Socialist Television Research Articles

Memes, Satire, and the Legacy of TV Socialism

This article examines the phenomenon of internet memes not just as a pervasive form of digital communication with implications for political culture, but as a new satirical medium. Through the lens of socialist television satire, this article details how memes are an evolution of the venerable history of political satire that abridge past and future traditions of political humour as subversive criticism. This analysis is conducted primarily through a case study of Hungary, although similar memes in other contexts are cited to demonstrate the externalizability of these conclusions.

Fragments of the Body: Woman in Socialist Screen Advertising

The advertising of state socialism is often referred to as a paradox or oxymoron, yet it has produced images that shaped the consumer imagination and consumer values of socialist society. One of the critical topics in Czechoslovak socialist television advertising discourse was using an actor or a model. The socialist values of leveled consumption refused to promote consumption for property and create social distinctions through advertising and consumption. These beliefs fundamentally shaped the image of the body in socialist advertising. In this text, therefore, I discuss how the morality of socialist advertising, together with the evolving gender discourse, supported the methods of hiding, masking, or fragmenting the female body in socialist screen advertising. Based on the analysis of a vast corpus of advertisements, I follow the development of this trend from the 1960s to the 1980s, compare screen advertising with other types of advertising media, and argue that the reason for restraint in the explicit representation of the female body was, among other things, the specific hierarchy of the media in the geography of the consumer imagination of socialist Czechoslovakia.

New Media, Neo-Media: The Brief Life of Socialist Television in Ghana

Television in Ghana was born at a radical time when Africans across the continent were boldly inventing systems of governance resistant to imperialism and racial inequality. Alongside the formation of the new state, the new medium was designed to help realize visions of Pan-Africanism and African socialism promoted by Kwame Nkrumah. With the February 24, 1966, coup d’état seven months after its first broadcast, Ghanaian socialist television ended. Based on archival research and interviews with Ghanaian television pioneers, in this essay I argue that this Afrofuturist segment of Ghana's media past provides a counternarrative to new media discourse from the colonial era that positioned Africa as the passive receiver of television. I show how transnational influences were actively adapted to theorize the new medium in opposition to racial capitalism and propose that media archaeologies attuned to Afrofuturism may reorient the field toward social and political justice in the present.

TELEVISION CULTURES OF SOCIALIST YUGOSLAVIA

The aim of the paper is to compare television cultures of Yugoslav republics during socialism. The paper is drawing on the recent comparative studies of socialist television in South and East Europe (Perško et al. 2021; Mihelj and Huxtable 2018; Imre 2016). Following the categories developed by Mihelj and Huxtable (2018) and Imre (2016), Yugoslav television cultures are here analysed in terms of a) generic composition and share of program modes, b) the level of transnationalism, c) the level of openness of television to social critique (semi-publicness), c) focus of television on private life (privatization), d) the gendering patterns, e) temporal orientation, f) characteristics of factual, humorous and history genres. Analysis is based on the data collected for the recently published book by Peruško, Vozab and Čuvalo (2021) and original content analysis of the JRT 79 Television Programme booklet, with a short description and basic info about the program that was shared within the JRT network. The result discerns differences between republic televisions (especially TV Ljubljana, TV Zagreb and TV Novi Sad) in program development toward neo-television, such as the differences in transnational orientation, temporal orientation, gendering patterns.

From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television

From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television

Conjuring the Bad Object in New Writing on Socialist Television

Conjuring the Bad Object in New Writing on Socialist Television

Book Review: From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television by Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable

Book Review: From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television by Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable

Socialist Television Drama, Newspaper Critics and the Battle of Ideas During the Crisis of Britain's Post-War Settlement.

Due to the difficult methodological issues it presents, political historians are wary of using television - the most important mass medium of the later twentieth century - as a means of exploring vernacular political thinking. Attempting to show how television audiences were encouraged to think politically, the article outlines a method generated through an engagement with the work of disciplines beyond history, to help political historians more systematically assess the medium's popular impact. The article takes as its case study Britain during the 1970s, one of the most ideologically contested periods in the country's history. It analyses how television critics employed by the Daily Mirror and Daily Express encouraged their millions of readers to respond to the dramas of socialist playwrights Jim Allen and Trevor Griffiths, thereby giving historians an insight into the shape of those conversations spawned by their work, such private dialogues being the place where the full political meaning of television was ultimately created.

