Kinga Siewior

The project proposes to look at post-war socialist Poland, understood as a political and cultural formation, from the perspective of the theory of cultural emotions. In this approach, emotions and feelings are regarded not only as a matter of the individual’s inner state, but also as social and historical values shared by the community, which organize society’s life and political processes at the level of both everyday experience and historical change. The primary inspiration of the project is provided by key concepts from cultural studies on emotions, as well as theoretical proposals concerning the emotional logic of modern capitalism. However, all these findings have only addressed the cultural production of liberal democracies. As far as other twentieth century political and economic systems are concerned—in this case, socialism—systematic studies of the social reality and cultural production from an emotional perspective are lacking. Hence, the main research questions of the project are the following: What did socialism feel like? Which emotive qualities and emotional styles were used by the authorities to design the socialist emotional community? And finally, what are the most important textual forms, narratives and genres that were used to create structures of feelings in the post-war period?