Introduction

Abstract

This issue of Art Studies explores the theme of revisionism, understood both as a historical phenomenon—insofar as the struggle against so-called “modern” revisionism (initially Soviet but subsequently Chinese revisionism as well) played a decisive role in the path pursued by the Albanian Party of Labor from the beginning of the 1960s and up until Enver Hoxha’s death in 1985, if not the collapse of the state socialist system itself at the beginning of the 1990s—and more generally as an attempt to rewrite history—in which case revisionism represents an impulse that defines the post-socialist period just as much as the socialist period, enabling the contributors to this issue to investigate the continuities and ruptures between the socialist and postsocialist eras, and also what the latter might tell us about the contemporary moment.