Field Of Cultural Production Research Articles

Культурная инновация в тени КГБ: «Клуб-81» как случай институционализации неофициальных сетевых практик

In 1981, the literary “Club-81” was founded in Leningrad. This was the only public organization of unofficial authors in late-Soviet history that was officially (more or less) allowed – at least, before the “Perestroika” period. As it was known that the “Club” was functioning under the auspices of the KGB, many unofficial writers considered this organization conformist and did not want to join it. However, the work of the “Club” turned out to be culturally extremely fruitful. This paper aims to reconstruct the social-ethical program of the organizers of the “Club” and its situation in the cultural dynamics of late-Soviet society. The leaders of the “Club” could take (at least sometimes) an independent position in negotiations with the KGB, because they proved capable of being skillful negotiators, and because by the end of the 1970s the unofficial cultural movement in the USSR had developed an independent ethical and aesthetic agenda and had turned into an autonomous field of cultural production. Moreover, the paper proposes that the period from 1978 till approximately 1986 should be viewed as a distinct period in Russian cultural history, separate in character from the previous period of the “progressing stagnation” (1967–1978).

The Rise of Cinematic Santri in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: Figure, Field and the Competing Discourse

This article examines the past decade’s cinematic rise among young pious Muslims (santri) affiliated with Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), Indonesia’s largest traditionalist Muslim group. It focuses on the social actors, the fields of cultural production, and the competing discourse central to this rise. Its main argument frames the santri’s turn to cinema as symbolic of various changes and continuities in multiple sectors of NU society’s life. It then situates the fields and discourses of the santri’s cinematic practices in the broader set of power relations, consisting of different, at times conflicting, identities and interests that come with being pious Muslims in public domains. To the extent that the efficacy of filmmaking practices and technologies has enhanced the rivalrous inclination of Islam in the post-Suharto Indonesian public sphere, the article offers an insight into the relationship between image-making practices and the politics of representation in a Southeast Asian Islam context.

Dangai fandoms under crossfire: The making of queer love in a permeable and convergent media ecology

Dangai web series burgeoned in the People's Republic of China in the late 2010s and introduced mainstream audiences to a brand of semihomoerotic media culture. We develop an ecological analysis of dangai production by surveying the four processes of online literature creation, entertainment production, censorship and regulation, and fan participation. We propose two arguments on media convergence/permeability and on queer fandom disruption. First, permeability and convergence characterize the production processes around dangai, with heterogeneous fandoms communicating intersystematically. Diverse, interconnected networks of fans serve as the infrastructure for dangai circulation among different audiences and uphold an interpretative framework prioritizing participation. Second, the broad circulation of dangai in different fields of cultural production opens an apolitical pathway for queer media representation to gain legitimacy. This pathway hinges on the tension between state control and pleasure-driven participation rather than ideological claims of identity politics.

Print as Infection


 My paper will consider how to exploit print as replication within a practice that seeks to disrupt the boundaries of power and normalcy. 
 Print offers a unique conceptual and material matrix of social dispersal. My paper will examine this multiplicity from the perspective of infection, where prints potential as an agent of dispersal is utilised as a code of rupture within the visual representational practices of power and normalcy. This draws upon theories of the cultural screen (Silverman, 1996) where a society’s conception of reality is defined through a shared projection of images and discourses: and the way that definitions of normal and ‘good’ exist in opposition to the ‘Other’ as dirty and foul. I propose that a creative research practice using print ‘as copy’ can disrupt the cultural screen by inserting new representational codes to contaminate and replicate. Such disruptions offer Deleuzian slippages in the field of cultural production itself. 
 
 
 Two bodies of current research will be discussed within this framework, the colonised body and hygiene practices. The colonised body draws on my history of incarceration to use the body of the prisoner in constant replication as a form of moral saturation and inversion. I have found people perceive my past as ‘dirty’, and that it excludes me from participation in parts of the social structure. My creating copies of myself I am able to insert my representation as inmate back into the social sphere of normalcy. The second body of work I will discuss extends on this idea of purity and infection to use dust printing to distribute the remains of the subjective pain of Othering processes over the body. 

