Christoffer Kølvraa
Biographic Data
| ID | 125928 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christoffer Kølvraa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christoffer |
| FAMILY NAME | Kølvraa |
| SIGNATURE | KØLVRAA C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Aarhus University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8600-914X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 21 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 135 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 21 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The Extreme Right at the Movies
The extreme-right practice of reviewing mainstream films is an overlooked, yet central part of their communicational activities. To more fully grasp the ideological function and effect of this practice, it is fruitful to revisit some fundamental questions about why extreme-right actors produce and/or engage with cultural forms and objects such as fictional narratives. Drawing especially on Fredric Jameson, it is suggested that the production/appr…
Fascism
Fascism has returned-not necessarily as a regime type, but as a central concept in political discourse. This editorial examines how the term "fascism" has been used to characterize Trumpism. While some historians have cautioned against simplistic analogies, other commentators and scholars insist that Trump embodies core fascist traits. Conceptual history provides a lens to analyze how fascism functions not only as an analytical category but also …
Imagining Alternative Worlds
Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century. It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four d…
Groping in the Dark
While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social history, and the limits of historiographical understanding in his discussion of the event, his thinking about the limits of the conceptual as such is harder to trace. However, a close reading of key texts where he discusses situations or events marked as "meaningless" or absurd, allows us to uncover both his ethics and analytics of the limit of meaning, of…
Affective Infrastructures of Re-emergence? Exploring Modalities of Heritage Practices in Nantes
The French city of Nantes has been heralded for both its creative and complex engagements with the dark heritage of its history as France's main slave port. In this article we examine the ways in which the colonial heritage has been dealt with in Nantes, arguing that we find here various processes and initiatives which can be understood as expressing or combining what we suggest are four main modes of colonial heritage practice: Repression, Remov…
Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces – An Introduction to the Special Issue
The contributions presented here were written in late 2019 and finalized in the early months of 2020. What unfolded on the global stage while the special issue was making its way through the publication process – the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter as a global agenda and the reenergizing of protests against both material and ideological colonial heritage – seemed at times almost about to overtake it; to render it "preemptiv…
Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right
This special issue sheds light on what we call the ‘cultural imaginaries’ of the contemporary European extreme right. The focus on cultural imaginaries—a term we will explore more fully below—entai
Embodying ‘the Nordic race’
Kølvraa’s article focuses on the cultural imaginary of the Scandinavian extreme right by analysing the online presence of the so-called Nordic Resistance Movement. He seeks to show how the cultural imaginaries of this National Socialist organization make use of the Scandinavian Viking heritage in three distinct ways. First, to produce a distinctly Nordic form of National Socialism and thus potentially make this ideology palatable to Nordic public…
Ferruh Yilmaz, How the Workers became Muslims; Immigration, Culture and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe
This article reviews How the Workers became Muslims; Immigration, Culture and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe
Psychoanalyzing Europe? Political Enjoyment and European Identity
This article seeks to discuss and illustrate how employing theoretical elements and interpretative frames from Lacanian psychoanalysis might help to conceptualize and analyze the affective dimension of European identity. European identity, as constructed in the discourses of European institutions, is believed to be crucial in legitimating the political project of European integration. It is argued that in order to understand how “desire” and joui…
Limits of Attraction
This article is part of the special section titled Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries, guest edited by Pamela Ballinger. The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2002–2003, was presented as the EU’s way of responding to the Eastern neighbours’ desires for closer ties to the Union. The policy ignored, however, that if such desires did exist they were aimed at full EU membership, rather than at mere neighbourliness. Indeed, the EU’s i…
Extreme right images of radical authenticity
Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in Nationa…
The attraction of ideology
A key question regarding ideology is how we might explain or understand its ability to attract and maintain support from human subjects -in other words what has been called the ‘grip’ of ideology. In the following, we aim to show that such a grip needs to be understood as operating in three different modes. While most contemporary theories of ideology conceive of these modes as symbolic systems and thus understand their grip as generated through …
European Fantasies
