“An ancient dance that is still performed today”

Folk Culture, Nationalism, and Socialist Art in Albania after the Fourth Plenum of 1973

Authors

  • Raino Isto

Abstract

This article analyzes artistic debates about folk culture and Socialist Realism that took place in state socialist Albania in the 1970s. It begins by exploring the impact that dictator Enver Hoxha’s infamous Fourth Plenum speech had on the visual arts and culture more broadly, and then proceeds to investigate the increasing emphasis on national and folk identity that characterized art critical discourse in Albania after 1973. The article aims to overcome simplistic interpretations of this phenomenon that straightforwardly equate increasing devotion to national themes in the visual arts as part of a decline catalyzed by Albania’s growing isolationism in the 70s decade. Instead, the article shows that the turn to folk themes and practices reflected the extension of certain logics of Albanian Socialist Realist discourse, and parallelled similar developments elsewhere in the world of the late Cold War, with nations in the decolonizing world and established socialist nations alike increasingly focusing on crafts, the applied arts, and the popular forms of making they reflected and developed. The article asks: can we read the prominence of national and folk narratives as part of a complex navigation of Albania’s place in relation to the decolonizing world, as well as the major powers of the Cold War? Can the stronger turn towards folk culture be read as an effort to achieve a kind of totalizing aesthetic account of socialist society, to capitalize on the promise of Albania’s Ideological and Cultural Revolution (begun in the late 1960s) while at the same time profoundly shifting cultural reference points away from Soviet art?

Keywords:

Socialist Realism, art history, folk art, nationalism, socialist culture, Albania, decolonization

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Published

2024-11-20

How to Cite

Isto, R. (2024). “An ancient dance that is still performed today”: Folk Culture, Nationalism, and Socialist Art in Albania after the Fourth Plenum of 1973. Art Studies, (22), 9–53. Retrieved from https://albanica.al/studime_arti/article/view/5807

Issue

No. 22 (2023): Art Studies

Section

Articles