In recent years European states have turned toward more austere political regimes, entailing budg... more In recent years European states have turned toward more austere political regimes, entailing budget cuts, deregulation of labour markets, restrictions of welfare systems, securitization of borders and new regimes of migration and citizenship. In the wake of such changes, new forms of social inclusion and exclusion appear that are justified through a reactivation of differences of race, class and gender.
Against this backdrop, this collection investigates contemporary understandings of history and cultural memory. In doing so, the reader will join the leading European contributors of this title in examining how crisis and decline in contemporary Europe trigger a selective forgetting and remodelling of the past. Indeed, Austere Histories in European Societies breaks new paths in scholarship by synthesising and connecting current European debates on migration, racism and multiculturalism. In addition to this, the authors present debates on cultural memory and the place of the colonial legacy within an extensive comparative framework and across the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences.
This book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in European studies, memory studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, migration studies, European history, cultural policy, cultural heritage, economics and political theory.
Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling mo... more Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism, fascism, and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in A Brief History of the Masses, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989.
This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical resear... more This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical research and aesthetic analysis. It does so by making two claims. The first one concerns political emergence, which refers to movements that emerge outside democratic institutions and portend profound reorganizations of political order although they are not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they have weak political representation. The second claim implies that aesthetic presentations and performances (fiction, poetry, visual arts, film, theater) offer unique ways of understanding political emergence, and hence also collective protest, revolt and revolution. Artworks embody this potentiality because they register the experience of protests, not as representations of fixed historical agents, but in ways comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant and the witness in situations of social stress, struggle and political violence.
This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of d... more This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of democracy. Three questions are foregrounded. How do aesthetic expressions capture and accumulate social energy? How do they help convert such energy into political action? How do they preserve it, for future use? These questions concern the ways in which aesthetic works express what I call political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Analyzing selected examples from the Maidan uprising, the essay demonstrates a contradiction between how democratic protests generate aesthetic forms with a strong universal and utopian thrust and how these democratic utopias are subsequently contained by cultural representations and political traditions, in Ukraine’s case a particular form of militant and self-sacrificing nationalism, which, however, cannot do without projections of utopian solidarity.
In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered... more In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered with life vests have done much to consolidate the politics of movement in Europe. Indeed, the mediation of migration as a crisis has worked to shore up various forms of militarized surveillance, humanitarian response, legislative action, and affective investment. Bridging academic inquiry and artistic and activist practice, the essays, documents, and artworks gathered in Moving Images interrogate the mediation of migration and refugeeism in the contemporary European conjuncture, asking how images, discourses, and data are involved in shaping the visions and experience of migration in increasingly global contexts.
This paper examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan‐ European ... more This paper examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan‐ European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalization in the European Economic Community (EEC) (i.e. today’s EU) in the late 1950s. As we show, practically all of the visions, movements and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As so much of the scholarly, political and journalistic accounts at the time testify to, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political and institutional discourse on Eurafrica—or the fate of Europe’s colonial enterprise—a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. There is strong evidence to support that this project was instrumental in the actual, diplomatic and p...
This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical resear... more This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical research and aesthetic analysis. It does so by making two claims. The first one concerns political emergence, which refers to movements that emerge outside democratic institutions and portend profound reorganizations of political order although they are not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they have weak political representation. The second claim implies that aesthetic presentations and performances (fiction, poetry, visual arts, film, theater) offer unique ways of understanding political emergence, and hence also collective protest, revolt and revolution. Artworks embody this potentiality because they register the experience of protests, not as representations of fixed historical agents, but in ways comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant and the witness in situations of social stress, struggle and political violence.