The exceptionalism of Romanian socialist television and its implications

During recent years, the study of European televisions has rediscovered socialist television, and we have witnessed a rapid rise in scholarly interest in a new field of research: socialist television studies. On the whole, this recent body of literaturę presents two main new insights as compared to previous studies in the field of the history of Western television: on the one hand, it shows that European television during the Cold War was less heterogeneous than one may imagine when considering the political, economic and ideological split created by the Iron Curtain; on the other hand, it turns to and capitalizes on archives, mostly video, which have been inaccessible to the public. The interactions between Western and socialist mass culture are highlighted mainly with respect to the most popular TV programs: fiction and entertainment.
 The authors give us an extraordinary landscape of the Romanian socialist television. Unique in the Eastern part of Europe is the period of the early 1990s. Upon the fall of the communist regime, after almost 15 years of freezing, TVR found itself unable to move forward.

A Forgotten Spirit of Commercial Television? Co-Productions Between Finnish Commercial Television Company Mainos-Tv and Socialist Television

Finnish commercial television company Mainos-TV co-produced a string of documentary and entertainment programmes with television broadcasters in the USSR, Czechoslovakia, the GDR, Hungary and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. This article asks what motivated Mainos-TV, a commercial television broadcaster in a non-socialist country, to collaborate with socialist television? Based on an analysis of published and archival sources (e.g. industry documents, memoirs, television programmes and press coverage), the article argues that Mainos-TV engaged with socialist television to secure its position at a time when the operation of commercial television was still quite restricted. Finnish foreign policy placed great importance on maintaining good relations with the neighbouring USSR. In this context, the leadership of Mainos-TV viewed its collaboration with socialist broadcasters as a way to strengthen the company’s position. International entertainment programmes and co-produced documentaries on social and cultural topics offered Mainos-TV ‘quality’ programming that differed from the stereotypical image of commercial television. Collaboration with Eastern European partners was not purely strategic, however, as it also brought influences from socialist television culture to Mainos-TV’s offerings. Mainos-TV’s co-productions with its socialist partners highlight the largely forgotten complexity of the history of European commercial television.

What Was Socialist Television and What Came Next?

What Was Socialist Television and What Came Next?

Refleksije socijalističke televizije - studija od medijskih sistema do medijskih kultura

In reference to the ever actual topic of the socialist television, its influence and the programs it has created, using the form of research dialogue, this paper aims to give a review of the recently published book by Sabina Mihelj and Simon Huxtable - From Media Systems to Media Cultures, (2018). Focusing on the beginnings of television as a new media, which developed in parallel with the Cold War tensions, as well as its impact at the time of the communist rule and immediately after the communist rule in the countries of the Eastern Block, this comparative media study covers the interaction of the geopolitical relations in this part of the world on the one hand, and on the other hand, offers a modernized view of the same media that has shaped the modernity of everyday civil life and the socialist culture and art. The book allows for re-contextualization of the opinions about the media and culture of the Cold War era (those that were rooted and most frequently adopted and repeated), and also offers a revision against the social, political and media framework that existed in the countries behind the Iron Curtain, both in the second half of the 20th century and in this particular moment.

“Images from beyond the Eastern Border”: Socialist Television in Finland, 1963 to 1988

Recent research has criticized a tradition of seeing socialist media cultures as strictly separated from the West. While scholars have analyzed how socialist television institutions reacted to influences from Western media, there is little research on how socialist television culture traveled outside the socialist bloc. This article analyses the ways in which state socialist television culture appeared in Finland on the basis of the main Finnish TV guide magazine Katso in 1963, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1983, and 1988. The article argues that socialist television was a significant influence in the Finnish television environment. Finnish audiences were introduced to socialist television cultures through means such as cross-border access to Soviet broadcasts and journalistic depictions. Both public service and commercial television companies imported Eastern European programs of various genres. Thus, the Finnish case shows that a strict East/West binary is not helpful for understanding European television history.

Festive television in the socialist world: From media events to media holidays

Abstract This article focuses on the ways in which socialist television sought to create a sense of extraordinary temporality out of the ordinary through its coverage of historical commemorations, national days, and secular and religious festivities. To do so, it develops the concept of ‘media holidays’, which draws on Dayan and Katz’s seminal notion of media events, and the work of other scholars of media ritual, to show the ways in which socialist television created extraordinary temporalities through scheduling. Drawing on schedule analysis and archival documents, the article compares the cases of television in East Germany, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. It examines a number of different kinds of media holiday on socialist television, and shows how different kinds of holidays and commemoration were marked with different kinds of programming in which entertainment played an important role.

