The Polish Studies Initiative at OSU invites you to join us for a guest lecture featuring Julia Keblinska (Ohio State U.) and journalist, Wojciech Przylipiak.
Abstract:
Warsaw journalist Wojciech Przylipiak’s recent book, Sex, Disco, and Videotape: Poland of the 1990s reconsiders this decade of socioeconomic transformation from its most quotidian registers—the popular culture that emerged at the turn of the 1980s when socialist drab met Western pop. The 1989 watershed and ensuing political and economic reforms have spawned a rich scholarly literature on Polish postsocialism, but the everyday life of this recent past is only just coming to scholarly attention. The material traces of this decade, however, have lingered since the decade of transformation, still visible on the palimpsest of Poland’s quickly modernizing urban fabric. Przylipiak’s reportage recovers these traces from the background, combining a curated selection of cultural objects from his personal collection with oral histories with key “types” of the postsocialist cultural economy. Here, we see not capital H history, grand narratives and great figures, but a retelling of the transformation through everyday forms and genres: pulp fiction, comics, erotic, pirated VHS, video games, and mix tapes. In this conversation, I will talk with Przylipiak about his book, his collection, and the place of the nineties in Poland’s contemporary culture. Together, we will consider what historical temporalities arise when we collect and curate a once radically new material world that is now receding into the past.
Presenters
Wojciech Przylipiak is a reporter, collector, and was for years the editor of the “Kultura” supplement of the Daily Legal Newspaper, where he wrote chiefly about music and pop culture. His articles have also appeared in the Polish web portals dziennik.pl, igimag.pl, legalnakultura.pl, as well as various magazines like Esquire and Noise Magazine. Since 2012, he has run BufetPRL.com, a blog dedicated to Poland’s bygone days on which he introduces remarkable forgotten objects from his collection. He has been a grantee of Poland’s Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. He is the author of the bestselling books Leisure in the People’s Republic of Poland (Czas wolny w PRL-u) and Sex, Disco, and Videotape: Poland of the 1990s (Sex, disco i kasety video. Polska lat 90).
Julia Keblinska is an external faculty fellow at OSU's Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows. She is currently finishing her first monograph, New Era, New Media: Emerging Media Ecologies in 1980s China, a media history of China's postsocialist transition. At OSU, she is developing a comparative project on popular media, with a special focus on VHS cultures, in 80s Poland and China. She holds a PhD in Chinese from the University of California, Berkeley.
If you have any questions about accessibility or wish to request accommodations, please contact us at csees@osu.edu. Typically, a two weeks' notice will allow us to provide access.
