Imperial Past Research Articles

Are you willing to be made nothing? Is Commonwealth reform possible?

A new round of Commonwealth reform proposals commenced at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting of 2009. An ensuing report, titled A Commonwealth of the people: time for urgent reform, contained a long list of proposals that eventually resulted in 2013 in the adoption of the Commonwealth Charter. Many classic international organizations are in need of reform, but this is, of course, challenging. This new Commonwealth reform process will not lead to satisfying changes and will not make it a more relevant actor in global governance. The year 2015 marks the Commonwealth Secretariat's first half-century. We take this symbolic marker to push for a forward-looking exercise, arguing that because the true nature of the Commonwealth is often misunderstood, a better understanding of the organization is essential before embarking on any successful change-management project. In the article we identify four different kinds of Commonwealth: three of a �formal� nature (the official, bureaucratic and the people's Commonwealth) and a fourth �informal� one (Commonwealth Plus). By describing the potential of these four different kinds of Commonwealth, we can anticipate better the challenges with which the Commonwealth network is faced, both internal (including its mandate, its British imperial past and dominance, the organization's leadership and its membership) and external (other international organizations, other Commonwealths, rivalry with regional organizations and the rise of global policy networks). Consequently, this should lead to a better and more sustainable debate about the Commonwealth's future role in global governance.

An Imperial Past in Ruins: Joseph Denfield's Photographs of East London, 1960–1965

This paper provides a reading of changing white subjectivity in the context of South Africa's transition to republican status in the early 1960s. It explores such a theme through a reading of photographs of architectural ruins in East London that were taken by Joseph Denfield from approximately 1960 to 1965. Such an analysis is done through the lens of existing literature on this historical moment in South Africa, which highlights rapid and at times violent changes taking place nationally. What remains key in the paper is South Africa's severance of ties with the British Commonwealth and its British imperial past, which rendered the state officially more ‘Afrikaans’ in character. I argue that Denfield's photographs of ruins registered such changes by bringing into greater visibility sites that spoke to the town's British past. Through his framing, choice of subject and totalising views of sites on camera, his photographs functioned as a form of photographic persuasion that directed the viewer towards a particular temporality. These not only constructed the city's past through the lens of British settlement but reconstituted the city as ruinous under the new political dispensation.

The London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony and Its Polyphonous Aftermath

Global mega-events are widely perceived as a tool used by host countries’ elites to propagate national narratives. But how are the messages actually decoded by international publics? The article takes the case of the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony to reveal the multifaceted character of mediated responses to a global event. This case is particularly important for both postcolonial studies and globalization studies because the British self-presentation silenced the country’s imperial past. In the aftermath, there were varying degrees of both attention and interpretative depth. Most notably, the omission of the imperial past of the host country was not scandalized by most authors of the “global south.” Instead, newspaper reports were characterized by affirmation, localization, criticism, or benign neglect. Empirically, the study is based on online versions of 26 newspapers from Argentina, Cuba, Germany, Great Britain, India, Jamaica, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda, United States, Zambia, Zimbabwe, as well as British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and Al Jazeera.

Ukraine and Russia: Legacies of the Imperial past and Competing Memories

The legacy of the tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union is one of the crucial factors for an understanding and an explanation of current affairs in the post-Soviet space. This is especially true for Ukraine and for Russian–Ukrainian relations. Russia regards Ukraine as a part of its own strategic orbit, while many Ukrainians want to liberate themselves from the Russian hegemony and advocate a closer cooperation with the European Union. This controversy culminated in late 2013, when Russian pressure led to a re-orientation of Ukrainian policy and a rapprochement with Russia. In this paper I present some reflections on the significance of the imperial heritage for the Russian–Ukrainian relationship. I analyse the different discourses and the Ukrainian and Russian historical narratives, politics of history and competing memories. The Russian–Ukrainian relationship was and is still characterized by an obvious asymmetry, a hegemony of Russia over Ukraine. Russia uses the Orthodox Church and the traditional dominance of the Russian language as instruments for its policy. Not only Russian historians, but also politicians and even the Russian President try to impose the imperial narrative on Ukraine. They are supported by a significant part of Ukrainians, who adhere to the ideal of a common Russia-led Orthodox East Slavic world. Other Ukrainian historians and politicians use the Ukrainian language and the Ukrainian historical narrative with its national myths of liberty and of Ukraine's closeness to Europe in their struggle against the Russian hegemony. The on-going “War of memories” is of special interest. Both sides use and abuse history as a political weapon, and the controversies about the heritage of Kievan Rus’, the interpretation of Mazepa, the Holodomor and WW II are not only academic, but also political issues. They reflect the struggle over the geopolitical and cultural orientation of Ukraine which is of crucial importance for the future development of the post-Soviet space and of Eastern Europe.

