A study in the history of meaning-making: Watching socialist television serials in the former Czechoslovakia.

The aim of this article is to map out and analyse how the viewers of the communist-governed Czechoslovak television understood the propagandist television serials during the so-called normalization, the last two decades of communist party rule after the Prague Spring. It strives to show peculiarities of the research on television viewers’ capabilities to remember the meanings and details of hermeneutic agency which took place in the past. The article argues that – in contrast to the mainstream historiography which claims full depoliticization of Czechoslovak people as a consequence of post-Prague Spring disillusionment – the uses of popular culture provided niches in which the political could be experienced. The role of reproductive memory in remembering the viewers’ experience buried under the grand socio-political switchover is also illuminated and used to coin the concept of ‘memory over dislocation’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]