Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

ABSTRACT

In pursuit of a novel perspective on legacies of empire in the present, this introduction addresses prominent debates related to post-imperialism, collective memory, and the construction of historical knowledge, while also reviewing recent trends in post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman studies. First, I examine the insights and limitations of ‘memory studies,’ ultimately proposing a more capacious model of post-imperial ‘ambivalence.’ I then recapitulate Walter Benjamin’s dialectical approach to historical knowledge in order to anchor the signal conceptual contribution of the volume, ‘textured historicity.’ This discussion is followed by a meditation on the role of metaphors in conceptualizing post-imperial legacies and a roster of the most common metaphors for post-imperial legacies. Finally, the introduction briefly summarizes the volume’s constituent essays and the rubrics that unite them.

KEYWORDS:

• Empire
• memory
• historicity
• ambivalence
• negative dialectics

Acknowledgements

The arguments and perspective that I forward in this introduction benefited incalculably from incisive comments by Gruia Bădescu, Alice von Bieberstein, Giulia Carabelli, Karin Doolan, Andrew Hodges, Miloš Jovanović, Annika Kirbis, William Mazzarella, and Piro Rexhepi.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Among the prominent literary titles that stylize this ‘presence of the past,’ Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina ([1945] 1977), Daša Drndić’s Trieste (2012), Claudio Magris’ Danube (1989), Jan Morris’ Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (2002), Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul: Memories and the City (2004), Joseph Roth’s The Radetzsky March ([1932] 1974), Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon ([1941] 2007), and Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday ([1942] 2009) warrant mention.

2. The scholarly literature on post-Habsburg and post-Ottoman legacies is increasingly vast. Key works on Habsburg legacies include Alfonsin (2006); Arens (2014); Ballinger (2003); Judson (2016); Schlipphacke (2014); Schorske (1981); and, Wolff (2012). For the persistence and revival of the Ottoman era in the present, see Argenti (2017b); Bryant (2016); Carney (2014); Hart (2013); Iğsız 2018; Meeker (2002); Mills (2010); Onar (2009); Taglia (2016); Tambar (2013, 2014, 2016); and, Walton (2010, 2016, 2017).

3. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz’ (2013) edited volume, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands is a welcome exception.

4. The influence of Nora’s argument can be gauged by the many criticisms levelled against it, especially in relation to its ‘methodological nationalism’ (Wimmer and Schiller 2002) and the rigidity with which Nora distinguished between ‘history’ and ‘memory.’ See, for instance, Klein (2000) and Palmié and Stewart (2016, 208, n. 2).

5. Marc Augé’s (2004) ruminations on ‘oblivion’ as a constituent feature of the passage of time suggest a parallel critique of memory and its privileging of conscious articulations between pasts and presents: ‘Of course, one does not forget everything. But neither does one remember everything. Remembering or forgetting is doing gardener’s work, selecting, pruning. Memories are like plants: there are those that need to be quickly eliminated in order to help the others burgeon, transform, flower’ (17).

6. Yael Navaro-Yashin (2012) has invoked Freud’s concept of the uncanny to interpret the legacies of war and the architecture of ruins in contemporary Cyprus with evocative effect. More recently, Charles Stewart (2017) has persuasively characterized history in the post-Ottoman world as uncanny.

7. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s more recent critique of historicism, ‘the mode of thinking (which) tells us that in order to understand the nature of anything in this world we must see it as an historically developing entity, that is, first, as an individual and unique whole … and, second, as something that develops over time’ (2000, 23), dovetails with Benjamin’s thoughts here. See also Palmié and Stewart (2016) and Tambar (2014, 43).

8. Susan Buck-Morss’ summary of Benjamin’s insight in The Arcades Project is evocative: ‘Corsets, feather dusters, red and green-colored combs, old photographs, souvenir replicas of the Venus di Milo, collar buttons to shirts long since discarded – these battered historical survivors from the dawn of industrial culture that appeared together in the dying arcades as ‘a world of secret affinities’ were the philosophical ideas, as a constellation of concrete, historical referents’ (1991, 4, emphasis in original). See also Walton (2019).