Exceptional Imperialism and Imperial Exceptionalism

In this highly ambitious work, sociologist Julian Go seeks to demolish the myth of American exceptionalism as it pertains to the question of empire. For too long, Go argues, Americans—and American foreign policy makers, in particular—have convinced themselves that the United States neither harbored imperial aspirations nor pursued an imperialist foreign policy. Unlike other nations, the country's liberal democratic institutions and unique national character supposedly inoculated its expansionism from becoming the stuff of empire building. Through a careful exercise in comparative historical sociology, however, Go aims to show us that this was not the case. Using Great Britain as the basis of comparison, he claims that not only has the United States been as imperialistic as Britain over time but also that both countries have moved through similar, predictable stages of imperial development. In the end, he says, “the United States did not so much break with its English imperial past as it did pick up the mantle” (p. 236).

Always “Tasty”, Regardless: Art, Chocolate and Indigenous Australians

This paper examines race and colour through the metaphor of chocolate. The authors use the metaphor of chocolate to question why some Aboriginal people are chosen ahead of others, with the choosing done by non-Indigenous people, perhaps on the basis of who is most likely to be “soft-centred”, agreeable, and pliable. The authors discuss the development of the Hot Chocolate art exhibition in Adelaide in 2012, with a particular focus on the works of Pamela CroftWarcon. The exhibition combined chocolate (the food), lyrics from Hot Chocolate (the band), and chocolate (the metaphor for skin colour) to encourage visitors to question their assumptions about representations of Aboriginal people in Australia.

Memories of Post-imperial Nations: Silences and Concerns

Seven nations lost their colonial empires after the World War II. Italy and Japan had to relinquish their colonies immediately after the war. Great Britain granted independence to India in 1947 and released most of its African colonies in 1960. France and the Netherlands reclaimed their colonies after recovering their sovereignty after the war, but they had to abandon them nevertheless after intense struggles. Belgium shared the same fate. Only Portugal clung to its ‘overseas provinces’ until 1974 when democratisation and decolonisation coincided. Scholars representing these seven nations met at Heidelberg University in May 2013 to compare notes concerning the post-imperial memories of their nations. The conference was supported by the Robert Bosch Foundation, Stuttgart. The period after decolonisation was characterised by long silences in the post-imperial nations. It is only in recent times that intensive debates of the imperial past and its conflicting memories have been conjured up.

‘A Symbol of Tradition and Modernity’: Itō Masanori and the Legacy of the Imperial Navy in the Early Postwar Rearmament Process

In the literature on the Japanese postwar rearmament, the loss of credibility of the Imperial armed forces prompted the Japan Self-Defence Forces to distance themselves from that institutional lineage and to define and display their own image. Underpinning this was the notion that the Imperial Army and Navy were publicly regarded as organisations that could no longer offer relevant professional models. This article reviews that assumption, investigating the early postwar naval narrative as it became popularised by journalist and historian Itō Masanori. It suggests that the postwar rejection of the imperial military past did not affect the Imperial Army and Navy equally. The reputation of the Imperial Navy as a professional organisation was not eradicated from postwar public memory. A distinguished correspondent and an internationally renowned writer, Itō dedicated his work to shape the early postwar naval narrative, defining the virtues that made the navy a symbol of the nation’s own journey into modernity. In so doing, he joined the public debate on rearmament and argued for the standards of the Imperial Navy to find their way into the professional ethos of the new armed forces

Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia by Sanna Turoma (review)

Reviewed by: Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia by Sanna Turoma Aimar Ventsel (bio) Sanna Turoma, Brodsky Abroad: Empire, Tourism, Nostalgia (Madison; London: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010). 292 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-299-23634-2. This is a book about Nobel Prize–winning Russian poet Joseph Brodsky’s travels after he was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972. Brodsky was born in Leningrad in 1940 and died in New York after a heart attack in 1996. He retains prominent status among people who appreciate Russian and classic world literature. The author, Sanna Turoma, is a senior researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute (University of Helsinki), Academy of Finland, and the book is based on her doctoral dissertation. Due to Brodsky’s profoundly nonconformist stance, he was persecuted in the Soviet Union, sentenced to a term of internal exile, and later “strongly advised” to emigrate. After settling in the United States and pursuing various academic and nonacademic jobs, he had the opportunity to travel around the world. These travels were reflected in his poems and Sanna Turoma has written a book focused on Brodsky’s writing about four locations: Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, and Venice. For comparison, in the second chapter of the book, Turoma adds a perspective on Brodsky’s pre-emigration period poems and essays about his native Leningrad. The author defines the scope of the book: “The book aims at setting Brodsky in a dialogue with leading representatives of postcolonial and postmodern theories in order to recontextualize the scholarly investigation of his travel poetry and prose” (P. 5). In short, Turoma looks at how places are contextualized and interpreted depending on their cultural and social meaning for Brodsky. She is interested in how Brodsky linked different locations with specific cultural, religious, or historical meanings and how the description of a visited place was structured by the poet’s self-identification and self-perception, by his cultural background and origin. Brodsky’s self-positioning was determined by different markers; he carried with him the burden of being an emigrant from the Soviet Union who never really adapted to the West. In his travels outside of Europe Brodsky also encountered cultures that were non-European or non-Christian, factors that also changed his self-positioning. Brodsky’s personality and biography are so intensively reflected in his poems that in reading this book I came to realize that the monograph could be seen as a psychoanalytical treatise through travel writing. [End Page 414] Certainly the book reveals much about Brodsky’s ideas and attitudes through his poetry. By looking at the travel poetry, the author suggests that travel writing as such has its roots in colonialism, in the epoch when educated noblemen traveled outside of Europe and described the countries they visited as the Other, from the perspective of Orientalism (P. 56). Brodsky, who grew up in Leningrad, exposed similar attitudes. His writings from that period reflect his strong nostalgia for empire combined with the Soviet kitchen dissident, typical of piterskie intellectuals (P. 69). This imperial nostalgia was apparently also the reason why Brodsky was always hostile to contemporary art and architecture (P. 58). In his later years Brodsky published several poems and essays idealizing Leningrad/St. Petersburg’s “magnificent” past (P. 76), even comparing it to the British Empire. In the last pages of the chapter about Leningrad, Turoma introduces another aspect of Brodsky’s philosophy: constant attempts to define Russian national identity, rooted in the imperial past as expressed in the architecture of the “old Petersburg.” These few pages help to explain why Russian émigrés have often failed to adapt in the West. Notwithstanding their anti-Soviet stance, they have nevertheless identified themselves with the culture of a country with a great history and grand influence on the world. Turoma here finds traces of postcolonial nostalgia and self-identification with a great empire that has ceased to exist. According to Turoma, Brodsky viewed other countries through the eyes of the piterskii intellectual who never felt comfortable in, and never fully accepted, other cultures. “From Brodsky’s metropolitan Soviet viewpoint” (P. 86), Mexico, with its exotica, underdeveloped economy, poverty, and legacy of a native empire gone...

