Imperial Legacy Research Articles

Curating conflict-related sexual violence: Museological visibilities at the Imperial War Museum

While often under-researched, mis-catalogued, and obscured from public display, conflict-related sexual violence is acutely entangled in the story of conflict that the Imperial War Museum tells its visitors, beyond the dichotomous characterisation of present/absent, hidden/revealed or remembered/forgotten. This article outlines and characterises ways in which the Imperial War Museum curates conflict-related sexual violence, illustrating how this equates to gendered and gendering arbitrations on what is appropriate, representative, and moreover what counts as conflict-related sexual violence and as the material and visual culture of war. Curatorial practices are found to both reflect and actively (re)produce patterns of representation in sexual violence discourse, through a prism of visual hierarchies inherent to modern museumification and the Museum’s titular imperial legacy. Insights from this case can help guide ambitions of a more activist, feminist curatorial practice, one invested in disrupting harmful patterns and centring what is marginal.

Questioning Devotions, Reorienting Commitments

This paper is a methodological reflection on my time as a graduate student studying Indian Residential Schools through archival sources. I broadly survey relevant secondary studies to access the current state of the field and to chart prospective avenues for future scholarly engagement. I suggest that, for religionists, the frameworks of church history and mission history can be selectively utilized to examine the history of residential schooling. I argue that the ‘Indian Residential School’ (or IRS) terminology creates a narrowed understanding of colonialism and assimilative education by disregarding other modes of schooling deployed in Indigenous communities: the day schools and mission schools, but also hospitals, convents, and other church-operated institutions. Largely dating to the pre-Confederation period, mission schools especially fade from view when studies focus on the national model of the IRS launched in 1879 and expanded in 1884. In many regional contexts, mission schools of the colonial era laid the literal and conceptual groundwork for the later launching of the IRS system. By studying the works and the records of specific church bodies, religionists might elucidate with greater clarity the evolving differences, synchronicities, or collaborations of ideologies, policies, and practices among members of church and state over several centuries. Attending to pre-Confederation, colonial history also lends a transnational scope to a topic that is often framed in the context of national history, i.e., ‘Canada’s residential school system’. A global perspective on colonial education could assist historians of religion to assess the legacies of church, empire, and imperialism on Canada’s national model of residential schooling.

Caring for the living: the conservation of performance art

ABSTRACT As many disciplines are beginning to reckon with their contributions to historical injustices, so conservation must acknowledge and reflect on the number of its practices that continue to reinforce colonial and imperial legacies. Though such work is currently taking place in ethnographic museums, rethinking conservation and repairing its harms should be the aim of the entire museum community. Using case studies drawn from performance art, this paper demonstrates how performance challenges traditional paradigms of institutional collecting and conservation, and calls for a rethinking of certain museum procedures. It proposes the emerging scholarship on performance art conservation as a potential force for an expanded definition of conservation that puts people at its center. To this end, it presents performance as not only a conservation object to be cared for, but also a tool to care with, reframing the aim of conservation as preserving the vitality of relationships between objects and communities.

The Romanovs on Contemporary American TV

Abstract This article analyzes the Netflix six-part docudrama The Last Czars as well as the Amazon Prime anthology drama The Romanoffs for its representations of Russian imperial history and its heritage. Using an intersectional lens, it utilizes a close watching of the TV shows to identify a nostalgia for Russia's imperial legacy as core element of both series. Embedding the findings within popular culture, the analysis further shows that the nostalgic depiction of the last Russian imperial family and the mourning of their loss has a century-long history within American media. Comparing these depictions further to recent commemorations of the last Romanovs through the exhibitions Russia My History points to the Western complicity in Russian imperialist and colonial ideology through the recent shows in liberal American media.

Constitutionalism in Post-Ottoman Southeast Europe during the 19th Century

The essay investigates the emergence of constitutional statehood in post-Ottoman Southeast Europe during the 19thcentury in comparative perspective on the example of Serbia, Greece and Romania. It locates central turning points and highlights similarities as well as peculiarities of these processes in relation to the paradigm of Europeanization which functioned as the guiding principle in all three cases. It concludes that Europeanization, respectively “De-Ottomanization”, although dominating Southeast European political discourses, was not a clear-cut uniform concept but to a considerable degree influenced by specific regional factors, in particular the imperial legacies of the region, which have to be considered in order to make the Europeanization-paradigm a viable analytical tool for historical research.

