Imperial nostalgia: mythologizing Habsburg Trieste

Ballinger, Pamela

doi:10.1080/1354571022000036263

Cited by 32 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…The aesthetically valuable images of the port-city as seen from the sea, among which are the Primorsky Boulevard and the Potemkin stairways, suggests that the sea and the waterside work as privileged viewpoints for urban spectators (both tourists and residents) to establish a relationship with the city and its multicultural past. Just like in post-imperial Trieste (Ballinger, 2003;Treleani, 2009;Schlipphacke, 2014), nostalgia for the golden time of the empire is often recurring against the uncertainty of the present. Odessa, once the mythical Southern Palmyra of Russia, turns to its all-European elite cultural heritage of opera, ballet, coffee houses and cosmopolitan, artistic vocations to stage its transnational cultural and economic identity both for tourist and domestic consumption.…”

Section: Research Goalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking for a Relationship with the Sea: Urban-Scape and Cosmopolitan Memories in Contemporary Odessa

Cocco¹

2018

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The sea is not quite on the radar of social science. However, things change when the sea and the land touch each other and the sea resonates in living social relations. In some cases, the encounters with the sea take place in the form of embodied imagination processes that bring about productive dissonances. My research aims to unveil the frictions between dissonant embodied imaginations of local citizens and tourists in an exceptional 'landscape of dreams': the post-cosmopolitan port-city of Odessa. In 2008-2010 I carried out fieldwork with interviews and surveys aimed at comparing the ways maritime imperial legacies were exploited in Trieste and Odessa. After almost a decade, I was back 'in the pearl of the Black Sea' with the intention of carrying out a more in-depth investigation of the relationship between tourism and the exploitation of cosmopolitan memories in this post-socialist port city of Ukraine. My data are a combination of secondary statistics, ethnographic work, and first-hand qualitative accounts, both audiovisual and interviews, collected from April 2017 to June 2018, here including a two-week period spent in Odessa. After a preliminary elaboration of data, I am persuaded that the tourist relations in contemporary Odessa are oriented by the double endeavour of both hosts and guests looking for a special relationship with the sea. The sea and the waterside work both as privileged viewpoints for urban spectators (both tourists and residents) and a necessary medium to establish a relationship with the city and its multicultural past.

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Section: Research Goalsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Looking for a Relationship with the Sea: Urban-Scape and Cosmopolitan Memories in Contemporary Odessa

Cocco¹

2018

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“…After World War II, the border shifted farther east. Despite that, Brody retains the aura of a historically and culturally significant site, often cast in a local variety of post‐Hapsburg “imperial nostalgia” (Ballinger 2003b). 15…”

Section: Refiguration As Repossessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In that it has not, of course, been unique. The border zone between former Yugoslavia and Italy (Ballinger 2003b), the Hungarian–Romanian borderland in Transylvania (Kurti 2001), and—in a different manner—the area adjacent to the now gone German–German border (Berdahl 1999b; Borneman 1998) are all Central European regions that have been “profoundly shaped by [their] interstitial position between competing empires, states, religions and political ideologies” (Ballinger 2003b:261).…”

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confidence: 99%

REPOSSESSION: Notes on Restoration and Redemption in Ukraine's Western Borderland

Follis

2008

Cultural Anthropology

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This essay is an ethnographic account of the use of post‐Soviet military ruins in western Ukraine. I describe an encounter with the founder of a commune for persons released from prison, victims of human trafficking, and asylum seekers established in a former nuclear base in Ukraine's western borderland. The commune is an unusual restoration project that is carried out in the interstices of the postsocialist state and of the changing European border regime. As such, it is a compelling site for rethinking dispossession and the possibility of redemption some 15 years after the USSR ceased to exist. The protagonist of this account redeems ruins left behind by the collapse of an empire he was glad to see go, and reproduces precisely that which has been lost in the process of the unmaking of Soviet life, that is the all‐embracing domain of collective work and life.

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“…Located in the middle of a tourist forum which connects the city's museum quarter with its imperial court, the Identitarians' politics were both spatial and historical. While nostalgia for the Dual Monarchy has received a substantial amount of attention in the past decade (Ballinger 2003;Wolff 2012;Kamusella 2011;Kozuchowski 2013;Arens 2014;Schlipphacke 2014), scholars of the Habsburg mythos (Magris 1966) have shown comparatively less attention to the architectural and material heritage of empire. This is in sharp contrast to the historical significance of Habsburg urban space, which remained a significant part of imperial identity construction from the Eighteenth century onwards (Moravánszky 1998;Prokopovych 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Whitewashed empire: Historical narrative and place marketing in Vienna

Jovanović

2019

History and Anthropology

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The historical narrative of Habsburg grandeur has played a decisive role in branding the Austrian capital of Vienna. While scholars have situated place-marketing strategies within de-historicized frameworks of the neoliberal city, the nostalgic framing of imperial spatial assemblages should be critically interpreted from a historical vantage point. In tourist spaces such as the Kaiserforum, urbanists, museum curators, right-wing groups, and real-estate investors employ the discourse of Habsburg patrimony to leverage past spatial inequalities for contemporary purposes. Such nostalgic narratives obfuscate the historical material conditions of their making. I argue that this very obfuscation constitutes a continuing legacy of empire. I call this process 'whitewashed empire,' the redeployment of imperial structures through the preservation, renovation and assemblage of material heritage. As a memorial assemblage of narrative selection and a political economic relation of exploitation, imperial nostalgia extends the work of Habsburg spatial production into the present.

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Imperial nostalgia: mythologizing Habsburg Trieste

Cited by 32 publications

References 4 publications

Looking for a Relationship with the Sea: Urban-Scape and Cosmopolitan Memories in Contemporary Odessa

Looking for a Relationship with the Sea: Urban-Scape and Cosmopolitan Memories in Contemporary Odessa

REPOSSESSION: Notes on Restoration and Redemption in Ukraine's Western Borderland

Whitewashed empire: Historical narrative and place marketing in Vienna

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