Margins
Poor but Sexy book cover
Poor but Sexy
Culture Clashes in Europe East and West
2014
First Published
3.14
Average Rating
310
Number of Pages
24 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe is as divided as ever. The passengers of the low-budget airlines go east for stag parties, and they go West for work; but the East stays East, and West stays West. Caricatures abound - the Polish plumber in the tabloids, the New Cold War in the broadsheets and the endless search for 'the new Berlin' for hipsters. Against the stereotypes, Agata Pyzik peers behind the curtain to take a look at the secret histories of Eastern Europe (and its tortured relations with the 'West'). Neoliberalism and mass migration, post-punk and the Bowiephile obsession with the Eastern Bloc, Orientalism and 'self-colonization', the emancipatory potentials of Socialist Realism, the possibility of a non-Western idea of modernity and futurism, and the place of Eastern Europe in any current revival of 'the idea of communism' – all are much more complex and surprising than they appear. Poor But Sexy refuses both a dewy-eyed Ostalgia for the 'good old days' and the equally desperate desire to become a 'normal part of Europe', reclaiming instead the idea an Other Europe.
Avg Rating
3.14
Number of Ratings
166
5 STARS
11%
4 STARS
23%
3 STARS
40%
2 STARS
19%
1 STARS
7%
goodreads

Author

Agata Pyzik
Agata Pyzik
Author · 2 books

Agata Pyzik is a Polish journalist who divides her time between Warsaw and London, where she has already established herself as a writer on art, politics, music and culture for various magazines, including The Wire, Guardian, New Statesman, New Humanist, Afterall and Frieze. She studied philosophy, art history, English and American studies in Warsaw, and started writing and publishing during this time. She wrote for major mainstream Polish newspapers, like Gazeta Wyborcza, Dziennik, Przekrój and Polityka, as well as was a regular contributor for a contemporary music magazine “Glissando”, and smaller literary magazines, like Lampa and other art magazines. Her major interest was literature, especially poetry, contemporary art and architecture. Her translations include American poet James Schuyler into Polish as well as a book by the Polish urbanist Krzysztof Nawratek City as Political idea into English, published by Plymouth University in 2011. She worked for the foremost independent art foundation in Poland, Bec Zmiana, for whom she contributed essays to several books on architecture and philosophy. She also interviewed many writers for literary magazines, including Michel Houellebecq, Laszlo Krasznohorkai and Etgar Keret. More recently her main interest is in contemporary forms of resistance and political aesthetics. She has interviewed some of the foremost leftist thinkers and art theoreticians for the Polish journal 6 Weeks Notebook, which put together will become a book in Poland. (from http://www.zero-books.net/authors/aga...)

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