Communist Ghosts - Post-Communist Thresholds, Critical Aesthetics and the Undoing of Modern Europe

This book explores post-communist thresholds as materializations of a specific crisis of modern European identity that was caused by the existence and sudden breakdown of Soviet-type communism. It shows how post-communist thresholds emerge where relics from the communist experience continue disrupting the routines and rhythms of a modern life and confront Europeans with cultural experiences, affects and material realities of the 'enlightened world' which they usually seek to repress or ignore. In exploring and writing through art projects which engage with the psychosocial fabric of such post-communist thresholds, this book finds ways of speaking and thinking through these transitory and paradox sites, and asks what we can say about other or new worlds, about new beginnings and endings as well as about decolonial and ethical ways of relating to the other when assessing the status quo of European modernity from within its liminal and crisis-driven sphere.


Magda Schmukalla is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her work advances a decolonial, feminist and artistic study of social life. She has been awarded an ESRC post-doctoral research grant and is co-initiator of the Communist Hauntings project.