Recognizing European modernities

For over a century Europe has been characterized by a multiplicity of capitalist modernities. At any moment, each country possesses its own distinctly modern qualities which are partly shaped through interrelationships with other countries. Each European commodity society has experienced successive, but differently overlapping, periods of industrial modernity (large-scale factories and urban growth), high modernity (social modernization promoted by social engineering) and hypermodernity (the acceleration of modernity, yielding new circumstances and sensibilities). Investigating any part of contemporary hypermodern Europe thus requires that it be brought into constellation with its industrial and high modern past. . Recognizing European Modernities explores a century of civilization through a critical examination of the extreme case of Sweden. Using montage - relayering multiple pasts and on-going presents - the book challenges the contemporary obsession with "postmodernity," demanding a deeper, more informed understanding of the extended danger characteristic of the European present. The author visits three spectacular spaces: the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897, the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930, and the Globe, a contemporary multi-purpose arena. Analysis of these pivotal spaces reveals the on-going process of modernization as new forms of consumption are repeatedly entangled in changing discourses of power, both of which become reworked and translated into cultural politics.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.