Ab Imperio annual program 2014: Assemblage Points of the Imperial Situation: Places and Spaces of Diversity

[Sergey Glebov]

Dear colleagues,

The editors of Ab Imperio are pleased to announce the Ab Imperio 2014 
annual theme Assemblage Points of the Imperial Situation: Places and 
Spaces of Diversity. The program of the volume is available in .pdf 
format.

In 2014, Ab Imperio invites its contributors and readers to examine the 
central category of new imperial history: the imperial situation. The 
coexisting and partially overlapping nomenclatures of social statuses 
and hierarchies of authority produce an irregular map of human diversity 
and hegemony, which can be discovered in virtually any epoch and 
society, “imperial” or “nation-state.” In this imperial situation, 
location can be exchanged for a different social status (say, a petty 
clerk from the capital becomes an important figure once he arrives in 
the borderlands or a colony); ethnicity and class generate different 
social capital in different situations or locations; and time is 
conditional and reversible (one can bomb people “into the stone age,” or 
propel them from primitive or feudal society all the way into 
socialism).

Numerous questions arise as soon as one projects this model onto 
specific case-study material: What is the relationship between the 
imperial situation and historical actors? Can we speak of a coherent 
imperial subject produced by the imperial situation? How exactly is the 
imperial situation “made?”

In order to avoid embedded explanatory strategies built into grand 
structuralist generalizations, we suggest operating with an open-ended 
middle-range theory category such as an “assemblage point.” Although it 
comes from the nonacademic sphere (namely, the visionary works of Carlos 
Castaneda), an “assemblage point” seems to be a quite neutral and 
“technical” wayto capture the very moment of forming an imperial 
situation – at a certain moment, under certain circumstances, from 
certain “building blocks.” It is possible that this notion can be 
productively used with the new analytical and rational connotations of 
new imperial history. More conventional (but not much more analytically 
clear) categories such as “bricolage” or “hybridity” can be revisited 
and overhauled in the pursuit of developing a language to describe the 
process of producing the imperial situation – between structurally more 
stable “spaces” and “places.”

Four thematic issues in this annual volume of Ab Imperio approach this 
task from different angles.

1/2014 Zeit und Raum: Adjacent Spaces, Overlapping Epochs?

Recipe number one: bring different worlds together, “mix, but do not 
stir.”


Neighboring communities or regions get incorporated into a common social 
and political sphere, on different legal, economic, and political terms; 
Multiple temporalities espoused by different social strata and cultural 
groups coexist, resulting in the incongruences of calendars, work 
rhythms, and perceptions of the past and future; Perceived or 
self-nominated “civilizations,” “worlds,” “socioeconomic formations,” 
and “cultures” become integrated into an all-embracing worldview, 
through an assortment of adapting institutional and discursive 
mechanisms; Individual trajectories across various social loci and 
temporalities “stitch them up” together; Historical turning points, 
junctures, and decisive events as formative experiences.
2/2014 Crossroads and Multiple Temporalities: Contact Zones and Middle 
Grounds

Recipe number two: strangers meeting in the “middle ground” in search of 
identity and common sense.


The city as a site of diversity, actualized and visualized: everyone is 
local, everyone is a newcomer; What mechanisms produce inequality in the 
inter-“minorities” relationships? How stable are the “conversion rates” 
between ethnicity and social status, wealth and territorial 
localization, education and state service? The nonessentialist 
understanding of collectivities as products of “magnetic fields” set by 
external factors and internal decisions; Thinking power without a clear 
subject in heterogeneous space: who rules the empire?
3/2014 Ghettos and Time Gaps (bezvremenie): Negativity as “the Moment of 
Truth”

The Test Case: Difference Being Produced Despite Isolation and Arrested 
Dynamics


Seemingly homogeneous societies and groups still generate situationally 
and contextually revealing differences: in a Jewish Ghetto, within a 
peasant community, or in a “stagnating” and stable “Developed Socialism” 
society; “The narcissism of small differences” as a historical mechanism 
of social demarcation at work in routine situations and egalitarian 
settings; How historical ruptures and “time capsules” make symbolic 
boundaries look bigger than life; The art of inventing differences: 
states, social groups, and the management of populations and statuses; 
Unintended consequences: projects of uniformity and the proliferation of 
differences.
4/2014 Spontaneous Bricolage, Masters of Assemblage, and Their Contested 
Blueprints

Assemblage Points Deconstructed: Who, When, and Why Attempted to 
Rationalize and Rearrange Diversity?


Social engineering as a conscious practice; How spontaneous are 
“hybridity,” “bricolage,” and premodern practices of composite 
identities? Seeing not like a nation-state: the history of certain 
schemes to sustain human diversity; Post-“isms” in their historical 
contexts: deconstructing deconstruction and social critique; The future 
of diversity.

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