Hybridity and Solidarity: Critical Reflections on the Postnational and the Post-Sovereign (original) (raw)
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(Comparativ 3_4/2020): Comparing Colonialism: Beyond European Exceptionalism
Comparativ, 2020
link to complete issue: https://www.comparativ.net/v2/issue/view/161 Editorial The topic of empire continues to keep the social sciences at large busy. After it had seemed for a long time as if the topic had definitely been handed over to historians, who are concerned with a past phenomenon that only occurs as a nostalgic reflex in the present, empires are suddenly also of interest again to the social scientists concerned with the present under quite different aspects. The question of whether the United States was and still is an empire and whether such imperial configurations were needed to maintain an international order after the multilateralism of the Cold War had come to an end played a crucial role in relaunching the debate about empires. A second layer of interest was informed by postcolonially inspired interest in the continuing mechanisms of earlier colonial empires now striking back in various ways and thus remaining present in today’s seemingly post-imperial world. At a third level, observations that view empires as a rather loose association of rule with unfinished territorialization came to the fore in interpretations of empire as a more appropriate form of governance under conditions of global or at least transregional weakening or even dissolution of boundaries. While we recently looked back at the similarities and differences between empires for the historical period from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries in a historically comparative thematic issue of this journal (no 3/2019), the current double issue, conceived from the perspective of historical sociology, is concerned with a geographically even broader comparison that seeks to revise the thesis of a European exceptionalism in the history of colonialism and imperialism that is often put forward implicitly rather than explicitly. This makes it necessary, first of all, to look for colonial imperial expansion also outside Europe and not to construct a “non-European world” as the target of expansion, as an overseas history, now out of fashion, did for a long time. This means not only to question the geography of comparative studies of empires, but also to reflect critically on their privileged time frame and to include examples that lie beyond the particular European expansion period that is often portrayed as starting in the fifteenth century. In a third level, the nesting of empires is at stake, because the confrontation with imperial conquest from outside by no means put an end to state-building processes inside the imperially overformed regions, from which a whole complex of new questions about the relationship of the various empire-building processes can be derived. Colonialism, in this perspective, is not a relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans, but a much broader, almost universal kaleidoscope of subjugation, settlement into regions other than the one of origin, and arrangements between external and internal elites. What distinguishes pre-modern forms of imperial rule and colony-building from those since the late eighteenth century, however, are (1) their positioning in struggles for dominance at a global scale, (2) the complicated blending between the formation of nation-states and ongoing attempts at imperial expansion, which can by no means be reduced to a teleology from empire to nation, and (3) the relationship between capitalist adventurism and political projects of empire building, which follow different logics but always interact. To abstract these processes in such a way that they can be made available as theoretical elements to other disciplines requires at the same time a wide range of expertise for many case studies, an important selection of which is brought together in this issue. Specialists will read these case studies as enriching knowledge about individual empires, while the thematic issue as a whole, not least with its introduction by the editors and its afterword by Frederick Cooper, pursues an ambition that goes beyond the individual case and at the same time offers a broadening of perspective beyond meticulously deconstructed European exceptionalism and a contribution to a general theory of empires.
Historical research on colonialist enterprises in different parts of the world is en vogue. One reason for this attention is a new search for the origins of today's globalising processes, of which colonialism is seen as one of the starting points. Having long been designed within the analytic framework of the nation state, historical research has recently suggested that solely national approaches are insufficient to analyse these potentially global relations and has consequently drawn its attention to the exchanges and interactions between colonial regimes, colonising and colonised societies and the common context of a colonial global order. This attention to global entanglements and the search for their early manifestations thus resulted in an adaptation of transnational approaches to the history of colonialism, approaches that try to overcome the nation state as the organising principle of historical narratives. 1 The methodological debate on how transnational histories of colonialisms should be written drew attention to comparisons, transfers and intertwinements between colonies and colonising powers. 2
The Allocation and Relocation of Identities: Colonialism, Nationalism, Transnationalism
Mester, 1998
The titie of this paper brings to mind the image of national cultures and national identities; or as I propose, the "hybrid" and the "transnational" open up the negative space of the "national." "Hybrid cultures" and "transnational identities" become then part of the oppositional process of relocating cultures and identities in a conflictive dialogue with the colonial allocation of cultures and national allocation of identities. I am assuming that "identities" are not only constructions, but also dialogical constructions that are the same as those inscribed in power structures. The process also demands the uncoupling of cultures and territories that colonial and nation building ideologies so successfully put together. While colonialism allocated identities by distributing, over five centuries, homogeneous cultures across space first (e.g., the distantbarbarians), and in a time line later (e.g., the human scale from primitives to European during the 18* century, formalized
The Local in the Global: The Value in Transnational History
To do transnational or international histories of empire may not obscure the local so much as render it intelligible, locating local developments within an imperial framework. 1 This is not only because the protagonists often thought of themselves as living and working in this broader world, but also because of the crucial role played by imperialism in inaugurating a world where the spread of both ideological formations and the world economy has created a globalised interdependence that, in different ways, implicates us all within historicised social relations. Here we need to interrogate, as Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper suggest, 'the hierarchies of production, power and knowledge that emerged in tension with the extension of the domain of universal reason, of market economics, and of citizenship'. 2 These hierarchies and the institutions that both reflected and produced them were produced in imperial contexts. Many transnational histories tend to naturalise the nation--state -assuming borders and valorising their crossing -rather than conceiving of the world system inaugurated by imperialism as one of differentiated unities. 3 The difference is central to the politics of postcolonialism, and reflects the distinction between a strategic colonial retreat and the decolonising vision of pan--African, pan--Pacific and other broader movements.
