Stefan Jonsson

Biography

B. 1961. Docent in Aesthetics, Södertörn University. PhD in Literature, Duke U. 1997. Author of several books in post-colonial studies, literary studies, cultural theory, and European modernism, most recently A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions (Columbia UP, 2008). Fellow at Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 1998-2000. Visiting professor, U of Michigan, 2006. Involved in two research projects: “The Image of the Masses in European Culture”; “European Integration and European Colonialism”, the latter funded by the Swedish Research Council. Literary critic at Dagens Nyheter.

Ongoing research

This project is an investigation of concepts that serve to interpret human collectives and explain historical change. Since its modern inception, European human and social science has attributed historical agency to collectives by calling them “classes “nations,” “masses,” “peoples,” or “cultures” – terms that have profoundly shaped our historical consciousness. These terms are now contested, theoretically and politically, and researchers seek new ways of describing collective phenomena. Jonsson will chart the conceptual geography that emerges as scholars in philosophy, post-colonial studies, critical anthropology, and spatial cultural history trace collective modes of being and acting. Important notions will be “network,” “subalternity,” “multitude,” “migrant,” “flow,” “movement,” “community,” and “humanity.” A study of this kind is needed because these ideas about the common and the universal heavily influence future developments of human and social science and its views of cultural transformations. Two hypotheses will be tried: (1) the new concepts avoid reference to fixed identities, thus rejecting prevalent modes of cultural analysis that see actions and artefacts as “representations” of group identities; (2) they understand the collective as a spatial, rather than temporal or historical phenomenon. Consequently, a general aim is (3) to historicize these conceptions of collective being and action, so as to disclose that each presents a different model of a liveable social future. His project will result in an English monograph, to be translated into Swedish, and before that in one or two articles for international journals.

Selected bibliography

A Brief History of the Masses: Three Revolutions. New York:

Columbia UP, 2008,

– Subject Without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity. Durham/

London: Duke UP, 2001

– Världen i vitögat: tre essäer om västerländsk kultur. Stockholm: Norstedts, 2008

– De dödas testamente - och andra essäer. Stockholm: Norstedts (forthcoming in 2009)

– Masses Mind Matter: Political Passions and Collective Violence in Post-Imperial Austria.” I Representing the Passions: Histories, Bodies, Visions. Red. Richard Meyer. London: The Getty Research Institute Publications, 2003.