Cold War Imaginaries
Technology, Temporality, Culture
John Beck editor Ryan Bishop editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Publishing:28th Feb '27
£115.00
This title is due to be published on 28th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The precarious balance of power held in place during the Cold War structured not only global geopolitics but the experience of reality itself for populations across the world. In the increasingly unpredictable multipolar world of the twenty-first century, how have conceptions of time and history forged in the Cold War come to shape and trouble our understanding of the present? Building on the previous collection Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics (EUP, 2016) but extending further beyond the U.S.-Soviet binary and focusing in particular on questions of history, temporality, agency and representation, this new collection gathers scholars and artists who investigate the ways in which the contemporary world continues to be shaped by ideas, values and practices that had been codified, intensified and institutionalised during the decades of the Cold War.
An electric collection of essays exploring how the Continuity Cold War continues to shape world culture: looking at the scrambled temporalities mobilised by powers, the ideologemes generated by Cold War-inflected technologies and systems, these superb and visionary readings unpack the volatility and instability of the planetary system of military-aesthetic technics. -- Adam Piette, University of Sheffield
This incisive and immensely readable collection uniquely offers both a clarifying historicization of the Cold War’s unwieldy temporalities in their sprawling global reach and new theoretical tools for understanding how this history continues to structure our present. -- Lindsay Caplan, Brown University
This collection convincingly challenges the familiar story that casts the fall of the Soviet Union as a clean epochal break. Ranging across disciplines and geographies, it treats art, media, and everyday culture with the same forensic care it brings to infrastructure and geopolitics, revealing a Cold War whose afterlives continue to scramble our volatile present. -- Annie Dorsen
ISBN: 9781399559621
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
408 pages