An Essential Trait in the Works of Pia Arke and Marguerite Duras Contemporary arts and literature... more An Essential Trait in the Works of Pia Arke and Marguerite Duras Contemporary arts and literature provide a record of alternative narratives of globalization. This essay discusses how the global world system is reconfigured in two different aesthetic endeavors: the so-called »India Cycle« of Marguerite Duras and the visual artwork of Greenlandic-Danish artist Pia Arke. The essay suggests that both Duras and Arke constitute what may be defined as global narratives, and, furthermore, that both approach what may be termed »the essential trait« of contemporary global history. This essential trait is made visible – or, indeed, audible – through the pertinent figure of a subaltern female subject, which the reader or viewer perceives as occupying the very margin or edge of the global order. It is argued that this position still remains untheorized in postcolonial cultural theory. Finally, the essay presents a model through which this figure may be understood, while it also insists on the f...
The relationship between the history of European integration and the history of colonialism is be... more The relationship between the history of European integration and the history of colonialism is best understood through a compelling geopolitical entity once known as Eurafrica. As we have shown in ...
The chapter analyzes current EU–African migration policy, but argues that it must be understood i... more The chapter analyzes current EU–African migration policy, but argues that it must be understood in its historical context. Whereas migration today is to be managed in the framework of a EU–African partnership model built on equality and mutual ‘win–win’ dynamics, a closer look at the history of EU–African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. From the 1920s onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis–a–vis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channeled migration to its own benefit. It is thus argued that unless scholars start to attend to European integration’s crucial colonial history, current power asymmetries between the ‘partners’ will not only remain obscure, we will also fail to recognize the co...
EU presenteras ofta som ett fredsprojekt. Men bakom fasaden doljer sig en helt annan historia.For... more EU presenteras ofta som ett fredsprojekt. Men bakom fasaden doljer sig en helt annan historia.For politiker, opinionsbildare och organisationer som fran mellankrigstiden och framat arbetade for eur ...
In this article we analyse the current trajectory of EU-African migration policy. Unlike many oth... more In this article we analyse the current trajectory of EU-African migration policy. Unlike many other scholars, we suggest it must be understood in its historical context. Migration between Europe and Africa has been a European concern at least since the 1920s. At that time, issues of migration were seen in the context of a co-European colonial effort in Africa. Today, migration issues are to be resolved in the framework of a EU-African partnership model built on equality, interdependence and mutual 'winwin' dynamics. However, a closer look at the history of EU-African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. Throughout the period from the 1920s and onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Presumed demographic 'imbalances' (i.e. population surplus or deficit) have been used to justify vastly different migrant regimes. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis-àvis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channelled migration to its own benefit. We argue that as long as scholars and intellectuals persist in imitating policy-makers' disregard of European integration's colonial history, current structural power asymmetries between the EU and Africa will not only remain obscure; we will 2 also fail to recognize the continued, or even increasing, currency of colonial ideology in the EU's African relations.
Events strike and haunt, from different locations and in multiple ways, and they are always altog... more Events strike and haunt, from different locations and in multiple ways, and they are always altogether unexpected. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici repeats, 'events appear to come out of the blue'. That she has pulled off a conceptually consistent and analytically coherent account of a category and phenomenon as elusive as the event is perhaps a bit of an event in itself, albeit of a minor kind if compared to happenings such as the French Revolution, the Paris Commune or the terrorist attacks on New York City in September 2001, these three being main stations of her analysis. Events that interest Wagner-Pacifici most are shattering, confusing and often destructive. They force open a void. They offer an encounter with chaos. Precisely because of this, they incite interpretation, the construction of new meaning. Wagner-Pacifici's analytical language gravitates toward this abyss of non-meaning. By bringing rational analysis within nudging distance to its opposite, to social and cultural disorientation caused by fortuitous reversals, outbursts of violence, destruction or death itself, she seeks to remodel the interpretive apparatus of social theory so as to make it able to reabsorb such events into its conceptual universe. In some strange way, this books inhales chaos and exhales order, and it successfully establishes a conceptual platform where social theory intersects with the theory of history. Such platforms, from which it again becomes possible to rethink the relationship between system and transformation, are precisely what the human and social sciences need if they are to retain their ability to critically interpret the dense fabric of late capitalist society and culturea society of the spectacle if there ever was one, a world from heel to head made up by events. It should not be ignored, however, that this book is also a mirror of such a world, in which thinking and scholarship have lost their grip on the meaning of causality and therefore are less interested in terms such as history, movement and transformation than in compiling a theoretical lexicon of ruptures, outbursts and explosions. The cultural and political theory at the turn of the twenty-first century has seen a sharp increase in various theories of the event. This rise can only in part be explained by the massive influence of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, later also of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou or Vladimir Lenin himself. The tendency should also be historicized as reaction to a new political reality characterized by flash news, media spins, virtual crowds, hacking, covert state violence, political protest, drone strikes and terrorism, be it called a society of risk (Beck
