Becoming a symbol and losing control : The Gothenburg Book Fair and the alt-right debate

This chapter explores the processes by which cultural fairs can become symbols of larger societal debates and the potential consequences on their cultural activities. We focus on the case of the Gothenburg Book Fair, which between 2016 and 2017 became the center of an intense public debate on the appropriateness of an extreme right-wing publisher exhibiting at the Fair. Ambiguous since its start, the Fair was forced to take a stand on its commercial or cultural raisons-d'être and engaged in a media debate about Freedom of Expression and its state in Swedish society which shifted the focus of the Fair from literature to politics. The chapter shows how the Book Fair through its properties as a media event become a symbol of the upraise of the extreme right-wing movement and how this symbolization process transformed the Book Fair from being primarily a cultural event into an arena of political contestation. We point at three mechanisms of such transformation: temporally extending the field-level event; decentering the agency from the organizers to other centers of actions, and redefining the focus and eventually also the core of the event.