Culture, Art and Communication

Gideon Mendel’s ongoing photographic work documenting HIV/ AIDS, first started in 1993, has seen shifts not only in production but also in the author’s representation of his subjects. This paper looks at three texts of Mendel’s work, taken from three different stages of Mendel’s career and reads the shifting paradigm taking Mendel from photojournalist to activist armed with documentary photography as a tool of social change. This thesis explores how different positionings as an author and different representations of the subjects, living and dying, with HIV/AIDS influences meaning-making, and what that means for documentary photography as a tool of social change.

The understanding of Swedish ‘immigrant literature’ as an expression or illustration of ethnicity is, for several reasons, deeply problematic. For the representation of ethnic experiences and identities in ‘immigrant literature’ is a product of the discursive construction of this kind of literature, rather than by the authors’ ethnic cultures. And this construction generates extremely narrow, and often othering and exoticizing, representations of non-Swedish ethnicities, since it is conditioned by the emerging self-image of Sweden as a multicultural society – a self-image underpinned by a rigid opposition between Swedish and immigrant culture. Futhermore, the view of ‘immigrant literature’ as a literature expressing ethnic experiences runs counter to an understanding of ethnicity as a cultural construct, since it presupposes that ethnicities exist outside of, and prior to, cultural representations. Thereby this view is indicative of (or, even, contributing to) the dominating Swedish discourse about ethnicity – a discourse which racializes non-Swedish ethnicities. In addition to this, the view of ‘immigrant literature’ as a literature expressing ethnicity is at odds with the representation of the relationship between cultural texts and ethnicity put forward in at least some ‘immigrant novels’. Works such as Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Ett öga rött and Marjaneh Bakhtiari’s Kalla det vad fan du vill, for example, criticize both the construction of ‘immigrant literature’ as a source of information about non-Swedish ethnicities and the understanding of ethnicity as a pre-cultural category underpinning this view. By deconstructing the idea that literature and other cultural practices can express ethnic experiences, and by arguing that these practices should rather be viewed as constitutive of such experiences, Bakhtiari and Khemiri not only criticize the dominant view of ‘immigrant literature’. They also point out how the study of this literature – as well as literary criticism in general – could contribute to the understanding of ethnicity, namely by critically investigating how this phenomenon is constructed in literary texts.

In "From Redistribution to Recognition?" Nancy Fraser formulates a theory aiming at defending only those versions of identity politics that can be coherently combined with socialist politics. Many commentators have criticized the analytical distinction between economic and cultural injustice underpinning this theory. I argue, however, that it is Fraser's inability to uphold this distinction that makes her argument problematic, and that a clearer analytical distinction between the categories class and identity makes possible both a more theoretically satisfying critique of the "postsocialist" condition and the formulation of a radical politics that addresses economic as well as cultural injustices.

In this paper I describe how contemporary Swedish literature which thematizes cultural diversity is understood within a powerful discourse about the so-called multicultural society, centred on an opposition between a culturally homogenous past and a culturally diverse present, and emphasizing the phenomena ethnicity and identity. I also try to suggest an alternative way of relating literature to a society characterized by diversity. This suggestion is based on Walter Benn Michaels’ and Nancy Fraser’s analyses of the epoch of “posthistoricism” and “the postsocialist condition” respectively, and my argument is that the study of the relationship between literature and diversity should be undertaken from a transformative/deconstructive perspective.

In this article I analyze the representation of the Swedish city Malmö, on the local authority's website. The most important theme in this representation is that Malmö, because of economic re-structuring and immigration has become a post-industrial city characterized by a high degree of cultural/ethnic diversity. My analysis aims at mapping how this representation is conditioned by partly contradictory ideological pressures emanating from global, national, and local economic and symbolic processes. Specific attention is given to the representation of time, and to the history-narrative underpinning the idea about Malmö's tranformation into a post-industrial and multicultural city.

The article (published in the edited collection "New Dimensions of Diversity in the Nordic Countries" 2006) explores how the representation of class in Kristian Lundberg's novel "Yarden" is conditioned by the ideological change accompanying the downfall of the Swedish welfare state as well as by conditions specific to the realm of literature.