A Beginning, Two Ends, and a Thickened Middle: Journeys in Afghanistan from Byron to Hosseini

This article looks at three disparate travel texts—Robert Byron's classic 1937 travelogue The Road to Oxiana, Khaled Hosseini's massively popular 2003 novel The Kite Runner, and Michael Winterbottom's emotionally wrenching 2002 fauxdocumentary In This World—which deal, either directly or indirectly, with Afghanistan. It argues that the geographical coordinates of Afghanistan have recently been confused with the “War on Terror,” and that one of the most notable results of this has been the ideological assimilation of a Central Asian nation to the post–9/11-inspired imaginative geography of a “Greater Middle East.” The article seeks to account for this latter-day history of geographical misprision, but also for the triangulated relationship between travel, empire, and colonial modernity that underlies it—a relationship in which the US-dominated “colonial present” (Gregory 2004) maps onto the British imperial past.

A Spanish Canonist in Rome: Notes on the Career of Francisco Peña

This essay presents three vignettes illustrating the relationships between the Spanish canonist Francisco Peña and three of the Popes he served during his long Roman career: Sixtus V, Clement VIII, and Paul V. Examining the motives that brought these figures into conflict with one another, as well as the common goals that led them to collaborate, allows us to understand from a unique perspective the complexity of the power dynamics within the Roman Curia in relationship to the Spanish Crown. More generally, the study of the difficult relationships between Peña and the Popes can become a means to unpack, or at least to begin to appreciate, the multiple and multiform identities of post-Reformation Rome, at once the heir of its ancient imperial past and a distinctively modern experiment in intellectual hegemony, the capital of the Papal state and the center of a transnational and spiritual empire of souls, the See of Peter’s successors and the theater of the world.

The Dialectics of Remembrance: Memories of Empire in Cold War Japan

AbstractBetween 1895 and 1945 Japan assembled one of the largest empires in modern world history. It vanished abruptly in the summer of 1945 at the end of the Second World War, and seemed to leave no trace in public consciousness. Historians, too, have portrayed postwar Japan as characterized by a virtual erasure of the imperial past. This article draws on recent scholarship to argue that things were more complicated than that. While references to the imperial past indeed dwindled after about 1960, immediate forgetting did not exhaust the reactions by individuals and interest groups. Some social milieus experienced the dissolution of the empire much more profoundly than official discourse would suggest. Since the mid-1990s, Japan's imperial past has reemerged as a major field of historical inquiry and a more general concern in public debate. In this article I situate the dialectic of remembering and forgetting within larger processes and transformations of the postwar order in East Asia, in particular the American occupation and the emergence of the Cold War.

Empire and Globalisation: from ‘High Imperialism’ to Decolonisation

Reviewing the expansion and ultimate demise of the British and French empires, this article takes a long view of globalisation as an integral part of Europe's recent imperial past. The authors’ argument is that these empires were not simply a global phenomenon. Rather, the processes that built and destroyed them were more actively ‘globalising’. In this context, they argue that the rise and fall of the two pre-eminent overseas empires had several globalising effects. These globalising effects include distinct patterns of migration and communication, critical shifts in the movement of goods and capital, new forms of transnational connection, changing conceptualisations of community and individual rights, and discrete forms of violence and conflict that outlasted the ‘formal’ end of empires.

Italian Liberal Imperialism in China: A Review of the State of the Field

AbstractThe story of Italian imperialism in China is an almost forgotten one. Few know that the Kingdom of Italy was on the verge of war with the Qing Empire in 1899 and that, following its participation in the Boxer War a year later, it acquired a concession in Tianjin, which it kept until 1947. This nearly forgotten episode is important, however, for understanding Italian imperialism as a whole. For a number of years, research of Italian imperialist past has tended to pay more attention to fascist imperialism at the expense of liberal imperialism, at times making Italian imperialism in general appear as an outgrowth of fascism. This is dangerously misleading, as it was imperialism of the liberal era that first revealed expansionistic tendencies that would characterise Italian fascism half a century later. The historical importance of Italian liberal imperialism as a precursor of fascist imperialism and an important early signal of totalitarian proclivities of Italian political elites needs, therefore, to be critically reappraised.