On Becoming an Artist Anew: Refugees’ Arrival in the Field of Cultural Production in Austria

Abstract This article focuses on how artists who had to flee Syria between 2011 and 2016 have restarted their artistic careers in Austria. Pries’ concept of arrival and Lamont’s symbolic boundary approach offer an analytical framework for examining the process of becoming an artist anew. By drawing on data collected from a 4-year ethnography in various fields of cultural production in Vienna, this article sheds light on the barriers these artists face in their process of arriving. The findings show two superordinate challenges: ‘having to start from zero’ and ‘struggling to be seen and recognized as artist’. A better understanding of the factors that affect refugees’ artistic practices could be particularly beneficial regarding the role of art as a means of social inclusion. Finally, the question arises as to what extent artistic pathways can serve as a lens for studying the experience of arrival in the context of forced migration.

“We Learn Through Mistakes”: Perspectives of Social Media Creators on Copyright Moderation in the European Union

Artists promoting their cultural production on social media platforms must navigate an algorithmic environment that involves visibility, content distribution, and growing algorithmic copyright moderation. The latter was experienced by EU-based social media creators when Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive was enforced in the EU (Directive [EU] 2019/790, 2019). This research focuses on the understanding and experiences of such creators regarding copyright content moderation of their work on social media platforms. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 artists from EU countries, who were surveyed on digitization and digital access to cultural content. A multimodal framework was employed to analyze the copyright governance of creative practices and products, focusing on the regulative (i.e., the adoption of Article 17), normative (assumptions about legitimate and illegitimate behavior in specific communities), and discursive dimensions, as well as the influence of technological affordance on creative work. The findings contribute to the fields of cultural production and platform governance, as well as having policy implications. The anticipation of punishments from platforms due to copyright-related fears and the inability to use appeal processes directly influenced cultural production. Most interviewees employed self-censorship, avoidance, and content adjustment in their creative work before posting on social media platforms.

The decline of multilingualism in a divided public sphere: The Indian Press and cultural politics in colonial Allahabad (1890–1920)

AbstractThis article draws attention to the provincial city of Allahabad at the turn of the century as the site of a prolific and multilingual print culture. While publishing trends in this city were shaped by the intertwined histories of political culture and cultural politics, specific journals responded to these forces in ways that remain unexamined. Taking the Indian Press—established in 1884 and arguably the city’s most important multilingual publishing house—and four prominent journals that it produced (Saraswatī, Prabāsī, The Modern Review, and Adīb) as case study, I analyse the entanglements between print culture and debates on the contentious issues of languages and identities in a divided public sphere. Based on an extensive analysis of several decades of publishing trends for Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and English, I argue that the continued thriving of many languages, or multilingualism, cannot be read simply as evidence for the proliferation of syncretism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Through a detailed reading of this complex field of cultural production, I show that while multilingual publishing thrived, cultural discourse led by middle-class and elite intellectuals was increasingly becoming homogeneous and insular, pushing a milieu of multilingual readers and publishers towards a narrow nationalist and majoritarian ideal. Thus, upon close analysis, multilingualism as a cultural value in the era of colonial modernity mirrored the fractures within the public sphere.

