On nostalgia, haunting and postsocialism

Reading the panel story project

Bibliographic Data

ID19221271
AuthorsIveta Jusová (Carleton College, corresponding author)
Year2026
Pages1-30
Publication date2026-04-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueCultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0950-2386 • E-ISSN: 1466-4348
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/09502386.2026.2662005
OpenAlexW7155839352
LanguageEN
References cited15

This essay delves into the memories of life during state socialism as recounted by three generations of residents from a housing cooperative in a mid-sized Czech city. The cooperative consists of three eight-story prefabricated apartment buildings, or paneláky, built in the mid-1960s. The author, who grew up in the community, interviewed 28 former and current residents about their recollections of life in the community before and after 1989. These engagements focused on the residents’ assessment of life in paneláky and their evaluation of the housing cooperative model that organized their community during the socialist era and, in a modified version, persists today. Alongside the narratives of this community the essay examines questions of memory and the concept of post-socialist nostalgia, and it contributes to the ongoing discussion in CEE scholarship about the continued relevance of the term postsocialism. The author finds aspects of the post-socialist nostalgia concept valuable for providing insights into the cooperative members’ memory practices. Yet, aiming to move beyond the tendency to pathologize the memory practices of post-socialist subjects, the author explores shifting from post-socialist nostalgia to a more forward-looking framework inspired by Mark Fisher’s concept of haunting. The essay also suggests the continued relevance of postsocialism as an analytical category. It reads the coop members’ narratives and practices as a more progressive form of postsocialism, contrasting with Liviu Chelcea and Oana Druta’s exploration of ‘zombie socialism’

Multimodality · Narrative · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Reading (process) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis

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