CALL FOR PAPERS

2008 annual theme:

GARDENING EMPIRE

Dear Colleagues and Readers,

as a result of Ab Imperio’s focus on languages of self-description in the imperial space (2005-2006) and on knowledge and its gray zones in empire (2007), the journal explored discourses and practices of rationalizing and modernizing the diverse imperial space. To build on this trend – as well as expand it to new areas of research and reflection – we invite our authors and readers to explore the history of empire through the concept of the “gardening state” inspired by Zygmunt Bauman’s sociology. Following the established tradition, we would like to explore practices of the rationalization of imperial space through a meta-concept – in this case a meta-concept in continental sociology reflecting grand historical processes of modernity – which is brought to bear on diverse imperial experiences and encounters. It becomes immediately obvious that in the case of empire the concept of the gardening state loses its single-vectored character and its homogenizing and totalizing potential, because in the imperial states the right to “garden” is contested by multiple – social, political, ethnic, confessional – actors.

This right to garden is entangled with one of the key questions in the study of empire: the problem of uniqueness and exceptionalism of historical experiences, both in the eye of the scholarly beholder and as contained in the languages of self-description of historical actors. Each and every empire – from classic antiquity to modern day composite polities – rests on a notion of a unique and exceptional historical path. This exceptionalism is dialectically translated into imperial universalism, which lifts imperial loyalties and identifications above local, regional, national, confessional, or social loyalties. The dialectic transformation of imperial exceptionalism also reveals itself in hierarchies of shared and divided sovereignties, exclusions, and gray zones unregulated by the ever in-creasing pace of rationalization of modern polities. As one of the central questions of our first issue in 2008, we pose the problem of imperial exceptionalisms and the problem of academic languages that describe them. Can dichotomies between colonial and land empires (which lead to specific configurations and isolation of research fields) be overcome through a dialogue between research traditions and their mutual translation, and through exploration of connections and knowledge circulation within and outside of historic empires? Can a post-colonial paradigm shed light on the history of the Russian Empire? And can the latter, in turn, generate new insights and complicate post-colonial studies?
These and other questions naturally lead to the problem of gardening the imperial subject, the focus of the second issue of the journal in 2008. Overcoming the nation-centered and top-down political history, is it possible to enrich our understanding of the history of empire by looking into traditional themes of post-colonial studies: the relationship between the intimate and the collective across the divide between the metropole and the colony? Borrowing research topics from post-colonial studies (family, sexuality, nurture, upbringing) and combining them with established research programs in Russian imperial history (schooling, languages, socialization), can we identify and describe multiple gardeners – and perhaps gardens – and come to an understanding of the mechanisms of imperial subjectivity?

Gardening imperial and national spaces invokes establishing an ideal, utopian harmony of well-regulated and orderly relations among humans and between human societies and nature. How is this ideal order challenged and contested, and what are possible forms of violating and vandalizing imperial and national gardens? In the third issue of 2008 we are interested in exploring different forms of violence as practices of signification, as forms of rationality and irrationality, and as means to making and unmaking of groupness. At the same time, we are looking for articles focusing on rationalization and standardization as forms of (symbolic) violence.

In the last issue of the journal our focus is on the ecology of imperial gardens as reflected in languages and practices in imperial space. As gardening transgresses the divide between the social and the natural, it generates languages of authenticity and nurture. Problems in this issue may range from ecological discourses in constructing imperial and national identities, to sanitary and hygienic projects of different imperial and national gardeners.