Sameness across Difference: A Postcolonial Feminist Analysis of Gender-Affirming Health Care in Thailand and the United States.

Joining a growing body of research calling for the integration of social analysis and postcolonial theory, recent work in medical sociology has analyzed health, illness, and medicine from a postcolonial lens. In this article, I argue for a postcolonial feminist approach to medical sociology that builds on this extant work while challenging methodological nationalism and cultural essentialism. Based on an analysis of gender-affirming health care for transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people in Thailand and the United States, I propose "sameness across difference" as a framework to analyze commonalities in the health care experiences of marginalized populations across nations as the products of imperial legacies. Drawing on 83 interviews with health care providers, TGD patients, and TGD activists, I demonstrate the role of imperialism in sustaining barriers to gender-affirming health care through the uneven geographic distribution of care across rural and urban areas and the reinforcement of racial and class hierarchies within cities.

The Response of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission to Labour Migration from Malawi to South Africa 1889–1994: A Leaf to be Borrowed by the 21st Century African Churches

This article mainly highlights what southern African Churches can learn and borrow as a leaf from the contribution of the Dutch Reformed Church Mission to labour migration from the Central Region in Malawi to South Africa between 1889 and 1994. It is argued that although push factors for labour migration were the legacy of Western economic imperialism, the Malawi government’s inability to create jobs for its citizens and some Malawians’ belief that migration from Malawi to South Africa was a means to fulfil their heart-felt and lifetime desire for economic opportunities, the mission played an important role in responding to labour migration. While it is understandable that the contexts of the 19th century and 21st century are different. Also, the truth that the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa supported the apartheid government, this article arguably stresses that there are important lessons the Southern African Churches may learn from the mission’s response to labour migrants.

“Slippy with Rot”: The Irish Potato Famine and Neo-Victorianism’s Colonial Roots

Abstract In Paul Lynch’s neo-Victorian Famine novel Grace (2017), the protagonist’s encounter with the proverbial root of all evil marks a moment of Gothic horror. Much more threatening than a single dead body, the foul-smelling, rotten potato invokes the gigantic number of corpses the blight produced during the Irish Famine of the 1840 s. Rather than a natural disaster, this must be understood as a direct result of what is often broadly referred to as ‘ecological imperialism’. This article examines the ways in which Grace positions the Famine as both concrete reality and synecdoche of colonialism. The novel traces how the potato blight, caused by the pathogen oomycete Phytophthora infestans, transforms rural Ireland into an uninhabitable wasteland, populated by dehumanised creatures that are rendered disposable. In a second step, I consider the rotten potato as metaphorical of neo-Victorianism’s larger critical potential. As critics have argued, neo-Victorianism is well-suited to intervene in selective and largely nostalgic memorialisations of Britain’s imperial legacies. To do so, however, it must properly acknowledge that the soil on which it plants – the textualities, theoretical frameworks, and methodological tools upon which it draws – is saturated with imperialist ideology to an extent that precludes any critical re-readings of the past and its bearing on the present.

The grammars of globalisation and the languages of regionalism: The war in Ukraine as a milestone and a test

The article reviews transformations observed in the post-soviet space and raises the question of their implications for students of comparative regionalisms. It is first argued that such a discussion deserves to be more systematically related to that of the shifting ‘grammars’ of globalization. Unlike what was the case in the 1990s, globalization refers today to a fragmented, multipolar, yet globalized, world. Interdependency is perceived as a source of insecurity and strategic vulnerability. With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the article also stresses, a pillar of post-colonial and post-imperial international relations, uti possidetis, is also being tested and contested. Interactions with the diversity, or ‘languages,’ of regionalisms are then addressed through the identification of five distinctive threads: colonial and imperial legacies; regionalism as sovereignty or regime enhancement; the EU as a model of holistic and developmental integration; regionalization through defragmentation and connectivity; and regionalization without region-building. The article concludes to the resilience of debates and cognitive representations that were discarded in the aftermath of the cold war.

“Come to life” realism: View‐Master reels and the legacy of stereoscopic imperialism

AbstractI argue that View‐Master reels upheld the colonial legacy of previous stereoscopic depictions of Indigenous subjects while inaugurating new methods of asserting power in exhibition via its ease of use and “black‐box” structure. Further, focusing on the instrumentalization of stereoscopy allows us to think through how these images intervene in the history of the representation of Indigenous subjects across image media and histories of photographic technology and consumption. In sum, although stereoscopy functions as a marketable tool for narrativizing colonial power, its affective qualities and historical contexts complicate fantasies of unilateral viewing and domination and bring forth histories of resistance.