This article offers a critique of Gary Marks’ recent article in JCMS, entitled ‘Europe and Its Em... more This article offers a critique of Gary Marks’ recent article in JCMS, entitled ‘Europe and Its Empires: From Rome to the European Union’. Although it sympathizes with Marks’ invocation of empire as a key theoretical concept and historical category in the study of European integration, it fundamentally disagrees with his ‘continentalist’ operationalization. Marks chooses to discuss the nexus of empire and European integration exclusively with reference to historical processes of imperial expansion and community formation occurring on the western European land mass. Since this methodology leaves out Europe's maritime colonial empires, it cannot account for the mutually conditioning relations between the intra‐ and extra‐European imperial processes. Consequently, Marks also fails to register colonialism's decisive bearing on post‐war European integration, and thus the fact that the scale of the original EEC was not delimited by the European land mass, but corresponded to the geopolitical constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica.
In recent years European states have turned toward more austere political regimes, entailing budg... more In recent years European states have turned toward more austere political regimes, entailing budget cuts, deregulation of labour markets, restrictions of welfare systems, securitization of borders and new regimes of migration and citizenship. In the wake of such changes, new forms of social inclusion and exclusion appear that are justified through a reactivation of differences of race, class and gender.
Against this backdrop, this collection investigates contemporary understandings of history and cultural memory. In doing so, the reader will join the leading European contributors of this title in examining how crisis and decline in contemporary Europe trigger a selective forgetting and remodelling of the past. Indeed, Austere Histories in European Societies breaks new paths in scholarship by synthesising and connecting current European debates on migration, racism and multiculturalism. In addition to this, the authors present debates on cultural memory and the place of the colonial legacy within an extensive comparative framework and across the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences.
This book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in European studies, memory studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, migration studies, European history, cultural policy, cultural heritage, economics and political theory.
Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling mo... more Between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fueling modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theater, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism, fascism, and experiments in radical democracy. Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as "the mass" during a critical period in European history. It follows its evolution into the preferred conceptual tool for social scientists, the ideal slogan for politicians, and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval. This volume is the second installment in Stefan Jonsson's epic study of the crowd and the mass in modern Europe, building on his work in A Brief History of the Masses, which focused on monumental artworks produced in 1789, 1889, and 1989.
This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical resear... more This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical research and aesthetic analysis. It does so by making two claims. The first one concerns political emergence, which refers to movements that emerge outside democratic institutions and portend profound reorganizations of political order although they are not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they have weak political representation. The second claim implies that aesthetic presentations and performances (fiction, poetry, visual arts, film, theater) offer unique ways of understanding political emergence, and hence also collective protest, revolt and revolution. Artworks embody this potentiality because they register the experience of protests, not as representations of fixed historical agents, but in ways comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant and the witness in situations of social stress, struggle and political violence.
This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of d... more This essay analyzes how artworks express the Ukrainian revolution 2013–2014 as an experience of democracy. Three questions are foregrounded. How do aesthetic expressions capture and accumulate social energy? How do they help convert such energy into political action? How do they preserve it, for future use? These questions concern the ways in which aesthetic works express what I call political emergence: people who have no say in political institutions come together as a collective that changes the political order. Analyzing selected examples from the Maidan uprising, the essay demonstrates a contradiction between how democratic protests generate aesthetic forms with a strong universal and utopian thrust and how these democratic utopias are subsequently contained by cultural representations and political traditions, in Ukraine’s case a particular form of militant and self-sacrificing nationalism, which, however, cannot do without projections of utopian solidarity.
