Patrick H. Patterson

This comparative, interdisciplinary project assesses the nature and significance of socialist consumer culture. Examining the experience of communism with an eye to post-1989 transformations, it juxtaposes Yugoslavia's enthusiastic embrace of the styles, values, and practices of consumer society with the vivid but more constrained East German experience and with Hungary's flirtations with a consumerist "refrigerator socialism" deployed to quiet discontent after the revolution of 1956. I pursue a broad transnational perspective, reading these critical cases against evidence from other communist societies. Challenging prevailing interpretations of the region's history, the research tests the global reach -- and limits -- of capitalist economics and market culture.