Postempire: On memory, legacy and deimperiality

Abstract

The renaissance of empire/imperialism as a category within political and scholarly discourse has been accompanied by an efflorescence of collective memories of bygone empires. In this essay, I propose a broad, supple model for postimperial studies based on the relationship between legacies and collective memories of empires. After sketching recent debates in postimperial scholarship, I offer a dialectical theory of the relationship between collective memory and historical legacy. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s seminal concept of the postcolony, I propose an analogous concept, ‘postempire’. I specify the concept of postempire by incorporating the insights of Freud’s theory of the uncanny in relation to postimperial sites. This discussion supports the sibling notion of deimperiality, both distinct from and related to the established concept of decoloniality. Following this, I outline a methodology for the study of postempires with a tripartite focus on postimperial persons, places and things. To illustrate this methodology, the essay adduces a series of sites and examples in former Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov/Russian contexts. In conclusion, I reflect on the modes of affect that characterize the personifications, emplacements, and materializations of postempire, and their entailments for the project of deimperiality.