Crisis, Modernity, and the State: Reflections on Roy Tseng’s Confucian Liberalism

Abstract What is “Confucian liberalism” a response to? In this essay, I elicit a political, rather than merely philosophical, crisis in the background of Roy Tseng’s argument in Confucian Liberalism: Mou Zongsan and Hegelian Liberalism. This crisis stems from Western imperialism vis-à-vis China starting in the late nineteenth century. It also takes the form of a challenge of legitimacy for the modern Chinese state. Identifying the relevant crisis in this way leads me to question the suitability of Hegel as a companion to Confucian liberalism. It also leads me to suggest the necessity of an institutional approach that gives due consideration to the imperial legacy and the infrastructural power of the state in China today.

Tbilisi, Baku, and Yerevan: Neoclassicism and Imperial Signification in the Caucasus

Contrary to urban histories of the Caucasus that have tended to take an individual capital city and chart urban development from the Persian imprint and the Russian imperial legacy to the Soviet reconstruction, this article takes a comparative look at three national capitals, Baku, Yerevan, and Tbilisi, in order to argue for their similarities as well as their distinctness. It puts forth that the markers of the “national monumentality” and “capitality” of these three cities were set in place in the period of Russian imperial rule and that the central cores of Yerevan, Baku, and Tbilisi remained relatively unchanged into the Soviet era. This argument stresses that the impact of both the historiography of the Soviet urban revolution and the nationalizing historiography that continues to idolize genius figures like Armenian–Soviet architect Alexandr Tamanyan has led to an under-appreciation of the many imperial traces remaining in the Soviet-era cities. The article proceeds by using the architectural evidence, alongside travel accounts authored by those very familiar with imperial urban settings that describe Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan in some detail in these periods, to shed light on the changing dynamics of these locations (or lack thereof) into the Soviet era. Imperial travelers are supplemented by literary sources, as well as a spotlight on the example of Tamanyan and his centrality to movements like the World of Art group of neoclassicist architects in St. Petersburg. It is argued that it was neoclassicism that united the urban approaches in Baku, Tbilisi, and Yerevan under the Russian and Soviet periods of rule and that this violent rupture from the Persianate past continues to dominate these cities today.

Navigating the imperial legacy: exploring the discourse of sport for development and peace in Flanders for communities with a migration background

ABSTRACT Sport is often harnessed to serve broader societal objectives. In Flanders (Belgium) – the region of interest in this research – sport is instrumentalised to promote social integration and inclusion, particularly among communities with a migration background. However, this Sport for Development and Peace (SDP) policy and programming is not straightforward. Scholars have pointed to the lingering imperial residue within SDP, prompting a need for critical examination. Therefore, this research aims to gain an understanding of how contemporary SDP discourse in Flanders is socially and culturally constructed and what its performative implications are for communities with a migration background. To this end, online documents from the sport administration and organisations involved in SDP were subjected to critical discourse analysis informed by the theoretical and cultural understanding of post-colonial theory and decoloniality. The findings indicate that SDP discourse reflects a complex interplay of imperial legacies and neoliberal influences, simultaneously projecting an image of inclusivity and perpetuating inequalities. Consequently, decolonising the SDP discourse in Flanders is an imperative transformative process and requires a comprehensive approach rooted in historical awareness, contextual sensitivity, and challenging existing power structures. This decolonisation may pave the way for a more equitable and inclusive SDP framework, genuinely reflecting the diverse realities of communities with a migration background while acknowledging and rectifying its colonial legacy.

A Solicitous Science

Three visions of anthropology collided in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas in the 1950s. Infrastructural improvements, indigenista politics, and increased US social science funding intensified research on Indigenous Chiapas. The scene drew together imperial travelers, modernist ethnographers, and Mexican development administrators. Among them was Danish explorer-archaeologist Frans Blom, who struggled to establish his estate as a reputationally redeeming fieldwork institute. This article parses how some modernist anthropologists distanced themselves from Blom’s imperial legacy, while others pressed his ideas of cultural continuity into implicit, controversial claims for their centrality to ancient and modern Maya studies writ large.

