6. The Power of Other Worlds

Abstract

This chapter draws on childhood-memory narratives from Cold War socialist and early post-socialist settings to problematize the east-west civilisational hierarchies that often frame accounts of socialism’s ‘less developed’ material and consumer worlds. In the narratives, children’s encounters with commodities from abroad speak not only or directly to the significance of east/west, socialist/capitalist hierarchies in their lives but also to children’s relationships with the adults closest to them and children’s affective experiences of their own maturation. Exploring these dynamics brings scholarship on socialism and post-socialism into fresh conversation with contemporary childhood studies and other work that theorizes how selfhood and intimacy take form in and through specific moments in political economy. To bring the falsely simple oppositions of east/west and adult/child into the same analytical frame is to begin building more nuanced, nimble understandings of how macro-level political economic boundaries can be integral to children’s most intimate forms of self-knowledge.