Defying De-Stalinization: Albania’s 1956

Drawing on recently declassified Albanian, Soviet, East German, and Western archival sources, as well as a rich historiography on Nikita Khrushchev\u27s secret speech and the Hungarian revolution of 1956, this article investigates the little-known events of 1956 in Albania. Rejecting de-Stalinization, the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha was able to vindicate his position against Yugoslavia\u27s brand of socialism abroad, fortify his rule at home, and claim more aid from Moscow, Beijing, and the Soviet bloc. This article discusses the Tirana Party Conference of April 1956, treating the Albanian Party of Labor (the Communist party) as an “information society.” The article assesses deliberations over security and ideology at the highest levels and demonstrates how tiny Albania came to embody, in exaggerated form, both the promises and the perils of socialist exchange, in addition to mirroring the profound inconsistencies of Khrushchev\u27s de-Stalinization campaign

Reading Nearby: Literary Ethnography in a Postsocialist City

© 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved The solitary reader, sitting quietly surrounded by her thoughts, is a powerful image. But reading is also a deeply social practice. From learning to read to deciding what to read next, a significant amount of literate activity takes place within specific social relationships. Drawing from ethnographic research I conducted between 2015 and 2018, this essay shows how the act of co-reading has contributed to the emergence of a new literary community based in Tirana, Albania. The broader intention of the essay is to demonstrate the application of the general approach to literary anthropology I call reading nearby