Historical Knowledge Production Cultures in Late Socialist Hungary and Croatia: Expertise Unsettled explores the complexities of historiography in state socialist Eastern Europe, highlighting the divergent factors that shaped historical narratives and the role of historians in a changing political landscape. It emphasizes the importance of including party history and party historians in intellectual history to gain a more comprehensive understanding of late state socialism and contemporary memory regimes.

Format: Hardback
Length: 250 pages
Publication date: 08 January 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Historical Knowledge Production Cultures in Late Socialist Hungary and Croatia: Expertise Unsettled offers a comparative study and analysis from the Hungarian case, integrating academic, party, and popular historiography into a single analytical framework. Narratives concerning the history of the interwar period and the Second World War, and circumstances of their elaboration, are at the forefront of this study. Réka Krizmanics argues that even within state socialist Eastern Europe, different enabling and restrictive factors were at play, and investigates the specificities of late socialism while embedding them in the context of their interwar, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist legacies. "Expertise Unsettled" refers to the growing peril of historians, who proved to be often divided among themselves and were increasingly on the defense as a guild when literature, cinema, and interested non-professionals got involved in making and criticizing narratives of the recent past. Party history and party historians have been often sidelined in intellectual history, but the author argues that their inclusion is crucial both for a more complex understanding of what (late) state socialism meant for historians and to historicize practices of contemporary post-socialist, especially illiberal memory regimes.

Historical Knowledge Production Cultures in Late Socialist Hungary and Croatia: Expertise Unsettled

This book offers a comparative study and analysis from the Hungarian case, integrating academic, party, and popular historiography into a single analytical framework. Narratives concerning the history of the interwar period and the Second World War, and circumstances of their elaboration, are at the forefront of this study. Réka Krizmanics argues that even within state socialist Eastern Europe, different enabling and restrictive factors were at play, and investigates the specificities of late socialism while embedding them in the context of their interwar, Stalinist, and post-Stalinist legacies. "Expertise Unsettled" refers to the growing peril of historians, who proved to be often divided among themselves and were increasingly on the defense as a guild when literature, cinema, and interested non-professionals got involved in making and criticizing narratives of the recent past. Party history and party historians have been often sidelined in intellectual history, but the author argues that their inclusion is crucial both for a more complex understanding of what (late) state socialism meant for historians and to historicize practices of contemporary post-socialist, especially illiberal memory regimes.

Weight: 558g
Dimension: 237 x 158 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781666933239