"Relations beyond Colonial Borders: An Introduction"
Critical Times, 2024
Introduction to a forum on “Relations beyond Colonial Borders: Indigeneity, Racialization, Hospitality" in the journal Critical Times. The forum compiles selected contributions from a workshop convened for the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs at the Three Sisters Kitchen in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in April 2023. Natalia Brizuela, Samera Esmeir, Alyosha Goldstein, and Rebecca Schreiber brought together scholars, activists, poets, and artists whose work critically engages the modern border regime as a geopolitical technology indispensable to practices of colonial occupation and imperial management. The workshop focused on a number of key questions: How are we to think movement and inhabitation without reproducing the political and the legal frameworks that the modern border regime solidifies? Could it be that these irrepressible struggles, resistances, and worlds not only show the violence of borders but also illuminate what remains in their excess? How do Indigenous relational practices unsettle or otherwise challenge colonial border regimes? How does Indigeneity “travel” for those Indigenous peoples who have been displaced or who have chosen to live in places other than their historical homelands? How might the practices of people in the context of forced mobility, who aspire to cross a border to elsewhere or to return to their homes, be reflective of something other than the desire to settle in a land?
In-Between Empires: Trans-imperial History in a Global Age
By focusing on spaces “in-between” empires - their connectivity, cooperation, and competition - this workshop aims at establishing a trans-imperial approach to the history of empires. Imperial history has been booming for quite a while. Along the way, innovative approaches such as post-colonial history, global history, or new imperial history have provided us with thrilling insights into the omnipresence and the everydayness of the human experience of empires. Amidst all this diversity, many studies have focussed on entanglements between colonies and metropoles, but much less is known about trans-imperial dimensions of the game. On an empirical basis, inter-imperial perspectives, which compare several empires or consider competition between them, have become more important lately. Yet, such studies are scattered and this kind of research remains in its infancy. We still lack an overarching theoretical-methodological framework with which to address the spaces in-between empires. In other words: whereas national history has been transnationalized in the past decades, the same does not hold true for the history of empires. Thus, we would like to address the current state of research and at the same time ask how a future trans-imperial history could look. In this sense, we seek to decentralize the history of empires both on the level of empirical research and historiographical narratives. Our questions are as follows: do narratives for each empire change with such an approach? Do they appear less unique? To illustrate this: does the thesis about continuity in German colonialism from the late 19th century to the Nazi regime appear in another light if we discuss German expansion in trans-imperial contexts? Does the notion of the uniqueness of Japanese imperialism, which is often seen as a reaction to or even a mimicry of Western imperialism, still hold true? And, to add a final question: was the British empire the all-defining model for all the others or are the imperial processes of the various nations examples of mutual learning? By discussing such concrete questions we also seek to address more overarching questions. How can we systemize such an approach in methodological and theoretical terms? Are recent concepts dealing with dissemination and practices of knowledge helpful? How can we integrate studies on anti-imperial agency or violence into the approach? And who were the brokers of trans-imperial interactions? Research has shown that transnational approaches do not make the nation disappear. We would like to take the same stance in relation to empire. Therefore, in this workshop we will focus on specific cases. The workshop, to be held in Berlin in September 2017, will bring together an international group of scholars who have focused on one or more imperial dimensions of one of the following empires: British, French, Russian, Austria-Hungary, Japanese, German, Italian, Spanish, Ottoman, Chinese, as well as the US-American empire. Their contributions should discuss how transcending perspectives can change the perception of the empires they are specialized in, but also discuss possibilities and limits of a trans-imperial approach for the historiography per se. The focus will be on the years between 1850 and 1945.