De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926) by Sergio Adillo Rufo

Reviewed by: De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926) by Sergio Adillo Rufo Susan Paun de García De antiguo a clásico: Calderón y la génesis del campo teatral (1715–1926). By Sergio Adillo Rufo. Kassel: Reichenberger. 2021. viii+176 pp. €48. ISBN 978–3–967280–06–7. One of the brightest stars of the Spanish Golden Age dramatic constellation, Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) is said to have written around 120 plays, a modest number compared to the 600–800 attributed to Lope de Vega (1562–1635). Yet, at the beginning of the eighteenth century Calderón's plays accounted for [End Page 267] 25 per cent of all performances in Spain. In the present, he may be a canonical figure but only a handful of his comedias are regularly staged: La vida es sueño, El alcalde de Zalamea, La dama duende. Contextualizing and charting the changing fortunes of Calderón was the subject of Sergio Adillo Rufo's Ph.D. thesis, which he has mined for the publication of no fewer than three books. In the publication under consideration here, Adillo analyses the presence (or absence) of the dramatist on commercial stages in Spain between 1715 and 1926 in relation to how the theatrical profession was progressively articulating itself around Calderón as a field of cultural production. Adillo surveys the nature and evolution of the Calderonian canon and the factors that influenced its configuration. He applies the theories of Pierre Bourdieu to examine how productions of Calderón's plays evolved from being entertainment to symbols of identity, gradually departing from the commercial repertoire to form part of the elite canon. Considering important factors of influence (prevailing cultural trends and tastes as well as reforms and regulations of governmental and cultural institutions, including performance spaces), he seeks to answer an overarching question: why were certain texts performed at certain times? Structured chronologically, the book is divided into two main sections (each comprising three chapters) that discuss performances of Calderón plays within the commercial, political, cultural, and historical currents of the periods in question. In the first section—covering the years between the end of the Spanish War of Succession (1715) and the bicentenary of Calderón's death (1881)—Adillo traces the prehistory of the field of theatre, using performances of Calderón as a case study. The second section surveys the years between 1881 and 1927, a date that gave name to the Generación del 1927, a group of writers who rose to prominence in the late 1920s, many of whom produced important commemorative editions of the poetry of Luis de Góngora to mark the tercentenary of his death. Chapter 1 focuses on late baroque productions, contrasting what survived from the previous century and what was new in the first half of the eighteenth century, or to be precise, until 1765, when autos sacramentales were prohibited. Chapter 2 reviews the effects on the repertoire of successive (attempted) reforms of theatre from 1765 until the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Chapter 3 Adillo turns to the period from the War of Independence until the liberalization of commercial theatre in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, noting that with the beginnings of a 'teatro nacional' and the incipient field of theatre (seen as art, not an industry subject to the market rules of supply and demand), Calderón was becoming a figure around whom national identity could be articulated. Chapter 4 concentrates exclusively on the celebrations of the bicentenary of Calderón's death and the importance they had in officially consolidating his canonical status. Chapter 5, covering the reign of Alfonso XII and the first years of the regency of María Cristina, reviews how famous actors (Rafael Calvo, Antonio Vico, and María Guerrero) kept 'classic' Spanish theatre on the stage at the end of the century as a cornerstone of the relationship they established with the dominant class that constituted their audience. Adillo observes that Calderón was by this time [End Page 268] an emblem of national identity and sign...

O tempora! O mores! Cultural modernisation and nudity depiction in European cinema

This paper analyses the film industry as a social phenomenon through the lens of revised modernisation theory. Revised modernisation theory implies that economic development leads to value shift which eventually results in the spread of more liberal social attitudes, including the greater acceptance of sexual freedoms, gender equality, and overall tolerance. These changes penetrate all spheres of social life, including the field of cultural production. Here, one can expect that topics and visual tools employed by filmmakers reflect the ongoing changes. This research focuses particularly on the presence of female and male nudity in films. We use the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) as a dataset that reflects changes in modern societies, as we believe that IMDB represents a vast area underexplored by social scientists. Using IMDb and European Value Study data, we juxtapose the presence of general, female, and male nudity in films and the prevalence of choice values in the given year and country. The sample consists of films produced in 40 European countries between 1960 and 2013. Relying on the IMDb data we identify 34 291 films, with approximately a quarter of them depicting nudity. Using multilevel regression analysis, we find that the probability of female nudity is associated with the prevalence of choice values, whereas male nudity is more likely to appear in films related to the topic of homosexuality. Overall, the paper shows that value changes are reflected through the depiction of female bodies, however, the spread of choice values do not lift the restrictions on the presentation of men.