In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered... more In recent years, spectacular images of ruined boats, makeshift border camps, and beaches littered with life vests have done much to consolidate the politics of movement in Europe. Indeed, the mediation of migration as a crisis has worked to shore up various forms of militarized surveillance, humanitarian response, legislative action, and affective investment. Bridging academic inquiry and artistic and activist practice, the essays, documents, and artworks gathered in Moving Images interrogate the mediation of migration and refugeeism in the contemporary European conjuncture, asking how images, discourses, and data are involved in shaping the visions and experience of migration in increasingly global contexts.
This paper examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan‐ European ... more This paper examines the history of the ‘Eurafrican project’ as it evolved from the Pan‐ European movement in the 1920s to its institutionalization in the European Economic Community (EEC) (i.e. today’s EU) in the late 1950s. As we show, practically all of the visions, movements and concrete institutional arrangements working towards European integration during this period placed Africa’s incorporation into the European enterprise as a central objective. As so much of the scholarly, political and journalistic accounts at the time testify to, European integration was inextricably bound up with a Eurafrican project. According to the intellectual, political and institutional discourse on Eurafrica—or the fate of Europe’s colonial enterprise—a future European community presupposed the transformation of the strictly national colonial projects into a joint European colonization of Africa. There is strong evidence to support that this project was instrumental in the actual, diplomatic and p...
This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical resear... more This essay explores the basis for dialogue at the junction of political theory, historical research and aesthetic analysis. It does so by making two claims. The first one concerns political emergence, which refers to movements that emerge outside democratic institutions and portend profound reorganizations of political order although they are not yet fully recognizable as political entities as they have weak political representation. The second claim implies that aesthetic presentations and performances (fiction, poetry, visual arts, film, theater) offer unique ways of understanding political emergence, and hence also collective protest, revolt and revolution. Artworks embody this potentiality because they register the experience of protests, not as representations of fixed historical agents, but in ways comparable to the testimonial mode of the participant and the witness in situations of social stress, struggle and political violence.
An Essential Trait in the Works of Pia Arke and Marguerite Duras Contemporary arts and literature... more An Essential Trait in the Works of Pia Arke and Marguerite Duras Contemporary arts and literature provide a record of alternative narratives of globalization. This essay discusses how the global world system is reconfigured in two different aesthetic endeavors: the so-called »India Cycle« of Marguerite Duras and the visual artwork of Greenlandic-Danish artist Pia Arke. The essay suggests that both Duras and Arke constitute what may be defined as global narratives, and, furthermore, that both approach what may be termed »the essential trait« of contemporary global history. This essential trait is made visible – or, indeed, audible – through the pertinent figure of a subaltern female subject, which the reader or viewer perceives as occupying the very margin or edge of the global order. It is argued that this position still remains untheorized in postcolonial cultural theory. Finally, the essay presents a model through which this figure may be understood, while it also insists on the f...
The relationship between the history of European integration and the history of colonialism is be... more The relationship between the history of European integration and the history of colonialism is best understood through a compelling geopolitical entity once known as Eurafrica. As we have shown in ...
The chapter analyzes current EU–African migration policy, but argues that it must be understood i... more The chapter analyzes current EU–African migration policy, but argues that it must be understood in its historical context. Whereas migration today is to be managed in the framework of a EU–African partnership model built on equality and mutual ‘win–win’ dynamics, a closer look at the history of EU–African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. From the 1920s onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis–a–vis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channeled migration to its own benefit. It is thus argued that unless scholars start to attend to European integration’s crucial colonial history, current power asymmetries between the ‘partners’ will not only remain obscure, we will also fail to recognize the co...
