Remains of Socialism in Postsocialist Hungary. Maya Nadkarni in conversation with Ferenc Laczó

PoSoCoMeS online seminar series: session #10

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/98470815842?pwd=VGE0cmpab3lmeHM4Uy9jaS9wYXNLZz09

Meeting ID: 984 7081 5842

Passcode: ykwL3f

In the monthly online PoSoCoMeS seminar, historian Ferenc Laczó and anthropologist Maya Nadkarni will discuss Nadkarni’s recent book Remains of Socialism: Memory and the Futures of the Past in Postsocialist Hungary (Cornell University Press, 2020). In conversation between the discussant, the author and the audience, we will reflect on the changing fortunes of the socialist past in Hungary after 1989.

Maya Nadkarni’s book introduces the concept of “remains”—both physical objects and cultural remainders—to analyze all that Hungarians sought to leave behind after the end of state socialism. She argues that the such remains were far more than simply the leftovers of an unwanted past. Instead, the struggles to define remains of socialism and settle their fates would represent attempts to determine the future—and to mourn futures that never materialized. Her analysis spans more than two decades of postsocialist transformation, from the optimism of the early years of transition to the later right-wing turn toward illiberal democracy. She looks at the Statue Park Museum, the marketing of socialist nostalgia, new memorial museums, the case of the communist regime’s informers, and the contentious memory of the 1956 revolution. Remains of Socialism recently received an Honorable Mention for the Heldt Prize for Best Book by a Woman-Identifying Scholar in Any Area of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies (2021).

Maya Nadkarni is Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania (USA). She has held fellowships at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, the Aleksanteri Institute in Helsinki, Finland, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Budapest, Hungary, and her research has been funded by the Fulbright IIE, National Science Foundation, Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies, among others. In addition to her book, she has written numerous articles on memory, politics, and popular culture after the end of state socialism. She is currently working on a project, “The Postsocialist Life of State Socialism’s Secrets,” that investigates contemporary debates about Hungary’s communist state security archives.

Ferenc Laczó is Assistant Professor in European history at Maastricht University. His main fields of interest are political and intellectual history; European history in the twentieth century with a special focus on Central and Eastern Europe; Jewish history and the history of the Holocaust; and questions of history and memory. He authored three books, including Hungarian Jews in the Age of Genocide. An Intellectual History, 1929-48 (Leiden: Brill, 2016). In 2020, together with Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič, Laczó edited a volume on the fate of ideals of 1989 since the implosion of the communist re­gimes in Europe, The Legacy of Division: East and West after 1989 (Central European University Press, 2020).