Review: Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu and Katarzyna Marciniak (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures

The form and material of politics are at the heart of The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures. From the outset, the book is as concerned with the political fissures of the contemporary world as with the faded socialist states of the 20th century. In the words of Aga Skrodzka, it aims ‘to salvage the dismissed achievements and forgotten aspects of communist cultural work’ and ‘ask how these cultural formations inform our contemporary grappling with social, economic, and political challenges’ (pp. 1–2). In Skrodzka’s interpretation, paying attention to ‘the visual traces of imagined better futures’ (p. 3) is an urgent task that promises to lead to a wholesale rejuvenation of politics and form for the present day by ‘reimagining [communism] beyond the existing ways of thinking about it as a defunct project’ (p. 12) and envisioning an alternative, perhaps utopian, future.