Revivals of Empire – Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation

Project Information

REVENANT

Grant agreement ID: 101002908

DOI

10.3030/101002908

EC signature date 10 November 2021

Start date 1 April 2022

End date 30 September 2027

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 936 185,00

EU contribution

€ 1 936 185,00

Coordinated by

SVEUCILISTE U RIJECI, FILOZOFSKI FAKULTET U RIJECI
Croatia

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REVENANT (Revivals of Empire – Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation)

Reporting period: 2023-10-01 to 2025-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

In recent years, nostalgia for empires of the past has reshaped political cultures, identities, and historical discourses across the globe. REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation (Grant # 101002908) interrogates the collective memories and legacies of three former empires: the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and the Romanovs. REVENANT examines the personifications, emplacements, and objectifications of these bygone empires: the ways in which specific persons, places, and things convey legacies and orient memories about them. The research for REVENANT spans both geographic and disciplinary divides. In order to pioneer a comprehensive, comparative analysis of postimperial memories and legacies, the members of REVENANT pursue research in a host of countries, including Austria, Belgium, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Mexico, Romania, Serbia, Turkey and the United States. Memories and legacies of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs take shape quite differently in each of these successor states, and beyond—consequently, the distinct contexts of REVENANT’s research cast contrasting analytical light on one another. The multiple disciplines, sensibilities and methods that coordinate our research are central to REVENANT’s overarching aims. REVENANT includes scholars trained in Anthropology, Comparative Literature, History, Musicology, Psychology, and Theology. Two key concepts unite and integrate REVENANT’s individual research projects: postempire and interimperiality. Postempire, a concept that the PI, Jeremy F. Walton, has developed through his research for the project, theorizes the forms of nostalgia and criticism, as well as the uncanny legacies, that define postimperial political, social and cultural life. Interimperiality, adapted from the work of literary scholar Laura Doyle, encapsulates the ways in which collective memories of multiple empires mediate and inflect one another. The interimperial aspect of collective memories of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs is central to REVENANT’s research, and illuminates shared yet unacknowledged forms of historical belonging, interaction, and transformation. More generally, REVENANT’s approach to postimperial, interimperial collective memories and legacies aims to foster new modes of historical understanding that discard the epistemological and political straitjackets of methodological nationalism.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first half of REVENANT involved multiple, overlapping activities. Initially, the PI focused on recruiting the postdoctoral and doctoral fellows on the project while also initiating his own research. Once the full research group had assembled, each member began their individual projects through archival and ethnographic research. In addition to the PI’s comparative study of interimperial sites of postimperial memory in former Habsburg and Ottoman contexts, the specific research topics for REVENANT include interimperial microhistories in the Balkans; collective memories of Nikola Tesla in Croatia, Serbia and the United States; postimperial networks of Bashkir Sufis across former Romanov and Ottoman domains; Yugoslav travel writing on former imperial contexts; images of the Romanov Empire in Soviet-era opera; contemporary images of Emperor Maximilian of Habsburg and his wife Charlotte in Mexico; memories of Bosnian clergy from the 19th century in Balkan contextual theology today; and, the transformations of the military figure Nikola Šubić Zrinski across a variety of Croatian texts from the 16th to the 20th century. A host of publications has already emerged from this research, including articles and book chapters on postimperial cemeteries, Bashkir Sufi epistemologies, and the concept of postimperial uncanniness as a capacious lens through which to examine postimperial legacies. An agenda-setting article by the PI that fully theorizes REVENANT’s signature concept of postempire is currently under review. In addition to individual research, REVENANT has sponsored a series of public lectures by senior researchers, roundtables and conferences. Most importantly, in May 2024 REVENANT hosted a major international conference, “Postcolonial, Decolonial, Postimperial, Deimperial,” in which over 80 researchers from across globe gathered to discuss the intersections and distinctions among postimperial and postcolonial research. Finally, over the course of 2024, filming was conducted for a documentary on the REVENANT project in Istanbul, Sarajevo, and Vienna. The film will be completed in early 2025.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Over its first two-and-a-half years, REVENANT has pioneered a new field of scholarship at the intersection of several disciplines, including Memory Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Imperial History, and Anthropology: Postimperial Studies, with an emphasis on the afterlives of interimperial dynamics. Two concepts orient this new field of study—postempire and deimperiality. The notion of postempire draws inspiration from Achille Mbembe’s concept of the postcolony as an entanglement of different temporalities. Rather than entanglement, time and historicity in the postempire is a dichotomous matter of either nostalgic celebration or scathing condemnation. Accordingly, the concept of deimperiality—a cousin of decoloniality—entails criticism of this dual temporality based on the uncanny ways in which imperial legacies persist in the present. Much of the collective conceptual work of REVENANT has focused on constructing and sharpening these concepts, especially in relation to the project’s threefold approach to postimperial persons, places and things. In May 2024, REVENANT hosted the conference “Postcolonial, Decolonial, Postimperial, Deimperial” to explore the resonances of the project’s signature concepts across distinct domains of research. The conference explored the distinctions and continuities between the classic overseas colonial empires of the British, French and Dutch and the continental empires that define REVENANT’s purview, the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs. Several edited volumes will emerge from this conference, and will constitute a major output for the project. These collections will appear in tandem with an agenda-setting article by REVENANT’s PI that adumbrates the field of postimperial studies and the concepts of postempire and deimperiality. Beyond these publications, REVENANT will result in two-to-four sole-authored monographs, four dissertations, and sundry peer reviewed articles. Furthermore, a documentary film that summarizes the project’s key research and themes will be finished by early 2025. Together, these publications and other outputs will make two interrelated, groundbreaking contributions. On a regional level, REVENANT will pioneer a comparative approach to the aftermaths of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs. On a conceptual level, REVENANT will establish a framework for comparative Postimperial Studies as a whole.

REVENANT Logo

Vienna's massive Pummerin bell, originally forged from Ottoman cannons

A 19th Century Bosnian Headdress, featuring Habsburg and Ottoman coins

Massive busts of Suleyman the Magnificent and Nikola Šubić Zrinski