EU presenteras ofta som ett fredsprojekt. Men bakom fasaden doljer sig en helt annan historia.For... more EU presenteras ofta som ett fredsprojekt. Men bakom fasaden doljer sig en helt annan historia.For politiker, opinionsbildare och organisationer som fran mellankrigstiden och framat arbetade for eur ...
In this article we analyse the current trajectory of EU-African migration policy. Unlike many oth... more In this article we analyse the current trajectory of EU-African migration policy. Unlike many other scholars, we suggest it must be understood in its historical context. Migration between Europe and Africa has been a European concern at least since the 1920s. At that time, issues of migration were seen in the context of a co-European colonial effort in Africa. Today, migration issues are to be resolved in the framework of a EU-African partnership model built on equality, interdependence and mutual 'winwin' dynamics. However, a closer look at the history of EU-African migration reveals striking parallels between past and present. Throughout the period from the 1920s and onward, the migration policies devised within various frameworks of European integration have been shaped by demographic projections. Presumed demographic 'imbalances' (i.e. population surplus or deficit) have been used to justify vastly different migrant regimes. Each time demography has governed European migration policy vis-àvis Africa, what has first been introduced as a mutual interest has quickly been transformed into a geopolitical relationship, where one partner has channelled migration to its own benefit. We argue that as long as scholars and intellectuals persist in imitating policy-makers' disregard of European integration's colonial history, current structural power asymmetries between the EU and Africa will not only remain obscure; we will 2 also fail to recognize the continued, or even increasing, currency of colonial ideology in the EU's African relations.
Events strike and haunt, from different locations and in multiple ways, and they are always altog... more Events strike and haunt, from different locations and in multiple ways, and they are always altogether unexpected. As Robin Wagner-Pacifici repeats, 'events appear to come out of the blue'. That she has pulled off a conceptually consistent and analytically coherent account of a category and phenomenon as elusive as the event is perhaps a bit of an event in itself, albeit of a minor kind if compared to happenings such as the French Revolution, the Paris Commune or the terrorist attacks on New York City in September 2001, these three being main stations of her analysis. Events that interest Wagner-Pacifici most are shattering, confusing and often destructive. They force open a void. They offer an encounter with chaos. Precisely because of this, they incite interpretation, the construction of new meaning. Wagner-Pacifici's analytical language gravitates toward this abyss of non-meaning. By bringing rational analysis within nudging distance to its opposite, to social and cultural disorientation caused by fortuitous reversals, outbursts of violence, destruction or death itself, she seeks to remodel the interpretive apparatus of social theory so as to make it able to reabsorb such events into its conceptual universe. In some strange way, this books inhales chaos and exhales order, and it successfully establishes a conceptual platform where social theory intersects with the theory of history. Such platforms, from which it again becomes possible to rethink the relationship between system and transformation, are precisely what the human and social sciences need if they are to retain their ability to critically interpret the dense fabric of late capitalist society and culturea society of the spectacle if there ever was one, a world from heel to head made up by events. It should not be ignored, however, that this book is also a mirror of such a world, in which thinking and scholarship have lost their grip on the meaning of causality and therefore are less interested in terms such as history, movement and transformation than in compiling a theoretical lexicon of ruptures, outbursts and explosions. The cultural and political theory at the turn of the twenty-first century has seen a sharp increase in various theories of the event. This rise can only in part be explained by the massive influence of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, later also of Antonio Negri, Alain Badiou or Vladimir Lenin himself. The tendency should also be historicized as reaction to a new political reality characterized by flash news, media spins, virtual crowds, hacking, covert state violence, political protest, drone strikes and terrorism, be it called a society of risk (Beck
This article offers a critique of Gary Marks’ recent article in JCMS, entitled ‘Europe and Its Em... more This article offers a critique of Gary Marks’ recent article in JCMS, entitled ‘Europe and Its Empires: From Rome to the European Union’. Although it sympathizes with Marks’ invocation of empire as a key theoretical concept and historical category in the study of European integration, it fundamentally disagrees with his ‘continentalist’ operationalization. Marks chooses to discuss the nexus of empire and European integration exclusively with reference to historical processes of imperial expansion and community formation occurring on the western European land mass. Since this methodology leaves out Europe's maritime colonial empires, it cannot account for the mutually conditioning relations between the intra‐ and extra‐European imperial processes. Consequently, Marks also fails to register colonialism's decisive bearing on post‐war European integration, and thus the fact that the scale of the original EEC was not delimited by the European land mass, but corresponded to the geopolitical constellation that at the time was called Eurafrica.