In this article, we compare the phenomenon of working-class literature in Sweden and the United States. After examining how working-class literatures have evolved in both countries, we analyze how they have been conceptualized in two academic fields: contemporary U.S. working-class studies and the study of Swedish literary history. We discuss the material and historical contexts shaping these conceptualizations, critique them on theoretical grounds, and offer ways that comparative approaches help us better understand the phenomenon of working-class literature. Our main argument is that our analysis makes visible two important features of this literature. The first of these, inscribed in the very concept of the term, is that working-class literature is both a literary phenomenon and a phenomenon relating to working-class life. The second feature – a far less obvious, but not less important one – is that working-class literatures are always historically and geographically situated and, thus, assume divergent shapes in different times and locations. We argue that working-class literature as a phenomenon is, therefore, always in a process of new formations. In doing so, we move away from narrow nationalistic views of working-class literature as a defined term and, using a comparative approach, allow for new vantage points in the analysis of the relationship between class and culture.

With the aim of contributing to scholarly discussions about how to conceptualise the relationship between the art form of comics and the working class, this article analyses the Swedish comics artist Mats Källblad’s graphic novel Hundra år i samma klass [A Hundred Years in the Same Class], focusing on its self-reflexive discussion and problematising of the idea about comics as a working-class art form. Special attention is given to intertextual connections to Swedish working-class literature and to Källblad’s questioning of the idea that the opposition between popular and highbrow culture should be analogous with that between the working class and the bourgeoisie.

This article discusses the tradition of Swedish working-class literature and the relationship between taste and class. First, I analyze the representation of this relationship in Swedish working-class writer Ivar Lo-Johansson's novel Kungsgatan [King Street] from 1935. Thereafter, I discuss the whole tradition of Swedish working-class literature-in which Lo-Johansson's novel occupies a central position. This tradition constitutes a challenge to received ideas about class and taste, mainly because its consecration as a central strand in Swedish literature and its dissemination to a mass audience in the working class make it problematic to uphold conventional distinctions between popular/working-class and high/bourgeois culture. Finally, I argue that the challenging of these distinctions is not only a key to a better understanding of Lo-Johansson's novel, but it also shows that Swedish working-class literature can serve as a catalyst for re-theorizations within working-class studies of the relationship between class and taste as something that is historically specific, rather than universal.

The conference ‘Is Economic Inequality also a Literary Problem?’ held at Uppsala University, Sweden, in 2017 raised the following questions: What does literature have to do with inequality? Does it contribute to its reproduction, or can it be a force of resistance? Is it fair to even ask of literature and literary studies that they address the problem of economic inequality? This essay claims the answers to these questions are conditioned by the historical contexts of the critics grappling with them and the literatures that they study. Employing an analysis of the theme of poverty in contemporary Swedish-language working-class literature, I argue that the consecration of this literature as an important strand in Swedish national literature has allowed it to express radical critique of the economic inequalities lying at the heart of capitalism. Furthermore, I argue that this insight could be used as a starting-point for challenging some of the more pessimistic views expressed by critics of working-class literature regarding its political potentials.

The aim of this collection is to contribute to the forging of a more robust, politically useful, and theoretically elaborate understanding of working-class literature(s).
These essays map a substantial terrain: the history of working-class literature(s) in Argentina, Denmark, Germany, Japan, Singapore, South Africa and Ireland. Together with the essays in a previous volume – which cover Russia/The Soviet Union, The USA, Finland, Sweden, The UK, and Mexico – they give a complex picture of working-class literature(s) from an international perspective, without losing sight of national specificities.
By capturing a wide range of definitions and literatures, the two volumes give a broad and rich picture of the many-facetted phenomenon of working-class literature(s), disrupt narrow understandings of the concept and phenomenon, as well as identify and discuss some of the most important theoretical and historical questions brought to the fore by the study of this literature.If read as stand-alone chapters, each contribution gives an overview of the history and research of a particular nation’s working-class literature. If read as a whole (which we hope you do), they contribute toward a more complex understanding of the global phenomenon of working-class literature(s).

In this article I describe how contemporary Swedish literature which thematizes cultural diversity is understood within a powerful discourse about the so-called multicultural society, centred on an opposition between a culturally homogenous past and a culturally diverse present, and emphasizing the phenomena ethnicity and identity. I also try to suggest an alternative way of relating literature to a society characterized by diversity. This suggestion is based on Walter Benn Michaels' and Nancy Fraser's analyses of the epoch of "posthistoricism" and "the postsocialist condition" respectively, and my argument is that the study of the relationship between literature and diversity should be undertaken from a transformative/deconstructive perspective.