that the pages that come to us, readers, are of a great sensitivity and touch us deeply when they make us think about the human life and its many ways of existing in the various aspects. There is no way to deny the important academic contribution of the text and also of looking at our own regions and locations. What the authoress reveals is that: there are childhoods to be looked at now in order to think about their futures and with that, guarantee the “centrality of affective well-being to human flourishing” (233), in China and in any other country of this world.

Starting out from the interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica in Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, this essay discusses how, why, and for what purposes Weiss inserted extensive discussions of classical and contemporary artworks in his novel. More specifically, and by introducing the two notions of the foldout and political emergence, the essay investigates how the visual artworks in Weiss’s narrative reconfigure understandings of temporality, collectivity, and realism. A central question concerns the novel’s way of transforming representations of objective oppression, and even death itself, into figures of emancipatory subjective agency. Analyses of the novel’s interpretive engagement with visual artworks such as Guernica demonstrate how these sections of the novelistic text interrupt historical temporality, establish a transhistorical collectivity, and superimpose the experience of the victim with the perspective of the witness. In this way, it is argued, Weiss’s narrative enables an identification with the mute experience of destruction while converting that experience into a future-oriented political force: the emergence and continuation of collective struggle.

In this article, Bojanic, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer present a synthetic overview of the five country cases included in the special issue that analyse the emergence of cultures of rejection since 2015. In general, they discuss the conceptual framework of 'Cultures of Rejection', elaborated throughout the issue as a more encompassing approach that is sensitive to the values, norms and affects that underlie different or similar patterns of exclusion and rejection in different contexts. These cultures are located in the everyday lives of people. The article, therefore, first identifies contexts, objects of rejection--often migrants and racialized Others, but also 'the political' or state institutions-narratives and components of cultures of rejection that we label reflexivity, affect, nostalgia and moralistic judgement. The contrasting reading of the five cases shows that people struggle for agency under precarious and insecure conditions, and fight against imagined enemies. As Bojanic, Jonsson, Neergaard and Sauer conclude, cultures of rejection mirror ongoing processes of neoliberal dispossession, authoritarization and depolitization that culminate in a wish for agency and resovereignization. Second, and based on this overview, trends in cultures of rejection are detected against different national contexts as well as against common trends of social and economic transformations and crises, such as, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic. This results, finally, in a discussion of ways of challenging the cultures of rejection towards more democratic and solidaristic societies. One starting point might be the 're-embedding' of the economy in society, that is, a more equal distribution of resources and future perspectives.

Abstract: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 article offers a collectively developed analysis of the Covid-19 crisis as it relates to contemporary cultures of rejection, i.e. the socio-cultural conditions in which authoritarian and right-wing populist politics thrive, in Europe. We explore how the pandemic and its management reinforces, transforms and/or overrides existing antagonisms and institutes new ones in Serbia, Croatia, Austria, Germany and Sweden. We discuss how the Covid-19 crisis affects the rise of new statisms; gendered patterns of social reproduction; mobility and migration; digital infrastructures; and new political mobilizations.

Finns det en vit skuld for kolonialismen – och vad gor vi i sa fall at det? Kraven pa kompensation och gottgorelse for manskligt lidande, stulna rikedomar och konstskatter blir allt tydligare. Stef ...

This essay represents an effort to rethink the relationship between political emergence and migrant agency. This undertaking has a theoretical motivation. Mainstream human and social sciences seem to be at an impasse because of their structural inability to interpret and explain systemic crises and contradictions. While this is a topic far too complex to be dealt with in a brief essay, the following pages will explore three expressions of this impasse. First, the social sciences often analyse migration without acknowledging its profound political implications. Second, European history and sociology rarely recognize histories of imperial dominance and anticolonial resistance as intrinsic to European history and society. Third, mainstream social and political theories often ignore the structural significance of collective protests and resistance movements for the realization of democracy. The article frames the analysis of these problems via two different theoretical contexts in which we can observe ongoing conceptual or methodological shifts or ‘turns’ that respond to the said impasse. In studies of democracy and citizenship there has thus been a clear turn toward ‘borders’. In migration studies, there is a corresponding turn toward ‘agency’. By analysing the interconnections between these theoretical contexts the article suggests ways of resolving the three problems at hand. It starts by examining the first one, or the inability to acknowledge the profound political implications of migration. This discussion will then offer an approach to the other two, concerning the legacies of colonialism and the significance of political agency and protest.

