Ab Imperio annual program in 2007 - call for papers

Mon Oct 30 02:01:23 UTC 2006

Dear colleagues,

the editors of Ab Imperio would like to draw your attention to the journal's annual program in 2007 and to solicit manuscript submissions. Information on the journal, as well as all contact information and guidelines for article submission can be found at http://abimperio.net 

Ab Imperio editors

Ab Imperio 2007 Annual Program:

THE IMPERIUM OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE POWER OF SILENCES

In 2007 the editors of Ab Imperio invite our readers and authors to reflect upon the problem of production and functioning of knowledge in politically, culturally, and socially heterogeneous polities. In the modern world knowledge is a highly ambivalent category. It appears simultaneously as abstract scholarly knowledge, stricto sensu, and as local (in Geertzian sense) knowledge and mental habits of specific people in particular localities; as a self-representation and self-description of a certain culture, and as disciplining power that not so much reflects as it creates and structures social reality by means of its institutional self-reproduction and by acquiring an autonomous subjectivity of its own. The editors of Ab Imperio welcome various interpretations and methodological approaches to the study of the phenomenon of knowledge, which jointly can help shed light upon both general problems of epistemology of social sciences in contemporary world and particular problems that emerge in the studies of the historic past of culturally heterogeneous polities and social groups.

Clearly, we cannot avoid referring to the intellectual influence of Michel Foucault upon our views on the functioning of knowledge in modern societies (as well as to the limitations of his approaches). Next to the problem of naively mechanistic understanding of circulation of “texts” in a society (something that Foucault has long been criticized for), we see the problem in that the society Foucault describes is absolutely homogenous, more so than even the real Fifth Republic. What happens to Foucault’s model if it is superimposed upon a multinational and heterogeneous society, in which there co-exist alternative hierarchies of social status and the subject (or subjects) generating discourses function simultaneously in several social and cultural dimensions? A factor of special concern here will be numerous “gray zones” of silence and elusiveness (and of half-truths) effectively limiting the sphere of modern knowledge-power in the heterogeneous imperial space.

Within the 2007 program, we are especially interested in a particular form of knowledge, namely history as a discipline; or, to be more precise, the specifics of historical exploration of empires. We suggest looking at how historical knowledge is utilized in constructions of imperial legitimacies and power; how historians work with imperial legacies and ambivalent memories of the imperial pasts. We also suggest exploring how imperial situations influences the formation of hierarchies of loyalties and solidarities of social identity; how discourses of rationalization and control, having changed the context, are becoming transformed into discourses of spontaneous collective action. How is it possible, as a matter of general theory, to read and understand discourses in a deeply stratified multiethnic and multi-confessional society with no inherent contradictions to our reading? Whose knowledge, in an imperial situation, secures power, and who is the subject of that power?

Finally, within our annual theme we invite the community of our readers and authors to reflect upon the growing tendency to describe various phenomena of our present world order with the help of the category of empire: what makes people return to this seemingly archaic category?

No. 1/2007 “The Discipline of History and the Punishment of Empire”

Political authority and control over past in empire and nation  colonization and decolonization of imperial history by national historiographies  historians in Russian empire and USSR: “experts” or “officials”  Russian historians and “Slavic Studies” in the West: paradoxes of “core-periphery” relationships  whose norm? “imperial order” and “national deviation”  the laws of history and the history of law  historiography as symbolic violence  “whom do you threaten, historian?”  configuration of power-knowledge in empire and nation  who is the subject of history in empire?

No. 2/2007 “The Politics of Comparison”

“Mandarins” of official knowledge, apples and oranges: selecting objects of comparison as a political act  choosing the rival in world politics as a choice of fate  political connotations of historical periodizations  comparative history or the history of mutual influences and transfer?  rotation of administrative personnel, labor migration, and travel as factors of cultural transfer  comparison as a practice of “quality assurance” of modernization at the individual, collective, and state level  empire as a space of comparative experiences  comparison as a practice of normalization of local experience.

No. 3/2007 “History on Trial”

How does history judge?  what is different and what is common in historical and legal judgement  banned history  postmodernism, juridical expertise, and the problem of objective historical opinion  history as a source of legitimacy  historical expertise as legal judgement  historical revisionism and the problem of inviolable state borders  empire as arbiter: Justice of Peace or tribunal?  “revolutionary violence:” national liberation movement as “extenuating circumstances”  the problem of the universality of legal norms in historical judgement  denazification as a problematic model for desovietization  international law and historical legitimacies: Versailles, Trianon, Yalta, Nuremberg, the Hague…

No. 4/2007 “The Future of the Past”

The past as a guarantee of a stable future: “eternal nation,” “thousand year Reich”  forecasting future as selective homogenization of the present  “long century” – “short century:” putting in order the rhythm of history  the phenomenon of futuristic schemes: from prognosis toward utopia, or the Eros of the upcoming  the imagined and projected boundaries  history of federalist projects in East Europe and Eurasia  history of constitutional projects  the problem of homogeneity/heterogeneity and synchronism/discreteness of the historical time in empire  o tempora, o mores! Retrospective historicization of moral and social norms  how time heals: the making and overcoming of ruptures in historical time. 

submitted by Sergey Glebov

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