Samizdat, Tamizdat, and Beyond Transnational Media During and After Socialism [Paperback]

In many ways what is identified today as cultural globalization in Eastern Europe has its roots in the Cold War phenomena ofsamizdat(do-it-yourself underground publishing) andtamizdat(publishing abroad). This volume offers a new understanding of how information flowed between East and West during the Cold War, as well as the much broader circulation of cultural products instigated and sustained by these practices. By expanding the definitions ofsamizdatandtamizdatfrom explicitly political print publications to include other forms and genres, this volume investigates the wider cultural sphere of alternative and semi-official texts, broadcast media, reproductions of visual art and music, and, in the post-1989 period, new media. The underground circulation of uncensored texts in the Cold War era serves as a useful foundation for comparison when looking at current examples of censorship, independent media, and the use of new media in countries like China, Iran, and the former Yugoslavia.
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Jessie Labovis Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University.
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The volume displays in exemplary fashion the entire spectrum of this dissident world; it would be great to see such well structured edited volumes like this one more often. Archiv f?r Sozialgeschichte

[The editors] present a wide-ranging array of case studies of unofficial and oppositional media across the socialist bloc, which enrich the growing literature on samizdat while providing one of the first detailed accounts of tamizdat. Many chapters reconstruct the complex networks via which these media circulated to East European domestic audiences and, more important, to the transnational community that could offer theoretical and practical support for dissent outside the host countries. They evoke an almost infinite variety in thlSÍ