This article argues that any attempt to conceive of a new narrative of the Postcolonial Arctic wi... more This article argues that any attempt to conceive of a new narrative of the Postcolonial Arctic will fail, if it does not also entail a new narrative of European history. It starts out by asserting the strong afterlife of colonial narratives of the Arctic, through the example of the author's own difficulty of writing an authentic and ethically acceptable reportage about East Greenland. By drawing on further examples and by introducing narratological theory, the article moves on to consider the colonial narrative of the arctic. It is asserted that the prototypical colonial narrative of the Arctic may be modelled on Moby Dick: a hunting and whaling story, in which the setting is made up landscape, wildlife, and indigenous populations. The colonial narrative is gradually transformed as the indigenous peoples of the Arctic leaves the setting and becomes agents in the narrative. Indeed, it is only when the indigenous attains the place of the subject telling the story that we can seriously claim to have a postcolonial narrative of the Arctic. The article then briefly analyses two instances of such transformations of the colonial narrative: the works of Danish-Greenlandic visual artist and artistic researcher Pia Arke, and of the Sami visual artist Katarina Pirka Sikku. Both question the narrating subject in travel literature and scientific discourse about the Arctic. They reclaim that position for themselves, which results in narrative and visual performances of a immense interest.
TOTAL TEATER - STAGING UTOPIA IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC | Highlighting a crucial topic in the utopi... more TOTAL TEATER - STAGING UTOPIA IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC | Highlighting a crucial topic in the utopian aesthetics developed in the European interwar period, this article discusses the radical ideas of placing society on stage, and of turning theatre into a medium for the self-representation of society. Illustrations and examples are drawn mainly from Erwin Piscator, and his collaboration with Walter Gropius in a project that they conceived of as “the Total Theatre” (Das Totaltheater). As the essay argues, these ideas of a new stage craft and performance were perhaps the most daring interventions among the wild and unruly democratic experiments of the Weimar Republic, and they usefully illustrate what Walter Benjamin had in mind as he, in the same period, cryptically endorsed the aesthetico-political idea of an artwork that is “being absorbed by the masses”.
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Books by Stefan Jonsson
Against this backdrop, this collection investigates contemporary understandings of history and cultural memory. In doing so, the reader will join the leading European contributors of this title in examining how crisis and decline in contemporary Europe trigger a selective forgetting and remodelling of the past. Indeed, Austere Histories in European Societies breaks new paths in scholarship by synthesising and connecting current European debates on migration, racism and multiculturalism. In addition to this, the authors present debates on cultural memory and the place of the colonial legacy within an extensive comparative framework and across the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences.
This book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in European studies, memory studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, migration studies, European history, cultural policy, cultural heritage, economics and political theory.
Papers by Stefan Jonsson
Against this backdrop, this collection investigates contemporary understandings of history and cultural memory. In doing so, the reader will join the leading European contributors of this title in examining how crisis and decline in contemporary Europe trigger a selective forgetting and remodelling of the past. Indeed, Austere Histories in European Societies breaks new paths in scholarship by synthesising and connecting current European debates on migration, racism and multiculturalism. In addition to this, the authors present debates on cultural memory and the place of the colonial legacy within an extensive comparative framework and across the boundaries of the humanities and social sciences.
This book will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences and humanities, particularly in European studies, memory studies, sociology, postcolonial studies, migration studies, European history, cultural policy, cultural heritage, economics and political theory.