The question of European identity today seems to be all the more pressing, as the current financial crisis is not only quickly developing into one of internal political cohesion for the Union, but has also certainly aggravated the long‐standing problem of a lack of identification with the European political project among European populations. This article seeks to discuss this disenchantment with Europe through a concept of political myth. It arg…
Street Protests and Affects on YouTube Investigating DIY Videos of Violent Street Protests as an Archive of Affect and Event Desire
This article argues that YouTube, as a platform for sharing DIY videos, is an useful resource for understanding the role of affective processes before, during and after protest events. As a case study the article investigates the documentation on YouTube of two antagonistic demonstrations in Aarhus, Denmark, on 31 March 2012. We argue that the collected material, consisting of 71 YouTube videos, can be analysed to reveal a wish or will to experie…
The Nature of Nationalism
This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental is…
Past and Future in the Construction of Communal Identity
This article relates to the question of whether or to what extent identity is wholly constructed through language by engaging in a discussion of how the use of the past enters into the construction of communal identity. It argues that in order to understand why collective memory and the mythical narrativisation of the past which it frames are such powerful elements in the construction of collective identities, it must be distinguished from the sc…
Ideology and the crowd
This article discusses the ideological role of crowd experiences. Utilizing both classical crowd theory and ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it suggests that what happens to the subject in crowds can be understood as a de-subjectification linked to the drive and to an encounter with Other jouissance. Finally, it is argued that the concept of charisma might link the always transitory crowd experience with more permanent ideological identificati…
The Father on Display
In the 1980s, the EC engaged in trying actively to construct a European identity, primarily through a ’manufacturing of symbols’, such as a common flag, hymn and day of celebration. A lesser-known element of this symbolic construction was the elevation of the recently deceased Jean Monnet to a position as the undisputed ’founding father’ of Europe. The ’sanctification’ of Monnet culminated in the con-version of his house – purchased by the Europe…
Narrating a ‘new Europe’
The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ b…
Affect, Provocation, and Far Right Rhetoric
Many of those working within or along with the so-called affective turn in the humanities do so following the Deleuzian (cf. 1997) understanding of affect as a force or kind of intensity to be thought separate from processes of signification or discursive construction, indeed, as something that fundamentally disturbs or challenges the stability of such structures of meaning. As such, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro both emphasize the distinction…
Extreme right images of radical authenticity
Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in Nationa…
European Fantasies
The question of European identity today seems to be all the more pressing, as the current financial crisis is not only quickly developing into one of internal political cohesion for the Union, but has also certainly aggravated the long‐standing problem of a lack of identification with the European political project among European populations. This article seeks to discuss this disenchantment with Europe through a concept of political myth. It arg…
Narrating a ‘new Europe’
The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ b…
Psychoanalyzing Europe? Political Enjoyment and European Identity
This article seeks to discuss and illustrate how employing theoretical elements and interpretative frames from Lacanian psychoanalysis might help to conceptualize and analyze the affective dimension of European identity. European identity, as constructed in the discourses of European institutions, is believed to be crucial in legitimating the political project of European integration. It is argued that in order to understand how “desire” and joui…
Embodying ‘the Nordic race’
Kølvraa’s article focuses on the cultural imaginary of the Scandinavian extreme right by analysing the online presence of the so-called Nordic Resistance Movement. He seeks to show how the cultural imaginaries of this National Socialist organization make use of the Scandinavian Viking heritage in three distinct ways. First, to produce a distinctly Nordic form of National Socialism and thus potentially make this ideology palatable to Nordic public…
Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces – An Introduction to the Special Issue
The contributions presented here were written in late 2019 and finalized in the early months of 2020. What unfolded on the global stage while the special issue was making its way through the publication process – the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter as a global agenda and the reenergizing of protests against both material and ideological colonial heritage – seemed at times almost about to overtake it; to render it "preemptiv…
Limits of Attraction
This article is part of the special section titled Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries, guest edited by Pamela Ballinger. The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2002–2003, was presented as the EU’s way of responding to the Eastern neighbours’ desires for closer ties to the Union. The policy ignored, however, that if such desires did exist they were aimed at full EU membership, rather than at mere neighbourliness. Indeed, the EU’s i…
Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right
This special issue sheds light on what we call the ‘cultural imaginaries’ of the contemporary European extreme right. The focus on cultural imaginaries—a term we will explore more fully below—entai
