Indiana University Press, 2013
Winner, William A. Douglass Book Prize, for 2014. The Society for the Anthropology of Europe.
Winner, Hungarian Studies Association Book Prize for 2013 & 2014
Honorable Mention, 2014 Davis Center Book Prize in Political and Social Studies, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Honorable Mention, 2016, Laura Shannon Prize, Best Book in European Studies, Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame (site)
“After 1989, we often heard that consumption failures caused communism’s collapse; Fehérváry’s brilliant analysis explains why this is both right and wrong. Instead of the stereotypical socialism of long queues and shoddy goods, she presents a Hungarian Communist Party that actively created demanding consumers, who insisted that it meet its own standards. This is a major reinterpretation of Soviet-style socialism and an innovative model for analyzing consumption.”
–Katherine Verdery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York
“Fehervary’s book is an absorbing account of everyday life and embodied aesthetics in socialist and post-socialist Eastern Europe. In it we learn how collections of things and people, structured in relation to each other by deeply-rooted historical forms of class consciousness, served the self-fashioning aims of Hungarians from 1950 to the late 1990s. This cultural history of style and consumption reveals much that is occluded in other studies of socialism and post-socialism: bodies, materialities, spaces, habitual orientations, commodity desires, lived historical dispositions, and diverse, sometimes clashing temporalities. The book shows that modernism can be historicized across Cold War divides, as a global movement; as such it expands the reach of this important category while insisting on the many local specificities that appeared under a modernist banner. Politics in Color and Concrete explains why the everyday is important, and shows why domestic aesthetics embody a crucially significant politics.”
–Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago
Material culture in Eastern Europe under state socialism is often remembered as uniformly gray, shabby, and monotonous—the worst of postwar modernist architecture and design. Politics in Color and Concrete revisits this history by exploring architecture and domestic space in Hungary from the 1950s through the 2000s. Fehérváry reconstructs the multi-textured and politicized aesthetics of daily life through the objects, spaces, and colors that made up this lived environment. She shows that contemporary standards of living and ideas about normalcy have roots in late socialist consumer culture and are not merely products of postsocialist transitions or neoliberal economic reforms. This engaging study decenters conventional perspectives on consumer capitalism, home ownership, and citizenship in the new Europe.
Recent photographs of renovated Socialist Modern architecture as well as the latest in (upscaled) Organicism. Several photos are updates of buildings/houses in the book that were taken in the mid to late 1990s. See especially the yellow house from Chapter 7 and the high rise apartments (now renovated) on the book cover.
