Awards

• Winner of Honorable Mention, 2023 Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.
• Winner of Winner, Oskar Halecki Polish History Award, Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America Honorable Mention, 2023 Heldt Prize of the Association for Women in Slavic Studies.

Overview

"The Global Sixties are well known as a period of non-conformist lifestyles, experimentation with consumer products and technology, counterculture, and leftist politics. While the period has been well studied in the West and increasingly researched for the Global South, young people in the ""Second World"" too were active participants in these movements. The Iron Curtain was hardly a barrier against outside influences, and young people from students and hippies to mainstream youth in miniskirts and blue jeans saw themselves as part of the global community of like-minded people as well as citizens of Eastern Bloc countries. Drawing on Polish youth magazines, rural people's diaries, sex education manuals, and personal testimonies, Malgorzata Fidelis follows jazz lovers, university students, hippies, and young rural rebels. Fidelis colorfully narrates their everyday engagement with a dynamically changing world, from popular media and consumption to counterculture and protest movements. She delineates their anti-authoritarian solidarities and competing visions of transnationalism, with the West as well as the ruling communist regime. Even as youth demonstrations were violently suppressed, Fidelis shows, youth culture was not. By the early 1970s, the state incorporated elements of Sixties culture into their official vision of socialist modernity.From the perspective of youth, Malgorzata Fidelis argues, the post-1989 transition in Poland from communism to liberal democracy, often dubbed as ""the return to Europe,"" was less of a breakthrough and more of a continuation of trends in which they participated. Indeed, they had already created new modes of self-expression and cultural spaces in which ideas of alternative social and political organization became imaginable."

Full Product Details

9780197643402

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Reviews

All too often, the countries of the former Soviet bloc are depicted as isolated lands of totalitarian oppression, locked away until they could rejoin the flow of global history after 1989. As Malgorzata Fidelis persuasively argues, nothing could be further from the truth. This fascinating study of youth culture in the 1960s places Poland in a truly global context, showing that the tumultuous events of that decade were more complicated and multifaceted than we ever imagined. This book is mandatory reading for anyone interested in the cultural or social history of the Cold War era, East or West. * Brian Porter-Szucs, author of Poland in the Modern World: Beyond Martyrdom * In this exciting and groundbreaking study, Malgorzata Fidelis breaches the analytic Iron Curtain separating sixties youth revolts in East and West, writing the Polish Sixties into the global history of which they were a part. Impressive in breadth and detail, this indispensable book belongs on every global 1960s reading list. * Timothy Scott Brown, Northeastern University * Imagining the World represents a long overdue and much needed endeavor to write Eastern Europe into the history of the global 1960s. Malgorzata Fidelis does so with verve, conviction, and scholarly rigor, taking the reader across the entirety of Poland's social landscape. We learn about urban bohemians as well as rural rebels. We delve into the lofty dreams and unabashed internationalism of Poland's hippie community. And we witness how authorities attempt to domesticate the wild and unregulated transnationalism of the era by forcing it into the new framework of consumer socialism. By the time the journey ends in the mid-1970s, it has become more than evident that global counterculture did not stop at the Iron Curtain. Indeed, the implication is that if the world had paid more attention to youth culture(s), the collapse of socialism in Europe should not have come as such a surprise. * Juliane Furst, author of Flowers Through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland *

Author Information

Malgorzata Fidelis is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is the author of Women, Communism, and Industrialization in Postwar Poland.

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