The attraction of ideology
A key question regarding ideology is how we might explain or understand its ability to attract and maintain support from human subjects -in other words what has been called the ‘grip’ of ideology. In the following, we aim to show that such a grip needs to be understood as operating in three different modes. While most contemporary theories of ideology conceive of these modes as symbolic systems and thus understand their grip as generated through …
Ideology and the crowd
This article discusses the ideological role of crowd experiences. Utilizing both classical crowd theory and ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it suggests that what happens to the subject in crowds can be understood as a de-subjectification linked to the drive and to an encounter with Other jouissance. Finally, it is argued that the concept of charisma might link the always transitory crowd experience with more permanent ideological identificati…
Past and Future in the Construction of Communal Identity
This article relates to the question of whether or to what extent identity is wholly constructed through language by engaging in a discussion of how the use of the past enters into the construction of communal identity. It argues that in order to understand why collective memory and the mythical narrativisation of the past which it frames are such powerful elements in the construction of collective identities, it must be distinguished from the sc…
The Father on Display
In the 1980s, the EC engaged in trying actively to construct a European identity, primarily through a ’manufacturing of symbols’, such as a common flag, hymn and day of celebration. A lesser-known element of this symbolic construction was the elevation of the recently deceased Jean Monnet to a position as the undisputed ’founding father’ of Europe. The ’sanctification’ of Monnet culminated in the con-version of his house – purchased by the Europe…
Affect, Provocation, and Far Right Rhetoric
Many of those working within or along with the so-called affective turn in the humanities do so following the Deleuzian (cf. 1997) understanding of affect as a force or kind of intensity to be thought separate from processes of signification or discursive construction, indeed, as something that fundamentally disturbs or challenges the stability of such structures of meaning. As such, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro both emphasize the distinction…
Narrating a ‘new Europe’
The 1990s and 2000s saw a memory and remembrance boom at both the national and supra-/transnational level. Crucially, many of these emerging memory frames were not simply about a glorious and heroic past, as in, for example, traditional nationalist narratives. Rather, groups started to narrate their symbolic boundaries in a more inclusive way by admitting past wrongdoings. In this article, we look at a corpus of so-called ‘speculative speeches’ b…
Ideology and the crowd
This article discusses the ideological role of crowd experiences. Utilizing both classical crowd theory and ideas from Lacanian psychoanalysis, it suggests that what happens to the subject in crowds can be understood as a de-subjectification linked to the drive and to an encounter with Other jouissance. Finally, it is argued that the concept of charisma might link the always transitory crowd experience with more permanent ideological identificati…
The Father on Display
In the 1980s, the EC engaged in trying actively to construct a European identity, primarily through a ’manufacturing of symbols’, such as a common flag, hymn and day of celebration. A lesser-known element of this symbolic construction was the elevation of the recently deceased Jean Monnet to a position as the undisputed ’founding father’ of Europe. The ’sanctification’ of Monnet culminated in the con-version of his house – purchased by the Europe…
The Nature of Nationalism
This article inquires into how contemporary populist radical right parties relate to environmental issues of countryside and climate protection, by analyzing relevant discourses of the British National Party (BNP) and the Danish People's Party (DPP). It does so by looking at party materials along three dimensions: the aesthetic, the symbolic, and the material. The article discusses to what extent the parties' political stances on environmental is…
Past and Future in the Construction of Communal Identity
This article relates to the question of whether or to what extent identity is wholly constructed through language by engaging in a discussion of how the use of the past enters into the construction of communal identity. It argues that in order to understand why collective memory and the mythical narrativisation of the past which it frames are such powerful elements in the construction of collective identities, it must be distinguished from the sc…
European Fantasies
The question of European identity today seems to be all the more pressing, as the current financial crisis is not only quickly developing into one of internal political cohesion for the Union, but has also certainly aggravated the long‐standing problem of a lack of identification with the European political project among European populations. This article seeks to discuss this disenchantment with Europe through a concept of political myth. It arg…
Street Protests and Affects on YouTube Investigating DIY Videos of Violent Street Protests as an Archive of Affect and Event Desire
This article argues that YouTube, as a platform for sharing DIY videos, is an useful resource for understanding the role of affective processes before, during and after protest events. As a case study the article investigates the documentation on YouTube of two antagonistic demonstrations in Aarhus, Denmark, on 31 March 2012. We argue that the collected material, consisting of 71 YouTube videos, can be analysed to reveal a wish or will to experie…
Limits of Attraction
