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2021 annual theme:
Historicizing Diversity
According to dictionaries, the English word “diversity” dates back to the mid-fourteenth century and originates in medieval Latin forms that had rather negative connotations, from the more benign “turn aside” to the more troublesome “contradiction, disagreement.” Its modern Russian equivalent, raznoobrazie, was not yet included in the Dictionary of the Russian Academy (Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi, 1789–1794) but was first used in print around 1785, according to Google Books Ngram and the Russian National Corpus. By this time, “diversity” was seen more as a challenge and a potential resource than a trouble. For example, it was recognized early on as an opportunity for sustaining political representation. In February 1788, in the Federalist Papers no. 60 Publius (Alexander Hamilton) argued:
There is sufficient diversity in the state of property, in the genius, manners, and habits of the people of the different parts of the Union, to occasion a material diversity of disposition in their representatives towards the different ranks and conditions in society. And though an intimate intercourse under the same government will promote a gradual assimilation in some of these respects, yet there are causes, as well physical as moral, which may, in a greater or less degree, permanently nourish different propensities and inclinations in this respect.*
* Federalist
no. 60. https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-51-60#s-lg-box-wrapper-25493436.
Regardless of whether the concept of diversity emerged in the fourteenth or eighteenth century, or whether the early American usage indeed reflected the inclusion of all types of human diversity (which was obviously not the case), most of human history had been permeated by diversity that did not yet have a special name, but this did not mean that the condition itself was never noticed and problematized. And when the special word was coined, its semantics varied dramatically depending on the historical context; in general, it has evolved from undertones of suspicion in the early modern period to the hierarchical renderings of modernity, and to the celebration and recognition of diversity’s productive potential nowadays. Diversity is a useful analytical concept, but without proper historical contextualization, it can mean very different things or nothing in particular.
In 2021 the editors of Ab Imperio invite contributors and readers to historicize diversity in thematic issues of the journal organized along four possible modes of dealing with the concept and different genres of historical inquiry into it. While difference in its variegated forms has attracted historians since at least the establishment of the principle of historicism and the critique of universalist and social scientific generic concepts, various historiographic paradigms have conceptualized the phenomenon differently. Microhistory and historical anthropology were the most intellectually insightful ways of thinking about difference and alterity, but most scholars in these fields have shown little interest in tackling and revising the metanarratives of global history according to their paradigms, and have thus allowed that broad canvas to be populated by national and Eurocentric narratives. Only with the advent of new imperial histories has the phenomenon of diversity received due attention both on the level of reconstructing human subjectivity and on the level of rethinking the globally guiding narratives of history. Even more important, the turn to unevenly structured difference on all levels of historical experience in the accounts of new imperial history has produced the effect of normalizing diversity as the fundamental social condition. As a result, the primary locus of diversity has shifted from the periphery of the Eurocentric view to center stage and from the voiceless “history from below” to the meaningful “history amid.”
As recent scholarship shows, the history of dealing with diversity and the modes of approaching it did not evolve in a steady linear way. So it seems more productive to identify four ideal types of tackling diversity that, arguably, can be discovered in any historical period and in virtually any society: (1) the stage before diversity is identified as a distinctive problem and therefore must have been taken as given; (2) the situation in which diversity is viewed primarily as an avoidable hindrance; (3) the moment of social anomie that deems any system of groupness conditional and limited in application; and (4) the generally positive and constructive approach to diversity. These four approaches to handling diversity will be addressed in four issues of Ab Imperio in 2021 as follows:
1/2021 Norm: Diversity as a Natural Order of Things and Lived Experience
Where was the norm before its codification? ● “Natural man” in reality and in social thinking, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Michael Foucault ● Ethnic blindness and ecumenism ● The idea of equality in history ● The ubiquitousness of inequality and a worldview that deems equality impossible ● The social cosmos of ordinary people in empire and nation ● The universality of laws and policies versus the idiosyncratic specificity of their application ● When language was nothing more than dialects ● Gender and kinship as the foundation of social order and the moving force behind its transformation ● Life in the middle ground and its subsequent representation in popular memory ● The anatomy of Soviet internationalism ● The aesthetic forms of expressing diversity in a homogeneous society ● Making legal pluralism sustainable ● Were genocides possible before problematizing diversity?
2/2021 Transgression: Diversity as a Sin and a Crime
“The Fall”: when was diversity recognized as a deficiency? ● The gradient of transgression’s perception, from feeling awkward to prosecuting a crime ● What came first, norm or transgression? ● Monotheist religion as a mechanism for accommodating and prosecuting diversity ● On diversity good and bad and those who define the difference ● How certain schemes to eradicate diversity have come into being, succeeded or failed ● Why are gender and generational differences so critical to the enemies of diversity? ● The Asiatic mode of production, mixed economy, and other existential fears of Soviet Marxism ● The multiple faces of Eurocentrism and other centrisms. Migrations and migrants ● High culture and the war on vernaculars ● Self-organization as a subversive practice and the origin of a new norm ● Assimilation and acculturation, and their influence on the normative cultural canon ● Are genocides inevitable under regimes that reject diversity?
3/2021 Anomie: Everything Is So Confusing
Theories and histories of anomie: how to rationalize and retell the story of confused people ● Navigating society with no clear rights and wrongs ● Who believes in post-truth and moral relativism, why and when this has been the case? ● Redefining the foe and the friend: the rules of war and the strategies of survival under fire ● Surviving and conceptualizing the revolution as the upended regime of difference ● The effect of anomie in the metropole and in the colonies ● “Don’t know much about history … Don’t know much about geography”: postimperial amnesia and postcolonial indifference ● In search of an authentic voice of distinctiveness after emancipation from the old order ● Subcultures, gray zones, and redrawing the boundaries of diversity ● The diversity of marginality: Bakhtin’s vnenakhodimost’, the political underground, the criminal underworld, and perestroika ● Why does anomie kill if difference is not cast in stone?
4/2021 Projects: Designing a Rational Arrangement of Diversity
Race, race everywhere: the mental map of Europe and the structuring of the New World, then and now ● Socioeconomic reforms as projects of recoding diversity ● The European space of diversity: from Europe as a constructed category to the European Union ● The postsecular state and society and the return of the history of religion ● Eurocentrism and authenticity: debates since the postcolonial turn ● Imperial modernities ● The production of knowledge about human diversity in the premodern, early modern, and modern historical contexts ● The rise and fall of multiculturalism: the history of the concept and its reception in different historical contexts ● Gender equality, inclusiveness, and the danger to diversity caused by decreeing its parameters ● What the grant-giving agencies love: the theoretical foundations of conflict resolution and the pitiful place of historians in the debate ● How are genocides still possible after all we have learned about them?
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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OTTO HARRASSOWITZ.
East View Publications, EBSCO, and
OTTO HARRASSOWITZ.
