Toward a Postnational History of Eurasia: Deconstructing Empires, Denationalizing Groupness
Over the past twenty-three years, hundreds of scholars from dozens of countries have been developing the field of new imperial history as part of Ab Imperio’s academic network. As a coordinator of this collective research effort, AI has decisively placed explorations of Northern Eurasia’s past and present in conversation with students of supranational formations and composite states, imperial societies, nation-building projects, and colonialism, as well as of postimperial imaginations and global encounters. Its title literally meaning “from empire,” Ab Imperio began a concerted effort at epistemological decolonization long before “decolonization” became a political fad. The journal’s 2023 annual program invites contributors to apply the new knowledge and conceptual vision acquired over these years to revisit historical problems and theoretical concepts that have habitually been framed by the teleological and binary dualisms of empire and nation, hybridity and authenticity, archaism and modernity.
Specifically, the program focuses on the social mechanisms that enable and sustain universalism, diversity, and plural agencies; on the nature of groupness and the epistemological ambiguity of posthumanism; and on the constraints of temporal and spatial imaginations that continue reproducing the binary oppositions of empire and nations. These broad themes run through the studies of historical empires, postimperial formations and imaginations. They also increasingly play a central role in modern politics. The rise of the postnational state, announced by Jürgen Habermas in the late 1990s, has recently manifested itself mostly in the spectacular failure and decomoposition of the modern nation-state in many advanced countries. The handling of the COVID-19 pandemic is just the most obvious example of how the disciplinary practices and institutions of societal mobilization that were so effective in the mid-twentieth century are no longer effective or even sustainable. An important reason that the collapse of old structures has not been compensated for by the emergence of the predicted new forms of social organization is the prevalence of methodological nationalism in science and politics. This epistemological stance deems it impossible to conceptualize a modern supranational society in terms other than nation-centered and thus imperatively nationalizes everything “postnational.” Nationalizing a postnational society inevitably reporoduces only a dysfunctional version of a nation-state, just as the retrospective nationalizing of anational or multinational polities in the past yields false historical conclusions.
How can we resist the logic of our own analytical language determined by normative visions of social and political space bound by the nation? What can we achieve analytically going past the colonial paradigm and problematizing irregular imperial diversity beyond the postcolonial binaries and national optics? How can we mobilize the immensely rich research material offered by the study of imperial pasts to develop a scholarly language beyond the national limits? It is in this research context that new imperial history acquires exceptional relevance. Studying societies of the past – often archaic and reactionary – new imperial history, nevertheless, offers a unique opportunity to identify and explore anational or paranational social mechanisms at work. Their critical analysis is the only resource for developing truly modern and progressive forms of postnational imageries as a precondition for a more inclusive and just society.
1/2023 Dynamics of Imperialism and Nationalism in Eurasia
● Decolonization 3.0: 1917–1928; 1989–1991; 2022– ● Rethinking the binary opposition of nation and empire ● Empire and nation as categories of practice and analysis ● Anticolonial nationalisms in Eurasia in comparative and global perspectives ● Soviet historical narratives: supranational, national, subnational ● How are decolonization efforts today different from decolonization in the Soviet Union in the 1920s? ● Studies of settler colonialisms by historians of Eurasia ● Rusian (ethnic) and Russian (imperial) nationalism and imperialism ● Authoritarian statism and nationalism ● Nationalism in a multiethnic state: ethnographic hierarchies versus political inclusion ● Stateless nationalisms ● Nationalisms as products of empires ● Nationalizing “Russian history” ● The Revolution of 1917 as an imperial event ● The Soviet Union between nationalizing and universalizing impulses ● Rethinking the history of revolutionary movement through the framework of decolonization ●
2/2023 Citizenship and Participation in Imperial and National Polities
● Nationalism, democracy, and exclusion ● Dilemmas of postimperial transit ● Imperial citizenship: universalism and particularism in the regime of individual and collective rights ● The army and citizenship in the Russian Empire and the USSR ● Law and courts: the “imperial rights regime” and practices of imperial citizenship ● Citizens on the move: immigration, migrations, exile, and emigration ● Imagining postnational citizenship: genealogies and practices ● Diasporic groupness problematizing and transcending the duality of “core” and “periphery” ● The new politics of Russian citizenship: Crimea, Donbass, Abkhazia, South Ossetia ● Citizenship as an intersectional discourse ● Disaggregating Soviet citizenship: trajectories of post-Soviet independent states from the Baltics to Central Asia ● Post-Soviet citizenship and capitalism: entrepreneurship and the crisis of the welfare state ● Comparing EU and Soviet Union practices of supranational and layered citizenship ● Gender politics of nationalizing regimes ● Biopolitical citizenship in imperial and national formations; colonial biopolitics ● Reestablishing race in studies of imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet citizenship ● “Compatriot” relocation programs in post-Soviet states ● The place of imperial and Soviet histories of citizenship in global citizenship studies ●
3/2023 Rethinking the Politics of Naming and the Logic of Groupness
● Decolonizing the field as a linguistic turn ● Disentangling imperial populations: constructing and naming groupness ● What is in a name? Rusian versus Russian and other names for national and supranational identities ● Who, and when, were the Russians? the evolution of the category of the “Herrenvolk” ● Political rhetoric of Russia’s war against Ukraine ● Is intellectual history dead? ● Biographies of “decolonizers” (Mitrofan Dovnar-Zapolsky, George Khachapuridze, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Joseph Orbeli, Mikhail Pokrovsky, etc.) ● The war and the “Great Russian canon”: revisiting the problem of “canceling” Russian culture ● The meanings of race in Eurasian history ● Violence as a language – language as violence ● Speaking about Soviet society in post-Bolshevik ● “Multinational” in social theory, historiography, and literary discourses: a conceptual history ● Who is Kaiser treu in the post-Soviet world: in search of supranational homes ● Reflecting on Soviet hybridity ● The many meanings of Soviet nostalgia as a language of subjectivity and deprivation ● Soviet and post-Soviet normativity historicized ● The imperial, Soviet, and post–Soviet “middle class” ● Soviet social taxonomies revisited: hierarchies and opportunities in urban, rural, and ethnicized settings ● Pan-movements and ideologies: reflecting on affinity with nationalism and imperialism ●
4/2023 Bringing Agencies Back: Ecosystems of Humanism and Posthumanism
● Environmental history and its discontents ● The material turn and the humanist return ● Decolonizing Russian and Soviet histories: multiple agencies ● Imagining futures for the region ● Histories of reconciliation: postcolonial, postwar, post-genocide ● The rise of the Stalinist middle class ● Dialectics of Soviet humanism and violence in the post–World War II USSR ● The politics of Soviet history’s normalization ● Ethos and culture of Soviet professionals ● How global were the Soviet, socialist, and western 1960s? ● Histories for postmodernity: objects, topics, sources, narrative strategies ● Rethinking scale: transnational, global, local, and more ● Was there a Soviet “New Age” (critique of modernist narratives and progressive temporalities; the rise of mysticism, and so on)? ● Rendering Soviet history global and its limitations: decolonization, technocracy, 1968, New Age, consumerism ● The challenge of the postnational state ●
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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