Quels espoirs suscitent les Gilets jaunes pour le reste de l’Europe ou pour la societe mondiale ? En tant qu’observateur de la peripherie nord du continent, je pose la question suivante : s’agit-il ...

In this chapter, the authors discuss the project of European integration. In reconceiving historical European integration as a colonial project, they also discuss the implications of this for contemporary conceptions of European integration. Challenging received ideas in scholarship, the authors suggest a new point of departure for the analysis of the relation between Europe and Africa in the interwar and postwar eras. The interconnection between the history of colonialism and the history of European integration is best exposed by a compelling geopolitical figure once known as Eurafrica. In this post-catastrophic atmosphere of anxiety and pessimism, where nationalist hubris was defeated and imperial Europe was perceived as being in decline, the grand geopolitical narrative of European integration took shape. The most influential of the proposals for European integration was presented by Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in his 1923 pamphlet, Paneuropa. European integration thus found its real support only after the spiritual shock, economic collapse and political destruction inflicted by the Great War.

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 sh...

Research Article| April 01 2017 Eurafrica Incognita: The Colonial Origins of the European Union Peo Hansen; Peo Hansen Peo Hansen is professor of political science at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. A former senior fellow at the Remarque Institute at New York University, his research areas include European integration, EU migration policy, postwar European geopolitics, and the history of colonialism and decolonization. His most recent book is Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (2014) co-authored with Stefan Jonsson. He is currently writing a book on Europe's migration crises. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Stefan Jonsson Stefan Jonsson Stefan Jonsson is professor of ethnic studies at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University. He has written widely on European modernism and modernity, focusing especially on representations and fantasies of crowds and collectivities, as well as on European racism and colonialism. His writings include Subject Without Nation (2000); A Brief History of the Masses (2008); Crowds and Democracy (2013); and most recently Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism co-authored with Peo Hansen and Austere Histories in European Societies co-edited with Julia Willén. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google History of the Present (2017) 7 (1): 1–32. https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.7.1.0001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Peo Hansen, Stefan Jonsson; Eurafrica Incognita: The Colonial Origins of the European Union. History of the Present 1 April 2017; 7 (1): 1–32. doi: https://doi.org/10.5406/historypresent.7.1.0001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsHistory of the Present Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2017 University of Illinois Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Teaching conformity Austere histories? 'People will just have to pull their socks up. And tighten their belts. And figuratively rearrange other parts of their apparel until the mess is sorted out,' writes Richard Seymour (2014: 29), decoding the overtones in the discourse of austerity that for some years has been disseminated from economic and political power centres of the West. Austerity indicates a withdrawal of entitlements, a condition of severity, or a situation of scarcity; it discharges people to look for work and scavenge for food to put on the table, as they must struggle to make ends meet. Austerity is also associated with commands, authoritarian or authoritative superiors whose calls to order and discipline, be they intended to mobilize against external threats or close ranks in times of internal troubles, necessitate prohibitions. Thus, a policy of austerity apparently institutes a more frugal order of life – some would say more safe and orderly, others more gloomy and dangerous – than what preceded it. The near past no longer appears as an era of stability and comfort, but as one of undeserved affluence and irresponsible excess. After days of butter and cream, come the lean years of bark and rye. This is how the strange rhetoric of austerity, as political economist Mark Blyth (2013a: 13) has it, turns economic concerns into 'a morality play' about Western civilization.

Situating Pia Arke’s work at the limits of world history, Stefan Jonsson describes how Arke reclaims the unacknowledged margin as the centre of the world.