Приглашение авторов в Forum AI: Беларуская постколониальная революция

 

Приглашение авторов в Forum AI: Беларуская постколониальная революция

Шесть лет назад мы обнаружили особую продуктивность концепции “постколониальной революции” для анализа украинского Евромайдана как беспрецедентного феномена – утверждения коллективной субъектности через переопределение принципов солидарности и творческое воссоздание нации, а не противопоставление себя некому нормативному Иному:

Украинская революция постоколониальна, поскольку она не просто стремится свергнуть политическую и экономическую тиранию (иностранную или отечественную), но и высвобождает силы самоорганизации общества. Более того: программа революции и, в особенности, постреволюционного периода была определена преимущественно самими гражданами Украины и по их правилам. … Судя по риторике лидеров украинского общественного мнения, возникающий тип “новых украинцев” не определяет себя через противопоставление всему “колониальному” (и поэтому не оставаясь, по сути, в плену навязанных колонизатором ментальных рамок). Новые украинцы творчески занимаются своим делом, изобретая новую страну для себя, и когда их вынуждают отвечать на внешнее давление, их ответ формулируется в их собственной логике.

В определенном смысле беларуское движение в защиту волеизъявления избирателей, фальсифицированного на президентских выборах 9 августа 2020 г., представляет более чистый пример постколониальной революции. Как можно судить на основании массового потока информации, поступающего в режиме реального времени непосредственно с места событий, (1) в беларуском движении участвует гораздо большая часть населения страны – порядка 15% если считать мужчин и женщин в возрасте от 15 до 65 лет включительно; (2) это движение индифферентно по отношению к культурным идентичностям и в значительной степени русскоязычно, при этом оставаясь безусловно беларуским политически и в смысле признания фундаментального значения беларуской культуры и языка; и (3) оно нейтрально по отношению к соседним странам и не использует реальную или воображаемую угрозу национальной безопасности как мобилизующий фактор. Удивительно мирный и дисциплинированный характер протеста в Беларуси отражает не только тактическую необходимость перед лицом подавляющего превосходства репрессивного аппарата режима (в отличии от случая Украины 2014 г.), но и принципиально неантагонистическую интеллектуальную установку движения. Ему не требуется фигура Иного – ни в прошлом, ни в настоящем – для утверждения собственной субъектности, с чем связано примечательное отсутствие историзирующей риторики и маргинальность упоминаний Великого княжества Литовского Раннего Нового времени, непродолжительного периода независимости в 1918 г. или долукашенковской эпохи начала 1990-х годов. Использование бело-красно-белого флага как главного символа протеста опирается на символизм новейших событий, а не на отсылки к славному прошлому.    

Глядя на события в Беларуси с этой точки зрения, особую важность приобретает документирование и изучение разворачивающихся процессов постколониальной самоорганизации новой беларуской нации. Как обычно бывает с большинством революций, практически никто не ожидал ее сейчас в Беларуси. Поэтому важно зафиксировать момент самоописания и практики до наступления этапа, когда эти события задним числом будут рационализированы как “история”. Главный вопрос – создаются ли в ходе спонтанных действий “субалтернов” новые формы артикулирования политического воображения и групповой принадлежности, или гегемонные дискурсы наподобие европейской политической интеграции или этнонационального сообщества берут верх?

Редакторы Ab Imperio приглашают исследователей, принимающих участие в протестах, имеющих возможность проводить интервью и собирать информацию иным способом или имеющих доступ к этой информации, принять участие в тематическом форуме, запланированном в номере 3/2020 (сдается в типографии к началу декабря). Мы также рассмотрим возможность публикации аналитических нарративов, основанных на личном участии в событиях. Мы понимаем, что беларуская революция продолжается, и перспектива инсайдеров и участников отличается от перспективы исследователей, воспринимающих события со стороны и ретроспективно. Поэтому жанр материалов не ограничен: главным критерием отбора является рефлексия по отношению к собственной позиции исследователя. (Примеры возможных форматов материалов подобного форума см. в номере 3/2014). Чтобы обсудить возможное участие в форуме, пишите редакторам по адресу abimperio.inc@gmail.com.

Жыве Беларусь!

Call for Papers: The Belarusian Postcolonial Revolution

Call for Papers: The Belarusian Postcolonial Revolution

Six years ago we found a new concept of “postcolonial revolution” to be exceptionally productive in analyzing the Ukrainian Euromaidan as an unprecedented instance of claiming collective subjectivity through redefining solidarity and creatively reenacting the nation rather than through negating any normative Other:

Ukrainian revolution is postcolonial because it not only set out to overthrow the political and economic hegemony of a tyrant (foreign or domestic) but also released the forces of societal self-organization. Even more: the public agenda of revolution and, particularly, of the postrevolutionary period, has been defined predominantly by the citizens of Ukraine and on their terms. … Judging by the rhetoric of leaders of Ukrainian public opinion, the emerging type of “new Ukrainians” do not define themselves by negating everything “colonial” (thus effectively remaining within the hold of colonially imposed mental frames). They are creatively minding their business, inventing a new country for themselves, and when they have to respond to outside pressure, they frame the response in their own terms.

In a way, the Belarusian movement in defense of the popular vote falsified in the presidential election of August 9, 2020, presents an even purer example of postcolonial revolution. As can be judged by the abundance of real-life reporting on the ground: (1) it involves a much higher proportion of the country’s population – up to 15 percent if counting all people ages fifteen to sixty-five; (2) it is indifferent to cultural identities and is conducted largely in the Russian language while remaining adamantly Belarusian politically and in regard to recognizing the fundamentality of Belarusian culture and language; and (3) it is neutral to neighboring countries and does not use real or imagined national security concerns as a mobilizing factor. The remarkably peaceful and orderly character of the Belarusian protests reflects not only a tactical necessity in the face of the overwhelming repressive apparatus of the regime (which was not the case in Ukraine in 2014) but also the decisively non-antagonistic intellectual predisposition of the movement. It does not need the Other to validate its own subjectivity – neither in the present nor the past – hence the remarkable absence of historicizing rhetoric, the marginality of references to the early modern Grand Duchy of Lithuania or the short-lived independence in 1918, or the pre-Lukashenko period of the early 1990s. The use of the white-red-white flag as the main symbol of protest is substantiated in light of recent events, not as a relic of some glorious past.

Seeing the events in Belarus from this vantage point, it becomes particularly important to document and study the unfolding process of postcolonial self-organization of the new Belarusian nation. As is the case with most revolutions, virtually nobody was able to intuit its coming. Hence, it is important to register the moment of self-description and practice before the time when events become retrospectively rationalized as history. The central question is whether spontaneous subaltern actions lead to novel ways of articulating politics and belonging or are superseded by hegemonic discourses of European political integration and ethnonational community?  

The editors of Ab Imperio invite scholars participating in the protests who are able to conduct interviews and collect other data or have access to such data to contribute to the thematic forum scheduled for the 3/2020 issue of the journal (to be sent to the printer by December). We welcome self-reflective narratives based on personal experience of the events, too. We understand that the revolution is ongoing and the perspectives of insiders and participants differ from those of researchers who look at the events retrospectively. Hence there are no limitations in terms of genre of contributions: the sole selection requirement is the reflexivity of the scholar’s personal position. (Please see issue 3/2014 for examples for possible formats). To discuss your contribution please contact the editors at abimperio.inc@gmail.com.

 

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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