Islam and security narratives in Eurasia

The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the re-emergence of Islam as a major political factor ushered in an international narrative linking Islam with security. This initial securitisation of Islam was qualitatively enhanced by the 9/11 crisis and the emergence of a US-inspired and led global masternarrative on Islamic threat. Eurasian Islam had its own rich, more nuanced and complex normative heritage, both in its “Orthodox” imperial Russian and Marxist Soviet past, from which to construct its own native securitisation narrative of Islam; it was nevertheless heavily affected by the post-9/11 global masternarrative. This article analyses the impact of this masternarrative on the securitisation of Islam in Eurasia, and its symbiosis and encounter with Eurasian Islam in the post-Soviet, and especially post-9/11, eras. It further analyses Russia’s attempt at both bandwagoning and differentiation, the utilization of the masternarrative in Central Asia and its implications for authoritarianism, and the disposition of major actors such as the US, China, Iran and Turkey towards the securitisation of Islam. Post-Arab Spring dynamics have added new levels of complexity to the securitisation of Islam, specifically for Russia and its relations with the North Caucasus in particular, and with the wider Muslim and Western worlds more generally. Encounters and synergies between the global and Eurasian narratives, as elsewhere, have become a major source of policy connectivity between the states, societies, and social movements of the region and global Islamic politics.

"La schizofrenia austriaca": gli storici e la questione identitaria

How did theambivalences of Austrian identity influence both Austrian nation building and thewriting of national history? How did the Habsburg legacy impact on the creation ofhistorical master narratives? These are the main questions this article aims to dealwith, in order to provide a new contribution to the very topical problem of the role ofhistory in nation building processes and its public use. The Austrian case is peculiarfor several reasons: various metamorphoses of the concept of Austria, the creation ofthe Austrian nation within a multinational setting, and the controversial relationshipto the imperial past of the country.

Islam and security narratives in Eurasia

The 1979 Iranian Revolution and the re-emergence of Islam as a major political factor ushered in an international narrative linking Islam with security. This initial securitisation of Islam was qualitatively enhanced by the 9/11 crisis and the emergence of a US-inspired and led global masternarrative on Islamic threat. Eurasian Islam had its own rich, more nuanced and complex normative heritage, both in its “Orthodox” imperial Russian and Marxist Soviet past, from which to construct its own native securitisation narrative of Islam; it was nevertheless heavily affected by the post-9/11 global masternarrative. This article analyses the impact of this masternarrative on the securitisation of Islam in Eurasia, and its symbiosis and encounter with Eurasian Islam in the post-Soviet, and especially post-9/11, eras. It further analyses Russia’s attempt at both bandwagoning and differentiation, the utilisation of the masternarrative in Central Asia and its implications for authoritarianism, and the disposition of major actors such as the US, China, Iran and Turkey towards the securitisation of Islam. Post-Arab Spring dynamics have added new levels of complexity to the securitisation of Islam, specifically for Russia and its relations with the North Caucasus in particular, and with the wider Muslim and Western worlds more generally. Encounters and synergies between the global and Eurasian narratives, as elsewhere, have become a major source of policy connectivity between the states, societies, and social movements of the region and global Islamic politics.

‘We're all going global’: cricket's new rhythms in an age of revolution?

This essay examines cricket's past and present relationship/s with music in order to track the notable continuities that are evident in the ongoing connection between the two cultural forms. The discussion also questions whether the so-called globalization of the game and all that is associated with the televisual spectacle of ‘entertainment’ mark new modes of intersections or are outgrowths of earlier forms, genres, tropes and popular musical motifs. It asks: how do and have cricket and music intersected, and is their relationship now structurally different to their relationship in the past, most notably the imperial past of England, Britain and the British world system? The essay is subdivided into five parts with each taking its title from a track on The Duckworth Lewis Method album of cricket pop songs from duo Neil Hannon and Thomas Walsh.