Censorship, Pandemic, and the Field of Power: The Death and Revival of a Chinese War Epic

This case study examines the dramatic change of fortune of the Chinese war epic “The Eight Hundred”. The movie was censored in 2019 during China’s celebration of the country’s 70th anniversary but became the market-saving hero in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Through the lens of Bourdieu’s theory of the field of cultural production, this study argues that the movie’s changing fate is essentially the change of its political, symbolic and economic capitals, under different field conditions. The subfield of commercial films in China is subject to the control of political and economic forces in the field of power, but is also becoming an economic power itself.

The Portrayal of Neoliberal Subjects in Chinese People in Africa

This article examines the television documentary Chinese People in Africa (2016), as part of the official Chinese efforts to enhance China’s image in media and communication, for both the domestic and the international audiences. The determined, hard-working, self-relying individuals engaged in wild life conservation, peace-keeping, non-governmental organization service etc., offer typical neoliberal subject figures that reform-era China up till the 2010s tries to make of Chinese citizens. To the extent that the show’s value orientation fails to register the leftward ideological turn ensued by an actual leadership power transfer well before the show’s production, the documentary is also a good example of ideological tenacity in the field of cultural production.

Digital cultural policy. The story of a slow and reluctant revolution

ABSTRACT This paper describes digital cultural policy as a slow and ambivalent or reluctant revolution in a policy field. In investigates how cultural policy has gradually been affected by digitalization in the field of cultural production. I argue that digital cultural policy has developed in a sedimentary fashion, but that it also has been continuously marked by a certain ambivalence towards the digital revolution. Digital cultural policy is ultimately described as a field of hyperconvergence, where ideas, political tools, technology, and policy areas are entangled to an increasing degree. This challenges the research on and the analysis of digital cultural policy. The paper is primarily based on a close reading of Norwegian cultural policy documents. I have employed all the white papers on cultural policy from the Ministry of Culture between 1973 and 2019 – both the ones that explicitly deal with cultural policy and the ones that deal with a specific field of the arts (performing arts, visual arts, music etc.), as well as annual reports from Arts Council Norway between 1975 and 2018.

The Field of Cultural Production among Religious Community in Higher Education Institution

The utilization practices of houses of worship in Benteng Pancasila Area of Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS) campus can be seen as a field of cultural production by religious communities in an educational environment. This study uses a qualitative method with a case study to discover 1) how houses of worship on UNS Benteng Pancasila are utilized, 2) how agents use capital to shape cultural production, and 3) what social impacts are created. The results indicate that 1) the successfully constructed habitus leads to socio-cultural religious practices with academic nature, 2) agents instill values through narratives using cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and 3) the social impacts include inter-religious group integration, but the interaction within it is still limited. In this case, it was revealed that the social relations formed from the cultural production are still limited on the symbolic level.

A contribution to Paulo Freire’s theory and practice: The ‘Cultural Extension Service/University of Recife’ (1962–64)

This contribution to the special issue is an historical account of Paulo Freire’s pedagogical and administrative praxis before his forced exile in 1964. It relies on interviews collected during a field trip in 1976, a conversation with Paulo Freire in Geneva one year later and on the secondary literature up to date. Being the head of the first Extension Service of a major Brazilian university in the early 1960s gave Freire and his collaborators the space and time to experiment with the today world famous literacy method bearing his name. The concept of ‘Field of Cultural Production’ (Bourdieu) is used to elucidate better Freire and his team’s avant-gardist production within the spaces opened up by Brazil’s popular movements in the early sixties. The contribution shows how the ‘Paulo Freire System’ developed in the praxis of a cultural movement and received its academic consecration in an incremental and eclectic style.