9. One of the key epigraphs for Benjamin’s essay, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ is a quotation from the historian Jules Michelet, ‘Chaque époque rêve la suivante’ (‘Every epoch dreams that to follow’) (1999, 4).

10. Adorno’s notion of the ‘yielding’ of negative dialectics is pertinent in relation to The Arcades Project: ‘If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye’ ([1966] 1973, 27–28). The Arcades Project is a testament to Benjamin's ‘lingering eye’ for the minutiae of the Parisian cityscape, and a study in yielding to the object, rather than its category. I thank William Mazzarella for directing me to this passage.

11. A broader comparison and contrast between Benjamin’s negative dialectics of history and Foucault’s double method of archaeology and genealogy (see Foucault 1972, 1977) is beyond my purview here. That said, I strongly suspect that, despite the tendency to assign the two thinkers to disparate political-scholarly trajectories and camps, there is ample ground for commensuration and reconciliation between their models of history and historical knowledge.

12. More generally, Benjamin’s ‘off modern’ (Boym 2002, xvi) sensibility and critique of historicism have lately inspired new currents in post-colonial, decolonial, and counter-Orientalist scholarship, especially in the Middle East. Particularly worth noting in this context is the workshop sponsored in 2017 by the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien, titled ‘‘On the Ruins of History’-A Walter Benjamin Moment in Arab Thought?’ (https://www.eume-berlin.de/veranstaltungen/workshops/workshops-seit-2006/on-the-ruins-of-history-a-walter-benjamin-moment-in-arab-thought.html, accessed 24 February 2019). I thank the anonymous reviewer for alerting me to this initiative.

13. Even more strongly, we might say that textured historicity directs attention to the mutual constitution of historical subjects and historical objects. Michel Rolph Trouillot grasps this dialectical process of mutual constitution: ‘The collective subjects who supposedly remember did not exist as such at the time of the events they claim to remember. Rather, their constitution as subjects goes hand in hand with the continuous creation of the past. As such, they do not succeed the past: they are its contemporaries’ (1995, 16).

14. Another comparison worth pursuing, but beyond the confines of my argument here, is the relation between Benjaminian ‘constellations’ of past and present and Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the chronotope. While both concepts gesture to the spatialization of time and temporalization of space, chronotopes are decidedly matters of discourse and narrative, while ‘constellations’ are better construed as ‘infra-discursive.’ See also Palmié and Stewart (2016, 218–221).

15. While beyond the scope of this essay, a few comments on the relationship between ‘textured historicity’ and the recent appeal for an ‘anthropology of history’ on the part of Palmié and Stewart (2016) are apposite here. Palmié and Stewart advocate ‘the exploration of how history is conceived and represented to take in non-Western societies, where ethnographic study can reveal local forms of historical production that do not conform to the canons of standard historiography’ (Ibid., 208). In light of the interstitial, mediating character of most of the sites discussed in this volume (see also Todorova 2009), I remain wary of the oil-and-water distinction between Western and non-Western that coordinates Palmié and Stewart’s argument; in a comparable sense, our essays interrogate intersections of historiographic and non-historiographic practices (see, especially, my own contribution and that by Emily Neumeier). That said, the imperatives of textured historicity clearly resonate with Palmié and Stewart’s project of ‘identifying contemporary Western historiography and its ‘historicist’ philosophical underpinnings as objects of study in their own right’ (2016, 209).

16. The quest for better metaphors has also fuelled a comprehensive reckoning with anthropological theory. In my view, da Col and Graeber’s (2011) summons to return to ‘ethnographic theory’ and to abandon the theoretical scaffolding of post-structuralist and critical theory registers a pervasive exhaustion with the metaphors gleaned from these latter intellectual traditions. Rather than reactionary rejection of post-structuralism and continental thought – itself rooted in a false antimony – it seems to me far more productive to forge syntheses of ‘ethnographic’ and ‘critical’ theory, and the metaphors bestowed by each. William Mazzarella’s recent Mana of Mass Society (2017) is exemplary in its pursuit of this endeavour.