For the past four decades, scholars have inquired how the invention of traditions contributed to the formation of national identities by providing communities with a sense of historical depth. This workshop aims for taking stock of the discussions that have followed the publication Hobsbawm’s and Rangers seminal publication (1983) and explore the relation between social stratification, the establishing of modes of cultural self-representation and claims for sovereignty in a global historical perspective. What were the similarities and differences between German nation-building in the 1860s, the emergence of Black identity concepts of the Négritude, and the formation of national consciousness in India, to name but a few? Were these processes of collective self-fashioning in different parts of the world ultimately identical, differing only in their temporality?
The conference will explore the pathways, power struggles, and (re-)negotiations of nation-building and similar forms of community-fashioning in different world regions. It ties in with recent research that pointed out the role of scholarly disciplines such as History (Berger and Conrad 2015) or folklore studies (Baycroft and Hopkin 2012) for establishing sentiments of belonging within Europe and explores whether similar processes took place on other continents, as well as to what extent these processes were mutually entangled. Such an approach seems promising for the age of empire as in that period, the distinction between an allegedly civilized (i.e. European) and a supposedly uncivilized (i.e. colonial) world was not least drawn by different modes of temporality. Whereas the industrialised countries of the global North were deemed capable of historical change and development, the countries of the Southern hemisphere were denied coevalness (Fabian 1983) and considered backward ‘people without history’ by European intellectuals such as Hegel, Ranke, Mill, Macaulay or Droysen (Guha 2002). Actors from all around the world who participated in the self-fashioning of communities seem to be inspired by European academic traditions. Yet, they often maintained a level of non-conformity by emphatically locating themselves in scholarly tradition of their regions of origin, thus creating hybrid forms of scholarship. The invention of traditions and national histories that rooted communities in a historical past and allowed for projecting a certain trajectory towards the future and thus opening a distinct Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectation; Koselleck 1983) was therefore crucial for claims of territorial sovereignty in the imperial age. By focussing on the period between the 1860s and the 1960s, the conference adresses three topics in particular:
1. Role of scholarly knowledge: In many countries, nationalist ideas were first devised by middle class intellectuals before they spread to other parts of society; in fact, it was precisely the question whether other social groups such as the rural populace or the working classes could be integrated into the national community that decided on the success of nation-building. The concurrent raise of disciplines such as folklore-Studies, Historiography, and Anthropology was by no means a coincidence. These fields provided important tools that helped to identify the cultural ‘other’ and contributed to the formation of national identities by providing communities with a sense of historical depth. Furthermore, they were also inextricably linked to bourgeois practices and social distinction. To what extent was the incorporation of the rural population or the working classes into the bourgeois project of nation-building through folklore-studies and anthropology a global phenomenon? To what extent did the social upper strata of Delhi, Dakar and Tokyo imagine their respective communities within the scholarly framework of folklore-Studies, Anthropology and Historiography? Did these disciplines change under different global conditions?
2. Reinterpretation of cultural stereotypes in non-metropolitan areas and by subaltern groups: Nation-building was by no means merely a bourgeois project. Subaltern groups – with a strong involvement of female actors – challenged the national self-image devised by middle class intellectuals in many colonial territories in the first decades of the twentieth century. Several scholars thus argued that anticolonial nationalism should be considered a conjunction between top-down- and bottom-up-processes (Guha 1988; Schmidt 2005). Similar negotiations and reinterpretations took place in European countries. Nationalist and regionalist activists took up what metropolitan intellectuals had identified as ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ and reinterpreted the respective stereotypes as national and regional traditions, respectively, that sustained the claim for sovereignty in the respective territory. The results of folklore studies could be used to establish national characteristics in regions that belonged to the Habsburg Empire, such as Bohemia, Hungary, or Dalmatia, with the potential to sustain national ambitions in these imperial peripheries. Likewise, regionalist movements or secessionists in the British Empire or nation states such as Germany and France referred to narratives of both regional history and folklore studies to challenge the predominance of the respective capital.
3. Challenging teleological trajectories toward the nation-state: Addressing the question of the global rise of the nation between the 1860s and the 1960s – the period identified by Charles Maier (2000) as the heyday of territoriality – the conference will consider questions of methodological nationalism and historical contingency. Inventing traditions and imagining communities were not limited to a distinct region or nation as the only possible vessels of collective identification. Unrealized attempts of community imagining that aimed at self-determination without the need for a distinct territory were numerous. In the social transformation of East Central Europe of the early 20th century, for instance, Yiddish intellectuals developed community concepts of transregional cultural autonomy outside the nation state with the help of folklore studies and historiography. Another example is the embrace of Egyptology as an important part of Pan-African discourses that sought to establish a transcontinental sense of Blackness. As Gary Wilder has shown regarding the postcolonial utopia of Leopold Sedar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, even at the moment of national fragmentation of European empires in the 1960s, the nation was never an uncontested concept (Wilder 2015).
The conference intends to establish a dialogue between historians from different backgrounds, including early career researchers. It focusses on the relation between nation-building, scholarly research, and class from a global historical perspective. Therefore, the workshop explores the possibilities of how to write the history of ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) or ‘invention of traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) after the global turn. Moreover, it allows for linking these concepts to those of ‘the denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983) and ‘futures past’ (Koselleck 1983), all of which, coincidentally, have been presented in publications that were published in the same year of 1983.
We call for contributions dealing with different types of sources, and we welcome papers that adopt an interdisciplinary approach in studying ‘imagined communities’ between 1860s and the 1960s. We particularly welcome contributions that address gendered aspects of nation-building and self-fashioning at the intersection of scholarly activities and the invention of tradition.
Proposals of two pages (max.) should be sent to Christof Dejung, <christof.dejung@unibe.ch>; and Philipp Horn <philipp.horn@unibe.ch> before 20 December 2024.
Accepted papers will be pre-circulated in advance of the workshop, they will be expected to be submitted by 4 August 2025.
The conference will take place from 3 to 5 September 2025 at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg global dis:connect, Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Germany. All travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by the organizers.