(De)globalization, economic sovereignty, imperial legacies between the two world wars (and beyond)

(De)globalization, economic sovereignty, imperial legacies between the two world wars (and beyond)

Casting Stones with Intent: Transnational Interventions towards Ethical and Reparative Memorialisation

In the summer of 2020, on the wave of the Black Lives Matter Movement, statues and public monuments became focal points of political struggle, perceived by many as symbolic reminders of pervading western imperial legacies. Yet, the debate over public memorialisation is far from new. Starting from the 2020 BLM protests in Britain and going back to previous campaigns, this article contextualises the toppling, effacing and removal of well-known statues of colonial agents in Britain, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand and examines artistic interventions which appropriate, challenge and shatter static historical interpretations of imperial figures and events. Our contention is that these interventions constitute diverse forms of performative and re-storied resistance reflecting transnational demands for redress and reparation.

Examining Chinese American teachers’ diasporic lives through empire and AsianCrit

ABSTRACT Few studies examined Chinese American teachers’ diasporic lives in U.S. K–12 schools and society, even as research on teachers of Color increases. In responding to such scarcity, the author connects tenets of empire and AsianCrit to illustrate how the legacies of imperialism and geopolitics of race have influenced three Chinese American teachers’ diasporic trajectories and teaching practices. Implications include how scholars can use these theoretical orientations to historicize research on Chinese American teachers, apply Asian Diaspora as a framework in researching Asian American teachers, and prepare Asian American teachers to unsettle racism and imperialism in schools.

‘We swear to fight for the inviolability of the borders of our motherland’: disabled veterans and social welfare in interwar Lviv

ABSTRACT The newborn Second Polish Republic inherited a complex imperial legacy and a large minority population. The series of borderland conflicts and the Soviet–Polish War that followed the Great War added additional layers to the heterogeneity of the veteran population. Throughout the interwar era, the eastern borderlands became a source of interethnic, religious and political tension, and turned into a battleground of contested Polish and Ukrainian memory discourses. The article focuses on welfare policy as an instrument of state-building in the eastern Polish borderlands. The process of defining war disability took place alongside the process of nation-building. The question of the legal definition of ‘Polish disabled veteran’ turned into a discussion about who was a part of the national body. The article examines how the interconnections between the categories of war disability and ethnic and new social minorities forged new identities in interwar eastern Poland.

IMPERIALISM, THATCHERISM, AND RESISTANCE IN EDWARD BOND'S THE WOMAN: ACTING BACK TO THE CENTER

Edward Bond is one of the greatest dramatists of post-war period. During the 1970s, one dramatist who tried to inaugurate a form of historical drama, which used history as a means of representing political circumstances of contemporary Britain, was Edward Bond. In 1978, with The Woman, he seemed to have achieved his goal. He uses the history of the past to reveal the political, social and economic situation of his own time in order to make a change. Bond's The Woman is a critique and an attack on imperialism, neo-liberalism, and Thatcherism, but a revived version in the modern sense of the word. For this reason, I decided to work on The Woman to analyze how he criticizes his society and the imperialistic ideas dominant in western societies. As mentioned before, the main focus of this study is to read and interpret Bond's The Woman in the light of imperialism and see how colonized people, especially women, reject the imperial legacy by resistance and acting back to the center. The Woman contains numerous suggestions that Trojan War was an imperialist one which happened over economic interests and political competitions were at stake. Bond aims to have a deconstructive writing of the misogynist prejudgments and reveal that human civilizations and institutions collapsed due to imperialist and hegemonic political practices.

An appraisal of the impact Russia and Ukraine conflict on the global economy and peace (2021-2022)

The unannounced war between Ukraine and Russia has taken the world politics, peace, economy, and global market systems by storm and the diplomatic efforts by world leaders to resolve the crisis have shown no sign of progress. Ukraine became an independent nation with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was earlier part of the Russian empire and later became the Soviet Republic and did away with its Russian imperial legacy, thereby forming close ties with the West. Since its independence, the country has been battling with corruption and internal divisions. The objective of the paper is to examine the implication of the Ukraine and Russia crisis on the global economy and peace. The paper has adopted using secondary sources of information by consulting relevant literature on the subject matter. The paper has two major findings firstly, the sovereignty of Ukraine as an independent country was not fully respected by Russia and secondly, superpower countries are playing politics with the conflict which led to further destruction of human beings and facilities between conflicting countries. The researcher recommends that neighbouring countries of Ukraine needs to recognize its statehood independence as an independent country and the superpower countries and other global communities need to show concern and make serious commitment to end the conflict between the two countries to restore the fate of global peace and economy in a good time.