This article is part of the special section titled Recursive Easts, Shifting Peripheries, guest edited by Pamela Ballinger. The European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), launched in 2002–2003, was presented as the EU’s way of responding to the Eastern neighbours’ desires for closer ties to the Union. The policy ignored, however, that if such desires did exist they were aimed at full EU membership, rather than at mere neighbourliness. Indeed, the EU’s i…
Extreme right images of radical authenticity
Over recent years, the German extreme right has undergone significant changes, including the appropriation of symbols, styles, and action repertoires of contemporary (youth) cultures, sometimes even taken from the far left. In this article, we investigate extreme right visual communication through Facebook, focusing on claims to truth and authentic Nazism in relation to ‘history’, ‘nature’, and ‘gender roles’. These themes were central in Nationa…
The attraction of ideology
A key question regarding ideology is how we might explain or understand its ability to attract and maintain support from human subjects -in other words what has been called the ‘grip’ of ideology. In the following, we aim to show that such a grip needs to be understood as operating in three different modes. While most contemporary theories of ideology conceive of these modes as symbolic systems and thus understand their grip as generated through …
Psychoanalyzing Europe? Political Enjoyment and European Identity
This article seeks to discuss and illustrate how employing theoretical elements and interpretative frames from Lacanian psychoanalysis might help to conceptualize and analyze the affective dimension of European identity. European identity, as constructed in the discourses of European institutions, is believed to be crucial in legitimating the political project of European integration. It is argued that in order to understand how “desire” and joui…
Cultural imaginaries of the extreme right
This special issue sheds light on what we call the ‘cultural imaginaries’ of the contemporary European extreme right. The focus on cultural imaginaries—a term we will explore more fully below—entai
Embodying ‘the Nordic race’
Kølvraa’s article focuses on the cultural imaginary of the Scandinavian extreme right by analysing the online presence of the so-called Nordic Resistance Movement. He seeks to show how the cultural imaginaries of this National Socialist organization make use of the Scandinavian Viking heritage in three distinct ways. First, to produce a distinctly Nordic form of National Socialism and thus potentially make this ideology palatable to Nordic public…
Ferruh Yilmaz, How the Workers became Muslims; Immigration, Culture and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe
This article reviews How the Workers became Muslims; Immigration, Culture and Hegemonic Transformation in Europe
Affective Infrastructures of Re-emergence? Exploring Modalities of Heritage Practices in Nantes
The French city of Nantes has been heralded for both its creative and complex engagements with the dark heritage of its history as France's main slave port. In this article we examine the ways in which the colonial heritage has been dealt with in Nantes, arguing that we find here various processes and initiatives which can be understood as expressing or combining what we suggest are four main modes of colonial heritage practice: Repression, Remov…
Decolonizing European Colonial Heritage in Urban Spaces – An Introduction to the Special Issue
The contributions presented here were written in late 2019 and finalized in the early months of 2020. What unfolded on the global stage while the special issue was making its way through the publication process – the murder of George Floyd, the rise of Black Lives Matter as a global agenda and the reenergizing of protests against both material and ideological colonial heritage – seemed at times almost about to overtake it; to render it "preemptiv…
Groping in the Dark
While Reinhart Koselleck articulated the limits of conceptual history in relation to social history, and the limits of historiographical understanding in his discussion of the event, his thinking about the limits of the conceptual as such is harder to trace. However, a close reading of key texts where he discusses situations or events marked as "meaningless" or absurd, allows us to uncover both his ethics and analytics of the limit of meaning, of…
Fascism
Fascism has returned-not necessarily as a regime type, but as a central concept in political discourse. This editorial examines how the term "fascism" has been used to characterize Trumpism. While some historians have cautioned against simplistic analogies, other commentators and scholars insist that Trump embodies core fascist traits. Conceptual history provides a lens to analyze how fascism functions not only as an analytical category but also …
Imagining Alternative Worlds
Imagining Alternative Worlds explores how the far right employs fictionality as a powerful political tool in the 21st century. It does so by examining the far right’s own cultural production and commentary through a large collection of its novels, novellas, short stories, and film reviews, illustrating how the ‘alternative worlds’ articulated in such cultural products convey its ideology. More specifically, the book identifies and analyses four d…
The Extreme Right at the Movies
The extreme-right practice of reviewing mainstream films is an overlooked, yet central part of their communicational activities. To more fully grasp the ideological function and effect of this practice, it is fruitful to revisit some fundamental questions about why extreme-right actors produce and/or engage with cultural forms and objects such as fictional narratives. Drawing especially on Fredric Jameson, it is suggested that the production/appr…
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Law (14 works) · Law (13 works) · Politics (13 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Art (8 works)