Barbie in the Bunker: Childhood, War, and Imagination | Maša Kolanović

Join us for a conversation with Croatian author Maša Kolanović about her novel Underground Barbie, moderated by Dr. Mary Neuburger, a historian of modern Eastern Europe and Director of UT Austin’s Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. Maša will also be joined by local writer Taisia Kitaiskaia for a short reading.

Set in Zagreb in the early 1990s, Underground Barbie follows a generation of children coming of age as the socialist world they had inherited was collapsing before their eyes, while a new Croatia and capitalist consumer culture was rapidly taking over. At the center of the book is Barbie: an emblem of American popular culture that enters a child’s imagination just as war enters everyday life.

The conversation will explore the novel’s intersections of socialism and emerging capitalism, the appropriation and transformation of American popular culture, gender roles, and the experience of war through a child’s perspective. We will also discuss Underground Barbie as a work of anti-war literature, and the ways humor, play, fantasy, and subversive imagination can become forms of resistance in times of violence.

At its heart, the novel asks what happens when the intimate world of childhood collides with the “big stories” of history. What can dolls, games, friendships, and small acts of imagination tell us that official political narratives cannot? And how might these seemingly minor, personal stories challenge the grand narratives through which war and political upheaval are usually remembered?

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