Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Caribbean Studies
Episode: Sudha Rajagopalan, "Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India" (Routledge, 2023)
Description: At the intersection of history, material culture studies, and post-socialist memory studies, Journeys of Soviet Things: Cold War as Lived Experience in Cuba and India (Routledge, 2023) is an oral history of socialist globalisation constructed around the journeys of Cold War era Soviet objects in India and Cuba. During the Cold War, an important means to perpetuate Soviet ideals of modernisation and anti-imperialist solidarity across the world was the circulation of ‘banal’ objects, produced in the Soviet Union and purchased, awarded, and gifted for use in homes across the world. Based on oral accounts of Indian and Cuban interlocutors, this book ex...