2020 annual program

2020 annual theme:

When Postimperial Meets Postnational: Envisioning New Forms of Groupness in Historical Perspective

Growing sectarianism in modern public life operationalizes identity politics, thus reflecting a more fundamental phenomenon of social imagination. This type of social imagination attempts to counter uncertainty that is caused by the rapid and unpredictable transformation of all spheres of life by insisting on the persistence of some rigidly defined collective entities. If there is just one way a group and its rights can be legitimately imagined (a race, a gender, or an ethnicity), it becomes easier to preserve the familiar social order even if the entire economic, cultural, and political contexts underlying this order have changed beyond recognition. This cognitive mechanism of identity politics substitutes for a lack of proper reflection on the changed world and the underdeveloped vision of new social forms that fit the new world. 

We find the same cognitive mechanism at work in social sciences and humanities, which are supposed to be at the vanguard of forging the new type of social imaginary. The same politics and conceptual apparatus of groupness that developed back in the mid-twentieth century continue to lock scholarly analysis in the rigid framework of collective entities, such as “nations” and “empires.” Decades of constructivism did not change the habit of using these notions as shorthand for actual homogeneous groups or coherent structures (except that it has become customary to acknowledge that they might be “constructed” from other various elements, rather than being “primordial”). In this logic of social imagination congruent with modern identity politics, there can be only one way of “seeing like a state,” collective “Russians” are expected to exhibit a common attitude to the homogeneous “West,” and Soviet citizens are supposed to “speak Bolshevik” as stipulated by their assumed collective identity. Descriptions of the Habsburg, the Ottoman, and the Russian empires as “multinational” in the very language of analysis recuperate the constituent elements of these empires, that is, the nations or ethniciethnicities, as structural elements coming together into a larger composite. New historical directions, such as “transnational” or “transimperial” approaches perform the same function in a historiographic field that is undergoing a major conceptual transformation: instead of relativizing nations and empires as structures, they actually reestablish them. 

It is not that these assumptions are wrong, but they ignore the rich reality of attitudes and practices that do not fit into the procrustean bed of the language of social sciences and humanities, which is permeated with identity politics–like conventions and presents groupness as an obvious and unquestionable category. The alternative is not an anarchist rebellion against models and categories, but a more attentive and trusting attitude to the ways people have experienced and practiced their groupness in various aspects: cultural and political, social and economic. It is the complex intersection of these aspects that forms an imperial situation, rather than any hypothetical “imperial structures”: entangled societies are not easily differentiated (and hence disintegrated) along clear “national” lines precisely because cultural, territorial, and political affinities do not coincide neatly. When they do, no repressive imperial regime is capable of preventing dissolution of the entangled space of diversity. By the same token, true decolonization remains an elusive goal insofar as postcolonial formations readily adopt a groupist ontology akin to identity politics – one that ignores the transformative influence of social contacts and cultural dialogue on any preexisting collective entities. Learning to decipher languages of self-description and self-expression employed by historical actors is central to the task of reconstructing the forms of groupness that were relevant to them. Even when they talked explicitly about nation or empire, they might understand these concepts differently from us, from their predecessors, or from each other. Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts) is an important prerequisite for this type of research, but no generalized connotations as they are registered in dictionaries or other publications can substitute for the contextualized analysis of groupness as performed by particular individuals, in specific circumstances. Any fixed identities become problematized when they are deconstructed against the multidimensional context of the imperial situation.  

The rigid academic politics of contemplating groupness strives to conceal the fact that we live in a postimperial and even postnational world. This new world still lacks a developed language to describe the new experience of solidarity that on many levels transcends national borders and opposes empire-like claims to global hegemony. On a macro level and in a normative approach the assumption still holds that nationlike groupness is the only format capable of maintaining the principle components of the global social order. That is, it is believed – because insufficient thought has been given to exploring modern alternative forms – that only nation can assure civic participation in a community, the integration of foreign elements into the community in an attempt to avoid social anomie, and the sustaining of socially oriented state policies and pluralism in the international arena. This assumption seems all the more baseless given that various historical studies have questioned its validity when applied to different situations in the past. Historians are trying to develop a language for describing civic activism beyond the framework of the bounded community, of social cohesion beyond the normative notions of acculturation or assimilation, and of socially minded politics or a pluralist global world without recourse to the international play of “national interests.” 

In 2020, the editors of Ab Imperio invite colleagues to join this collective intellectual effort and share their studies covering any time period, in any society, that highlight the gap and tensions between the ways that people experience groupness and how this collective entity is conceptualized – synchronously and in subsequent narratives. Using notions such as “the state,” “nation,” “ethnicity,” and “empire” as elements of our analytical language, we will be looking for the ambivalences and multiplicity of their connotations. We will be paying special attention to the ways that the social forms thus denoted were emerging and, later, transforming into something else – and who was monitoring and explaining this process. We have learned so much about empires and nations over the past century. It is time to look for what remained obscured by these clear-cut entities, for other ways that people tried to articulate their social vision (even if they were using the same familiar words). 

    
1/2020 “In a Fit of Absence of Mind”: The Mechanism of Empire-Building

Was any empire created by a preliminary design? ● What made empire-building successful, and what compromised it? ● Is it possible to build an empire while having something different in mind, and how? ● Are empires produced from the top or the bottom? ● When do empires become visible to contemporaries? ● Is “translatio imperii” real? ● Revisiting narratives about empires by various historical actors: what experiences and ideas do they reflect and what languages do they employ? ● How did imperial challenges survive and reconfigure across chronological boundaries (e.g., Great Reforms, Revolution of 1917, World War II)?.

2/2020 “We the People”: The “Nation” between Tribe and Republic
 

The many things called “nation” in different cultures and eras. ● Do all nations operate in the same way? ● Is there a recipe for a true nation? ● The phenomenon of imperial nationalisms. ● Overlooked forms of nationalization: economic activities, productivity, communications. ● Social sciences and humanities constructing hierarchies of groupness in imperial and nationalizing contexts. ● Definitions and experiences of collective subjecthood and citizenship between “empire” and “nation.”

3/2020 “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”: Hybridity, the Nationalizing Empire, and Imperialist Nationalism
 
What is social reality between the “ideal forms” of empire and nation? ● How does an empire transform into a nation, and vice versa? ● Can hybrid forms self-sustain? Revisiting the problem of subalternity.  ● The USSR as a hybrid of empire and nation. ● Forms of social imagination in complex societies. ● Human sciences and the challenge of hybridity. ● Multiple temporalities, progressive evolutionism, and other ways of thinking about social time in complex societies.

4/2020 Groupness and Its Discontent: Historical Visions of the “Post” Order 
 
History of “certain schemes to improve the human condition.” ● Visions of groupness in historical and comparative perspectives. ● Politics of the future and reinterpretations of the past. ● The field of identity politics and its epistemological and political foundations. ● Postimperial historiographies and postcolonial history writing. ● Groupness as a problem in global and transnational histories. ● The evolution of legal discourses of individual and group rights and responsibilities. ● Assembling groupness in the moments of radical ruptures (revolutions, civil wars, political disintegration). ● Is the postnational world really possible: revisiting literary and philosophical utopias.

Permanent Sections:

Theory and Methodology ■ History ■ Archive ■ Sociology, Anthropology & Political Science ■ ABC: Empire & Nationalism Studies ■ Newest Mythologies ■ Historiography and Book Reviews.

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