Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

Walton, Jeremy F.

doi:10.1080/02757206.2019.1612387

Cited by 12 publications

(10 citation statements)

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“…With its labile, mobile mana, Zagreb's monument to Ban Jelačić defies this dichotomy, precisely because its vigour is irreducible to the instrumental designs of either empire or nation-state. By seizing the 'textured historicity' (Walton 2019b) of the statue as it has taken shape over the past century-and-ahalf, I have gestured to an architectonic feature of collective memory of the Ban that, I hope, will resonate across a plethora of (post)imperial contexts: Imperial pasts and national presents are neither contradictory nor fully continuous. Rather, both pasts and presents are 'constellations' (Benjamin 1968, 263) of the imperial and the nationallike the Ban's mana itself.…”

Section: Conjugations: Military Men and Miniaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ban’s mana: post-imperial affect and public memory in Zagreb

Walton

2020

Cultural Studies

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How might scholars of public memory approach the protean relationship among imperial legacies, nationalized collective memories and urban space from an 'off-center' perspective? In this essay, I pursue this question in relation to a monument whose political biography traverses, and troubles, the distinction between imperial and national times, sentiments, and polities. The statue in question is that of Ban Josip Jelačić, a nineteenth Century figure who was both a loyal servant of the Habsburg Empire and a personification of nascent Croatian and South Slavic national aspirations. Jelačić's monument was erected in Zagreb's central square in 1866, only seven years following his death; in the heady political context of the Dual Monarchy, his apotheosis as a figure of regional rebellion caused consternation on the part of the Hungarian authorities. Nor did the statue's controversy end with the Habsburgs. Following World War II, Jelačić's embodiment of Croat national pride proved anathema to Yugoslav socialist federalism, and the monument was dismantled in 1947, only to be re-erected following the disintegration of Yugoslavia and Croatian independence in 1991. Accordingly, the statue of Jelačić is a privileged material medium of and for nationalist memory in Croatia, even as it also conjures ghosts of the city's and state's imperial and socialist pasts. I theorize this play of hegemonic and repressed collective memories through the concepts of public affect and mana, especially in relation to several recent public events that centred on the statue: the memorial to Bosnian-Croat general Slobodan Praljak, who committed suicide during proceedings of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in November 2017, and the celebration of Croatia's achievements in the 2018 World Cup.

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Section: Conjugations: Military Men and Miniaturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Ban’s mana: post-imperial affect and public memory in Zagreb

Walton

2020

Cultural Studies

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“…Expanding Walton's broader scholarship on empire, this essay also reflects on how 'the afterlives of empires as objects of memory exceed historical knowledge precisely because these afterlives shape and recast the present and the future. Such presentand future-oriented imperatives accentuate imperial pasts in selective ways, yielding new constellations of post-imperial amnesia as well as memory' (Walton 2019). The tense forcefield between amnesia/erasure and nostalgia is also central to Gruia Badescu's analysis of competing claims over heritage preservation in the Habsburg-built Transylvanian city of Alba Iulia.…”

Section: The Structure Of Off-centrementioning

confidence: 99%

What’s off-centre of empire? Introduction to the special issue

Carabelli

Jovanović

2020

Cultural Studies

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In this Introduction, we discuss the aims of this publication along with guidelines to locate and connect the essays part of the edited volume. We start by highlighting the original contribution of our intervention in terms of what off-centring empire offers in relation to scholarship that de-centres empire. To us, this means to look at the processes, dynamics, and movements that connect empire (as a centre of power) to its peripheries (as a site of difference, struggles, and resistance). To be sure, attempts to off-centre and de-centre empire are related, relational, and they both commit to the project of challenging the centrality of empire, to confronting its lasting legacies and normative powers. Yet to off-centre, as we argue, is to focus on the electrifying forcefield generated by the poles of imperial power, rather than oppose centre and peripheries to subvert their relationship. Our aim is to reveal the complex ways centre and periphery connect and distance with the aim to highlight emerging modes of counter-imperial practice. Further, this introduction serves as the opportunity to discuss the structure of the SI and its three main sections -Public Memory, Orientations, and More-than-human. Here we reflect upon how each essay brings to the fore a unique way to off-centre empire, and thus provide examples that may inspire future research.Finally, we highlight how conversations emerging from individual essays can be assembled and read into threads, pointing to multiple ways in which we seek to offcentre empire through empirical research.

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“…The material afterlives of polities take shape through increasingly sophisticated simulacra and aesthetic mimicry, even as they also involve "whitewashing" the ongoing effects of political power (Jovanovic ́, 2019). Bygone empires lead especially vivid, ambivalent material afterlives (Walton, 2019), and the durability of "imperial duress" (Stoler, 2016) registers sharply in the "debris" (Stoler, 2008) empires leave behind.…”

Section: Introduction: Afterlives and The New Hauntologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…As a “concept metaphor” (Stoler, 2016: 3; see also Walton, 2019: 358), afterlives and a host of adjacent terms have seized sociological, anthropological, and philosophical imagination in recent years (Schäfers, 2020). Cumulatively, this turn to afterlives has revolutionized perspectives on temporality and time's effects on the political and the social.…”

Section: Introduction: Afterlives and The New Hauntologymentioning

confidence: 99%

Introduction: Afterlives in objects

Walton

Ilengiz

2022

Journal of Material Culture

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In this introduction to our edited volume, Material Afterlives, we specify the interventions and arguments of our collection as a whole. To begin, we reflect on the recent proliferation of “afterlives” as a concept and metaphor within the social sciences and humanities, a development that we describe as the “new hauntology.” As we argue, this new hauntology favors the subjective rather than objective aspects of afterlives and consequently neglects questions of materiality. The overarching goal of Material Afterlives is to remedy this neglect. Following this, we examine the contributions and limitations of the concepts of ruin/ruination and waste to the investigation of material afterlives. While the concepts of ruin and waste presuppose a decrease in value in the face of time and change of function, material afterlives, by contrast, accentuate the proliferation of enhanced and unanticipated material values. We then enumerate the implications of our consideration of material afterlives for Memory Studies broadly, with particular emphasis on how material afterlives unsettle the orienting role of trauma in the discipline. Finally, we briefly outline the five specific contributions that constitute our volume.

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Introduction: Textured historicity and the ambivalence of imperial legacies

Cited by 12 publications

References 27 publications

The Ban’s mana: post-imperial affect and public memory in Zagreb

The Ban’s mana: post-imperial affect and public memory in Zagreb

What’s off-centre of empire? Introduction to the special issue

Introduction: Afterlives in objects

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