ATTENTION!: «Structures and Cultures of Imperial and Post-Imperial Diversity»: "Ab Imperio" 2012 annual theme*

Diversity has unequivocally emerged as the key problem for today’s humankind. The preservation and conservation of biological diversity in the natural environment has come to the forefront of environmentalist thought. On the other hand, dramatically improved communications and travel have transformed many formerly relatively homogeneous locations into bustling cosmopolitan centers. Migrants from former colonies or neighboring countries and their impact on destination communities are seen as the most important challenge in countries as different as those of the European Union are from Mongolia. The rapid emergence of the global world is accompanied by social, political, cultural, and economic dislocations, all of which in one way or another are generated by human diversity. In the wake of the widely acknowledged failure of multiculturalism – the dominant strategy of accommodating the minorities of past decades – the challenge of managing human diversity has become more acute than ever before.

And yet, as historians are quick to point out, the problem of human diversity in its social, ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and other forms has been central to polities ancient and modern. In fact, the current rise of imperial histories is directly connected to the realization that they can help shed light on instances of managing human diversity as well as inform, even if just critically, our understanding of current developments. Problems such as conflicts between confessions and cultures, estates and classes were a permanent feature of imperial regimes, especially in Russia. In 2012 the editors of Ab Imperio invite authors to reflect on the overarching problem of diversity in the Russian Empire and the USSR (as well as beyond). The editors are interested in discussing both the philosophical and methodological implications of the problem of diversity and, in specific case studies, illustrating how, over periods of time, diversity has presented both a challenge and a resource to empire. One of the central premises of new imperial history as promoted by Ab Imperio is that the empirical study of empire based on mid-range theorization and historicization of diversity is capable of offering methodological insights into studying complex, composite, and uneven societies. Increasingly, such societies are becoming the norm of the modern world, thus reinforcing the urgency of historians’ shift to the study of empires.

In this year’s issues, we are most interested in reflection on diversity from the vantage point of its organization and rationalization – historically and in a synchronic perspective. We invite our contributors to consider the complex dynamics of centers and peripheries and their possible multiplicity; the marginalization of those phenomena that are considered unsuitable for a given model of a rationally organized diversity; the diverse nature of “colonialisms” and “exceptionalisms” and the limitations of our analytical optics needed to account for complex social organizations.


Tentative contents of the issues in 2012:


No. 1/2012 “Periphery as the Center”

Policies and practices on the imperial periphery that come to constitute the imperial center ● plurality of centers in empire ● the dynamics of the emergence of new centers in the periphery: cultural, economic, legal (for example, the Odessan periphery and Russian modernism) ● Western borderlands as economic powerhouses ● Finnish constitutional order ● the logic of provincializing: Soviet nation-building ● world-centers and worldperipheries: Russia and the USSR in the geopolitical imagination ● the moving matrix of empire: nation-building and empire-building and reconstitutions of centers and peripheries ● the rhetoric of periphery in political languages, academic discourses, and cultural production.

No. 2/2012 “Varieties of Colonialism”

The other colonialism: Mr. West in the land of the Bolsheviks ● post-Soviet post-colonialism: in search of norms and paradoxes ● nomadism and post-Russoist social imagination ● between paternalism and developmentalism: children’s literature and cultures of childhood in empire ● social progressivism as a function of colonialist interventionism and anticolonial empowering of the people through self-organization ● subaltern dreams of past grandeur: imperial nostalgias ● self-colonization: the dialectic of discipline and emancipation ● power and dependency on the resource-based economy: political and social implications of mineral wealth ● how “benevolent” was Soviet colonialism? ● colonialism and environment in empire: nature vs. nurture ● comparative history of colonialisms and colonizations: is there a common denominator? ● visual representations of colonialism and anticolonialism ● invisible colonialism: why do some empires lack colonial histories (Russia, China, Brazil)? ● imagined colonialism: colonial dreams, desires, and phobias.

No. 3/2012 “Varieties of Exceptionalism”

Exceptions to general rules as standard operating procedure ● governance in the “manual control” regime: temporary and exceptional regulations ● the imperial stake on extraordinary powers: concepts of “plenipotentiaries” and “extraordinary regimes” ● designating the norm and deviations: politics of inclusion and exclusion ● imperial nationalisms in search of realistic scenarios of selfrealization ● relativization of marginality in imperial spaces ● exceptionalisms and standardization as languages of self-description of social, economic, cultural, and political groups in empire ● who controls the past controls the future: politics of Sonderweg ● projects of alternative modernities ● “third ways between...”

No. 4/2012 “Imperial Diversity and Modern Knowledge”

Perceptions and conceptualizations of imperial diversity ● imperial subject and the production of self within imperial heterogeneity ● post-Romantic intellectual tradition and the phenomenon of diversity ● sociological models of diversity and challenges of poststructuralist models ● social hierarchies, systems of kinship, and alternative rationalities: anthropology and diversity ● nonclassical economic theories and practices and diversity ● “embracing diversity”: the cost of normalizing diverse societies ● the persistence of imperial diversity in the modern world.

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