The challenge of flow: state socialist television between revolutionary time and everyday time

This article contributes to the growing literature on diverse television cultures globally and historically by examining selected aspects of television cultures in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Being part of a political, economic and cultural system that self-consciously set out to develop an alternative form of modern society, state socialist television offers a particularly apposite case study of alternative forms of modern television. State socialist television was inevitably drawn into the Cold War contest between two rival visions of modernity and modern life: one premised on liberal democracy and the market economy, the other on communist rule and the planned economy. As a result, its formats, content and uses were different from those familiar from western television histories. The analysis, based on 70 life-story interviews, schedule analysis and archival sources, focuses on the temporal structures of television and on the challenges posed by television’s ability to offer an instantaneous connection to the unfolding present. We argue that the nature of television temporality had ambiguous consequences for the communist project, allowing citizens of state socialist countries to disconnect from communist ideals, while synchronising their daily life with the ongoing march towards the radiant communist future.

A study in the history of meaning-making: Watching socialist television serials in the former Czechoslovakia

The aim of this article is to map out and analyse how the viewers of the communist-governed Czechoslovak television understood the propagandist television serials during the so-called normalization, the last two decades of communist party rule after the Prague Spring. It strives to show peculiarities of the research on television viewers’ capabilities to remember the meanings and details of hermeneutic agency which took place in the past. The article argues that – in contrast to the mainstream historiography which claims full depoliticization of Czechoslovak people as a consequence of post-Prague Spring disillusionment – the uses of popular culture provided niches in which the political could be experienced. The role of reproductive memory in remembering the viewers’ experience buried under the grand socio-political switchover is also illuminated and used to coin the concept of ‘memory over dislocation’.

East and West on the Finnish Screen

Research on Finnish television history has so far emphasized Western influences. However, the Finnish television environment was also in many ways shaped by contacts with socialist television cultures. This article analyses the first volume (1960) of the television magazine Katso to trace the various transnational relations which shaped the early Finnish television environment and to discuss the cultural meanings of socialist television in this environment. Nearly every issue of Katso in 1960 discusses television in a transnational context. Transnational themes fall into four categories: (1) learning about television in other countries; (2) the Eurovision and Nordvision networks; (3) watching television across national borders (Swedish and Tallinn television but also television across surprising distances); and (4) visions of world television. Katso’s understanding of television emphasises the literal meaning of television, to see far. The magazine sets no clear limits to what television could do in terms of overcoming physical distance and ideological borders. The magazine avoids overt politics in discussing television from both the West and the East and represents Tallinn television as a potential source of popular television for Finnish audiences.

Understanding Socialist Television

This article develops a number of conceptual and methodological proposals aimed at furthering a firmer agenda for the field of socialist television studies. It opens by addressing the issue of relevance of the field, identifying three critical contributions the study of socialist television can make to media, communication and cultural studies. It then puts forward a number of proposals tied to three key issues: strategies of overcoming the Cold War framework that dominates much of existing literature; the importance of a multilayered analysis of socialist television that considers its cultural, political as well as economic aspects; and the ways in which we can challenge the prevalence of methodological nationalism in the field.

Folklore Music on Romanian TV. From State Socialist Television to Private Channels

Music genres rooted in folklore have often been interpreted as ideological manoeuvres to forge a sense of national identity (Gordy, Mihailescu, Baker, Cash). This article explores formalized folklore performances of muzica populara as forms ‘media rituals’ (Couldry), and focuses on the role that television has played in establishing the genre as we know it today. It analyses the link between muzica populara as rooted in mass participation activities during communism, and ‘media rituals’ as framed on television (Couldry), indiscriminately and democratically involving the entire population that it addresses (and is available beyond that).

Postcolonial Media Studies in Postsocialist Europe

I argue that postcolonial discourses are essential to unearthing and revising the complicated dynamic of codependence between Western and Eastern European nationalisms, which is haunted by internalized and rarely acknowledged traces of imperialism on both sides. However, the spatial expansion of postcolonial discourse to Europe’s own backyard needs to be matched by an expansion of research methods and objects. Postcolonial studies’ traditional commitment to theory and to textual analysis of literature and art cinema is beneficially complemented by engaging with popular media, such as television. It is also crucial to critically analyze the contexts of production and dissemination in which certain aesthetic and theoretical models are formed, lest we risk simply reaffirming the patterns in which Eastern European cultural nationalisms have reproduced themselves, which have also functioned to contain and disavow racism and imperialism. I propose to integrate within the postcolonial sphere methods and approaches from anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, and media and communication studies, which have produced a significant body of work on everyday socialist and postsocialist practices but have remained under the radar of elite national cultures. They have also stayed in fairly isolated disciplinary brackets and thus badly need postcolonial studies’ sophisticated theorizing of ideology and identity and its commitment to historiography. At the end, I outline three sample possibilities for such a geopolitically expanded, methodologically hybridized encounter: the postcolonial study of popular (post)socialist television; a postcolonial take on the European circulation of socialist film cultures; and contemporary reality television focused on the European underclass.