:

Gotelind Müller-Saini:
‘Introduction. History, Culture and Modernity in China’

Tze-ki Hon:
‘The Chinese Path to Modernisation. Discussions of “Culture” and “Morality” in Republican China’.
Tze-ki Hon examines the notion of ‘alternative modernity’ that was prominent during Republican China. He discusses the two main areas of contention between the May Fourth intellectuals and their critics: scientism and populism. By comparing the writings of Liang Shuming (1893-1988), Wu Mei (1894-1978), Liu Yizheng (1880-1956), and Chen Yinke (1890-1969), he focuses on their use of ‘culture’ (wenhua) and ‘morality’ (daode) to chart a Chinese path to modernisation.

Lung-chih Chang:
‘Islands of Memory. Postcolonial Historiography and Public Discourse in Contemporary Taiwan’.
Lung-chih Chang discusses the ‘memory boom’ in post-martial law Taiwan and examines its implications in our understanding of history, culture, and modernity in their East Asian context. He discusses the emergence of new academic and public discourses and the features of Taiwan’s postcolonial historiography in terms of history and memory.

Stefan R. Landsberger:
‘Dreaming the Chinese Dream. How the People’s Republic of China Moved from Revolutionary Goals to Global Ambitions’.
Landsberger investigates the radical turn in the People's Republic of China from revolution to economic development. How did this path to modernisation affect China’s political, social and artistic cultures? Is China’s present dream structurally different from the one cherished in 1949?

Thoralf Klein:
‘How Modern was Chinese Modernity? Exploring Tensions of a Contested Master Narrative’.
Klein looks at the recent history of China, arguing that although there exists a line between what is modern and what is not (between modernity and its Others), this often appears fuzzy when we look at concrete historical manifestations. The essay shows that it is essential to incorporate the paradoxes inherent in the modern condition into an analytical framework.