Australians and the Pacific Rim: The contested past in the popular fiction of Di Morrissey

Former print and television journalist Di Morrissey is Australia's biggest-selling writer of popular fiction. Her novels incrementally construct an Australia re-shaped for the new century through the interplay of significant social forces and demographic shifts. Her imaginary also places Australian culture within a global network of affiliations generated by the colonial and imperial past, as well as by more recent strategic alliances, and encompasses some of the darker elements of Australia's collective inheritance. The critical reception of Morrissey's work, however, has hitherto been scant and dismissive. Yet the Pacific Rim novels - Tears of the Moon, Scatter the Stars, Kimberley Sun, Monsoon, and The Plantation - can be read within perspectives afforded by dark tourism research and theories of cognitive dissonance, revealing that they subvert widely received understandings of Australia's relationships within the Pacific region and constitute a subliminal force for public education.

An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China by David Strand (review)

Reviewed by: An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China by David Strand Robert J. Culp An Unfinished Republic: Leading by Word and Deed in Modern China BY David Strand. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 387. $65.00. Few scholars' oeuvre has the high degree of coherence that David Strand's does. From Rickshaw Beijing, through his articles on the 1989 Tian'anmen protest movement,1 to the book reviewed here, Strand has explored dynamics of political action in twentieth-century China that continue to animate and inflect Chinese politics today. In particular, Strand has analyzed how Chinese political practice has been a medium of both authority and dissent, contributing to the formation of what could be called the "citizenship studies" subfield in the study of modern China.2 Further, he has tracked with great acuity the fluid interplay between culture and politics that modern China inherited from the late imperial past. Strand's latest book continues to explore these themes, with a particular focus on public speaking and its political implications. An Unfinished Republic analyzes the political dynamics of the first decade and a half of the Chinese Republic, reconstructing how they established many of the parameters of Chinese republicanism. Strand is most concerned with the growth of popular participation in politics during this period and how speech making became a key feature of Chinese public life. Even as highly anticipated new political institutions failed, Chinese republicanism flourished in the form of new modes of popular discourse and civic action. In Strand's words, "Within a few years the Republic became entrenched, not so much as a set of national political institutions, but as a political way of life in which citizens confronted leaders and each other face-to-face in a stance familiar to republics worldwide. Political equality as a value and an everyday practice stood in stark contrast to the inequality and hierarchy that long formed the spine of China's social and cultural order" (p. 1). [End Page 171] Strand portrays these emergent political dynamics through thematic chapters that focus, in turn, on the scope of political inclusion, through women's efforts to gain full citizenship in the new polity (Chapter 1), on the development of new modes of public discourse (Chapter 2), and on the dynamics of citizenship (Chapter 4). This thematically driven discussion is complemented by Chapters 3, 5, and 6, which focus on three individuals—Tang Qunying, Lu Zhengxiang, and Sun Yat-sen—who, Strand convincingly argues, shaped the development of Chinese republicanism through their words and actions. The thematic chapters chart in more systematic terms the parameters of popular participation and the emergent structure of direct address between political leaders and the people. The biographical chapters illustrate the terms under which particular Chinese political actors could enter public life by using new patterns of public discourse, and they evaluate the impact of those figures' speech and actions on the dynamics of Chinese politics. By focusing on political organizing and speech making in the first decade or so after the 1911 Revolution, Strand reveals the fluid and contingent nature of early Republican political action. Tang Qunying and other suffragettes were not immediately given speaking roles in the political system founded by the revolution they helped make. They first needed to take dramatic action—"slapping Song Jiaoren" (p. 13)—to claim any place in party politics and the polity. Lu Zhengxiang, as an elite diplomat with extensive experience in Europe, inherited key posts in Yuan Shikai's cabinets, but he badly flubbed a major speaking role before the Senate, in part because he misread the new political context and its requirements. In contrast, Sun Yat-sen, soon deprived by Yuan Shikai of a meaningful institutional base or audience as an official speaker during the early Republic, turned to address "the people" directly, whenever and wherever he could. In doing so, Sun fostered a form of Chinese populism on which Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, among others, would later build. By tracking the political action of these three figures and their contemporaries, Strand subtly illustrates how contingent acts of public address sedimented into a new culture of public...