Ab Imperio annual program 2014: Assemblage Points of the Imperial Situation: Places and Spaces of Diversity
Sergey Glebov
sglebov at SMITH.EDU
Sat Sep 14 15:23:32 UTC 2013
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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