Street art as “street fetish”- a new signifier of social class? The case of Brazil’s “Beverley Hills”

ABSTRACT This study explores street art's changing symbolic value and emplacement, the latter of which is reaching beyond the city limits and so-called 'public' space, where commissioned practices are being carried out on individuals' private homes and elite households in non-urban spaces. In this paper I focus on the process of “street fetish”, which has resulted from street art's contemporary institutionalization and shaped by complex socio-cultural, political, and economic process including de-subculturalization and artification. These microprocesses are intertwined with the convergence of authenticity and commercialization, and inseparable from practical, symbolic, organizational, discursive, and semiotic shifts taking place within the (street) art world concerning its market value, which are shaped by and simultaneously shape the field of cultural production and highly influenced by global capitalism. My investigation focuses on the work of one Brazilian street artist, RDO SAMP and his commissioned street art on a private home in the beach town resort of Jurerê International (Florianópolis, Santa Catarina), one of the most affluent towns in the country, which was designed by the world renowned, Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer and a place, where class distinctions center on enculturated symbolic and material economies.

Applying the Theory of Cultural Production: Authorship in the Literary Communities of Yogyakarta, Indonesia

Since the fall of the New Order in 1998, which began an era of political reform in which freedom of speech and association were guaranteed, literary communities have mushroomed in Indonesia; Yogyakarta is no exception. This city, through its literary communities, has played an important role in the development of Indonesian literature. Employing a Bourdieuan perspective, in which authors are understood as emerging within the field of cultural production, this paper explores the phenomenon of authorship in the literary communities of Yogyakarta. It finds that the field of cultural production in Yogyakarta has been influenced by the existence of literary communities, including the rise of new writers within said communities.

Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland by Ewa Stańczyk

Reviewed by: Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland by Ewa Stańczyk M. Jutkiewicz Stańczyk, Ewa. Comics and Nation: Power, Pop Culture, and Political Transformation in Poland. Studies in Comics and Cartoons. Ohio State University Press, Columbus, OH, 2022. xii + 211 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $149.95; $34.95. Throughout their history, comics in Poland have been perceived as a niche and marginal art form, despite the influence the medium has had in other countries. This is why most research has focused on demonstrating that there is such a thing as Polish comics, and has been an important part of Polish culture with a history of its own. This perspective, and the overall assumption that the history of art and popular culture in Eastern European countries is unique because of historical determinants, means that historians and scholars of comics in Poland tend to portray Polish graphic storytelling as an autonomous art form, isolated from the global field of cultural production (e.g. A. Rusek, Komiks polski. Od Łapigrosza do Funky’ego Kovala. Historia komiksu polskiego do roku 1989, Warsaw, 2021). According to these analyses, there have been only two periods when Poles had access to comics as part of global popular culture — during the interwar years and after the political transformation of 1989 — leaving the comic art of the Polish People’s Republic (1945–89) as something distinct from global trends. This myth has been revised and deconstructed in Ewa Stańczyk’s book. Stańczyk’s main assumption is that Poland has never been fully isolated, and that global trends were always evident in Polish culture. According to Stańczyk, the comic medium was intertwined with modernism and the global culture that emerged during the nineteenth century. The history of comics in Poland, therefore, has to be seen as a complex narrative, a product of both global and national cultural trends, even as representative of the complexity of Polish cultural history itself (pp. 3–12). This perspective is unique in the scholarship, and is best exemplified by the section of the book that considers Polish critics’ denigration of comic art during the 1950s, which paralleled the [End Page 541] critical scepticism expressed in the United States at the same time. Stańczyk shows how Polish academics, journalists and critics used the same arguments made by their Western counterparts, even though their reasoning was based on Communist discourse and propaganda. This paradox exemplifies the way in which Stańczyk deconstructs an assumption that is dominant in the field, namely the belief that this critical position was a result of socialist states perceiving the medium as a conduit of Western decadence. Stańczyk does not forget about local culture and politics, but sets them in a bigger, global context, forcing scholars to reinterpret them as an intertwined web of relations. The history of comics in Poland, even though more peripheral than in other parts of the world, is very extensive. Stańczyk has chosen her examples carefully, but there are a few omissions that would have strengthened her narrative. There is no mention, for example, of the emergence of fan culture during the 1980s. Stańczyk does mention some aspects of the history of fandom in Poland, particularly the recent popularity of manga, but its history extends further back to the period of social unrest prior to the collapse of the Polish People’s Republic, when it was modelled after Western fan communities, and was perceived as subversive towards the state (see A. Nowakowski, Fanzin SF. Artyści – Wydawcy – Fandom, Poznań, 2017). Polish science fiction and comics fandom was political, as reflected in the comics published during this period, which were satirical and distrustful towards the state and political power in general (see J. Szyłak and J. Konefał, ‘The Influence of Local and National Press on the Comic Publishing Industry in the Polish People’s Republic between 1956 and 1989’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, February 2022 <https://doi.org/10.1080/21504857.2022.2032231>). Stańczyk gives little attention or else completely omits examples of graphic narratives that were critical of the state, especially after 1989. There is some mention...

