The original monograph on Czechoslovak late socialism
The Normalization Festival is an original monograph on Czechoslovak late socialism, especially on the late socialist public sphere, which today is often considered a priori toxic. The main characters of the monograph are the organisers of folk concerts who were active in this sphere and thus co-created it (and also changed it in a certain sense). Their everyday actions show the problematic nature of today's mainstream ways of portraying late socialism, and the book is a remotely guided discussion of now familiar concepts such as the grey zone or islands of freedom. With the help of scholarly literature - and especially on the basis of a creative interpretation of the texts of anthropologist Alexey Jurcak - he offers an alternative model of narration about late socialism, whose overarching metaphor could be the Möbius strip mentioned in the introduction of the book.
