Claiming to expand recent “research efforts to redefine Eastern Europe and to rethink youth” (6), this hefty tome is comprised of eighteen chapters divided into four parts, following the editors' contextualizing Introduction. In that Introduction, Matthias Schwartz and Heike Winkel note that in 21st century eastern Europe, “conformist youth” are much more typical than rebellious or dissident counter-cultures (2). With a focus on “everyday routines and imaginary belongings,” the aim of this volume, they tell us, is to explicate the changes that have occurred over the twenty-five years following the fall of communism by examining how globalization, coupled with neo-liberal economic regimes, has affected the transitional, experimental life-stage known as youth (2–4). The editors pay special tribute to Hillary Pilkington's pioneering studies of cultural globalization and Russian youth cultures, and to Karl Mannheim's much earlier work on political generations as they assert that the vicissitudes of eastern Europe “have defined a new set of challenges for young people, which in turn requires revisions of the concept of youth itself” (15). The book's four parts, Reconsidering Generational Change, Popular Belongings, Reshaping Political Activism, and Contested Agency, present a wide range of perspectives from broadly theoretical to historical, literary, and ethnographic specifics. They each consider the relationship between the globalized world and its changing impact on eastern Europe and the cultural meanings and practices of its youth.
Many of the chapters project a dour outlook through a rather-numbing repetitiveness revolving around the frustrations and disappointments of “Generation Nul/Zero.” There is virtually no mention of gaiety or playfulness or the risk-taking exuberance that often characterizes youth subcultures. In addition, although over half of the volume's authors are women, the book has a decidedly male bias, reflecting perhaps the foundational work from the Birmingham School that focused on working-class lads. Although the editors state up front that “Pussy Riot or the women's rights advocates from Femen may be impressive examples of young activists who gain attention worldwide … they are not representative of the cultural practices … and social networks” in eastern Europe (2), I was disconcerted that the book contained little mention of young women and their cultural productions. There is no reference whatsoever to LGBTQ identifications or rainbow-pride parades, which have occurred over the past decade in several large east European cities, including Kraków and Warsaw in Poland, as well as in Prague, Budapest, Zagreb, and Ljubljana.
Much of the material in the opening theoretical chapters, as well as many of the case studies, comes from Russia and the former Soviet Union (FSU). And while the first two words of the volume's title are “Eastern European,” this geopolitical term figures in only two chapter titles; contrarily, “Post-Soviet” or “Post-Socialism” appears in five. Beyond detailing events in Russia and Ukraine, chapters also explore youth and youth cultures in the Czech Republic, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Serbia. All the other successor states of Yugoslavia are neglected, as are Bulgaria, Hungary, Moldova, Romania, and not surprisingly, Greece. Slovakia, represented by its capital Bratislava, is included in the traveling narrative at the heart of Alfrun Kliems's chapter. Most surprising is that Stefan B. Kirmse's concluding chapter asks, “Is the Central Asian Case Really So Different?” It is curious that a book about east European youth cultures would close with an examination of young people's cultural practices in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.
The main point of that chapter is, of course, the pervasiveness of cultural globalization and the virtual, if not real, movement that links young people's experiences throughout “post-Soviet space” (335). Movement is also central to Kliems's chapter in which travels across east central Europe are shown to drive the redefinition of the region's (literary) underground. Anna Oravcová likewise opens her analysis of the appropriation of hip-hop in the Czech Republic with a description of young people from “Slovakia, Poland, Germany and other countries,” (111) who have traveled to a festival in the remote Hrade Královù region to dance and mingle with rising rap stars from the U.S. and Europe. Most of the chapters, however, especially those dealing with the FSU, show young people, even as they increasingly surf the (Russian-language) internet, resolutely staying put.
I found Jovanna Papović’s and Astrea Pajović’s chapter on the revival of the Dizel look in Serbia to be one of the volume's most compelling because it cogently illustrates the counterintuitive and sometimes ironic workings of cultural globalization. The hyper-masculine Dizel style of heavy metal jewelry, mirrored sunglasses, silky sweatshirts, Diesel jeans and Nike high-tops worn by most Serbian black-market criminals in the early 1990s suddenly reappeared in 2005. According to the authors' interviews, this style was not adopted as criticism of the new, disappointing democratic government. Rather, it was worn and perceived by Serbian young people as part of a global trend celebrating the 1990s, which included popular U.S. media Mafiosi like Tony Soprano. Without reflecting on the immoral role played in the wars that ended Yugoslavia by those who wore the 1990s Dizel-look, young Serbs over a decade later inserted these thugs into a local version of the global trend and “interiorized [them] as a comical stereotype” (87).
Other chapters explicate fanatic football fans in Poland, the reemergence of youth brigades in contemporary Russia, and the supporting sister role of women at Euromaidan, Ukraine. Each of the chapters and the book as a whole certainly contributes original material and important insights to the expanding field of youth studies. But despite the variety of its offerings, Eastern European Youth Cultures in a Global Context neither redefines eastern Europe nor revises the concept of youth itself.