Cultural Spaces as Political Spaces: The Musical Field of the German Democratic Republic

This article examines the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), departing from the crucial role the State played there in organizing, and controlling all fields of cultural production. Much of the literature on the subject either depicts the interaction between the State and artists as unidirectional or represents their relationship as highly conflictual due to contrasting understandings of culture and its functions. In both cases, this tendency to dichotomize makes it hard to explain, for instance, how music genres that had arisen in Western countries could flourish in the GDR despite the official understanding of ‘socialist music’ propagated by the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Conversely, by adopting a field perspective, this article aims to highlight how musicians, the State, and Party representatives competed to shape the symbolic space of the GDR musical field. Hence, instead of understanding Party and State decisions as merely applications of ideological principles, a field perspective enables us to consider them as resulting from strategies, depending on both the objective position occupied in the musical field and its spatial-material dimension, and as aimed at maintaining their own power within it. The political elite succeeded, then, in actualizing its strategy of legitimating emerging music genres which were potentially disrupting until it was able to provide musicians with physical cultural spaces for developing their careers and, at the same time, expressing criticisms. On the other hand, from the 1950s, localized music scenes were created which proposed an alternative understanding of music to the official one without, however, refusing the core principles which structured the GDR musical field. After the end of the 1970s, though, new music scenes were formed which positioned themselves outside the institutionalized music spaces and places, refusing in this way the rules of the GDR musical field and questioning its very existence.

The Façade, the Face, and the Sympathies: Opening the Black Box of Symbolic Capital as a Source of Philanthropic Attractiveness

Although most studies on philanthropy have focused on corporate benefactors, limited attention has been given to beneficiaries and their characteristics. The literature thus falls short in explaining how the variance in the perceived value of those characteristics can condition the philanthropic attractiveness of recipients for donors. Drawing from Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital and qualitative insights drawn from our empirical context of philanthropy in the field of cultural production in the Russian Federation, we argue that the attractiveness of cultural organizations for potential corporate benefactors depends on a range of determinants, which we classify under the broad umbrellas of respectability and reputability. By using political orientation as a moderator, we show that, although respectability is an indiscriminately attractive part of symbolic capital, reputability, associated with artistic celebrity and renown, can become a deterrent to potential donors when it augments the risk of jeopardizing their relationship with the government. We also demonstrate that a board of trustees, which signals openness to stakeholder involvement, diminishes the returns of reputability for potential donors. We test our hypotheses using original and representative longitudinal data on 449 Russian theaters (2004–2011). Taking an indirect recursive approach to estimate models with high-dimensional fixed effects, we find strong support for our hypotheses across a variety of econometric specifications. Our research offers a unique focus on the beneficiary side of the beneficiary-benefactor relationship, which has both theoretical and practical implications for the literatures on corporate philanthropy, and cultural industries. Supplemental Material: The online appendices are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2022.1603 .

