This collaborative session, co-hosted by the Forums on Russia and Eurasia and on Contemporary China, explores the production, reception, and aesthetics of film and TV across global postsocialism. Along with its companion, “Cultural Systems after Socialism I: Art, Literature, Performance,” this session asks what happens to culture after socialism. How do modes of artistic production, networks of distribution, dispositions of reception, and aesthetic forms transform with the introduction of capitalism and the accession to global markets for culture? The topic could not be more relevant today. With Russia’s grinding war in Ukraine, China’s continued harassment of Taiwan, and the renewed alliance between Putin and Xi, the post-1989 world order is unraveling in real time. The promises of global capitalism, open societies, and liberal democracy—always shaky at best—are now undeniably disintegrating.

The cultures of postsocialism at times enthusiastically embraced the promises of the market and at others met them with a deep and early skepticism. The legacies of socialism in postsocialist societies, in turn, have informed artistic critiques of neoliberalism with global resonance, from the leftist poetics of Russia’s Translit journal to Ai Weiwei’s fantastical appropriation of Vladimir Tatin’s 1920 design for a monument to the Third International. The clash between accelerated marketization and the legacies of socialism makes postsocialist cultures fertile grounds for the generation and proliferation of ideas and aesthetic forms with global significance. In taking up these ideas and forms, the session is in direct conversation with work on postsocialist thought and cultural production, including Shuyu Kong’s Consuming Literature, Jason McGrath’s Postsocialist Modernity, and the most recent special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on "Cultures of Global Post/Socialisms." Other recent work mobilizes the legacies of socialism in contemporary critiques, including Rossen Djagalov’s From Internationalism to Postcolonialism, Amelia Glaser and Steven Lee’s Comintern Aesthetics, among many others, including several authored by participants in this session.

This session’s speakers home in on film and TV as two of the most generative media of this era, and on the two giants of the postsocialist world, Russia and China. Jeesoon Hong examines the aesthetics of the Chinese Communist Party’s internal television network Xinwen lianbo, an unmistakable rem(a)inder of the Communist Party’s firm domination and the state’s primary apparatus for implementing “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics.” Focusing on aesthetic and affective experience rather than the content and the intention of the Party-State, Hong explores the military metaphors, audio-visual editing, and the consecration of what she sees as an unsurmountable gap between the Party (leaders) and the people, including medical workers, in the early days of the COVID-19 emergency. Next, Jason McGrath discusses “post-socialist realism,” a decades-long trend in post-Mao China that defines itself against various forms of prescriptive realism. Chinese post-socialist realism, developed in the 1980s-90s, originally used both neorealist and modernist techniques as a reaction against the formulas of socialist realism. Now arrayed against other modes of prescriptive realism, including propaganda, capitalist realism, and entertainment films, post-socialist realism has become essential to understanding the wider ecosystem of contemporary Chinese cinema.

Stephen Norris’s contribution takes up one kind of prescriptive realism, the historical blockbuster, in Putin’s Russia, and shows how such films have paved the path to war. Not only have state-funded war films promoted themes—defeating Nazis, defending the motherland, war as a national idea—that directly fed into Putin’s justification for the war, the film industry has been unexpectedly entangled in politics. A former Minister of Culture led abortive “peace talks” in spring, and the current Minister of Defense plays a major role in Russian cinema. For Norris, postsocialist Russian cinema represents an uncanny blend of Hollywood styles and state control designed to promote a catch-all patriotism. Finally, Edward Tyerman examines recent Sino-Russian co-productions including the 2015 film Ballet in the Time of War (战火中的芭蕾, dir. Dong Yachun 董亚春, executive producer Nikita Mikhalkov), the 2019 interethnic romantic comedy How I Became Russian (战斗民族养成记, dir. Akaki Sakhelashvili and Xia Hao 夏昊), and the 2020 hit comedy Lost in Russia (囧妈, dir. Xu Zheng 徐峥). These co-productions, Tyerman argues, seek to build affective transnational connections through nostalgia for a shared socialist past and suffering in the Second World War, while also deploying a comic mode to negotiate an abiding sense of cultural difference as the grounds for friendship. Through careful analysis of rich visual material, each of these contributions not only distills an aspect of the developing postsocialist aesthetics, but also traces the connective tissues that bind cultural producers and audiences to ideologies, economic policies, and state politics.