New Russian Modernist Studies

New Russian Modernist Studies Edward Waysband Leonid Livak, In Search of Russian Modernism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. ix + 375 pp. Irina Shevelenko, ed. Reframing Russian Modernism. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2018. xii + 259 pp. Leonid Livak’s and Irina Shevelenko’s books reflect a growing interest in, and need for, new theoretical reassessments of Russian modernism and its post-Soviet theorizations made possible by the fall of the Soviet Union. Whereas Anglo-American studies of modernism are an intellectual growth industry, a collective hothouse of innovative approaches and ideas, research on the issue is still marginalized in Russian studies in the West and in international modernist studies.1 Russian modernist topics feature but rarely in the programs of annual conferences of The Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) or of The Modernist Studies Association (MSA) conferences. Leonid Livak, in particular, reflects on circumstances that have led to the conceptual “belatedness” of studies of Russian modernism and avowedly aims to synchronize their theoretical basis with that of their more up-to-date Western counterparts. If anti-modernist Soviet ideology created a special form of cultural disruption, late- and post-Soviet efforts to reclaim the modernist “lost time,” along with their unquestionable empirical accomplishments, have often uncritically espoused the value system and fixed canon self-servingly codified by specific literary figures. Aiming to de-ideologize the field, Livak’s book includes a revision of a range of entrenched assumptions of the “old” Western studies of modernism, associated with “the New Criticism and the Marxist tradition running from Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt school to Fredric Jameson” (4). Livak draws inspiration for this two-fold revisionist task from “new modernist studies” which emerged in Anglo-American literary scholarship in the 1990s and are embodied in its flagship journal, Modernism/modernity. He accepts the major theoretical assumption on modernism as a range of ambivalent responses to the challenges of modernity and reconsiders the concept epistemologically. Drawing on Clifford Geertz’s understanding of culture as a mechanism for organizing information and Virgil Nemoianu’s studies of Romanticism, Livak proposes [End Page 357] to consider “modernism”2 not as a fixed number of canonical works but as “culture” or a “cultural process,” i. e. “an evolving system of values, ideas, practices, and conventions . . . suffusing human experience with meaning” (7). This cultural synthesizing approach results in major reconsiderations of Russian modernism’s taxonomy, chronology, and geography, as well as of their interrelationships. No less important is Livak’s engagement with Pierre Bourdieu’s work in the field of cultural production, which yields important insights in regard to the socio-economic evolvement of Russian modernism. Taking as his main working metaphor the notion of cartography, Livak exposes distortions and blind spots in previous “maps” of cultural communities of modernity and proposes more accurate delineations. The titles of the book chapters reflect this cartographical metaphorics. The first three chapters propose a careful rethinking of the entrenched methodological premises (or distorted “maps”) concerning Russian and, by extension, international modernism. The fourth and fifth chapters propose two new “maps” of Russian modernism, demonstrating the possibilities of more inclusive research, involving extra-aesthetic phenomena, primarily social and economic. In chapter 1, “The Toponymical Labyrinth of Russian Modernist Culture,” Livak deliberately downplays various aesthetic lines of demarcation among multiple segments of modernist culture, viewing them as expressing the intrinsic modernist predilection for collective/ group self-definitions rather than as signifiers of any essential significance. Livak questions the universalization of general terms and definitions that were used at the turn of the century through the end of the 1920s by actors and contemporary observers of various artistic enterprises to define the evolving cultural and literary processes and self-organization. While this “intense onomastic activity” (40) was then substantialized by scholars, Livak stresses its functional and situational character in constant literary feuds and fights for artistic self-legitimization. Undermining the essentialist character of such concepts as Symbolism, Decadence, novoe iskusstvo (new art), Acmeism, Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, LEF, RAPP, and others, Livak, however, considers “modernism” as “the least bad option for a generic umbrella term denoting, in shorthand, a Russian cultural formation that existed from the turn of...