The
empires that once defined the political geography of Europe are no
more. One cannot meet a Prussian, Romanov, Habsburg, or Ottoman today;
these dusty categories of affiliation have ceded to myriad national
identities. Yet it would be mistaken to assume that Europe’s bygone
empires have become mere relics of history. Imperial pasts continue to
inspire nostalgia, identification, pride, anxiety, skepticism, and
disdain in the present. The afterlives of empires as objects of memory
exceed historical knowledge, precisely because these afterlives shape
and recast the present and the future. Simultaneously, present- and
future-oriented imperatives accentuate imperial pasts in selective ways,
yielding new configurations of post-imperial amnesia as well as memory.
Our conference, “Ambivalent Legacies: Memory and Amnesia in Post-Habsburg and Post-Ottoman Cities,” aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on post-imperial legacies, especially in relation to eight specific cities: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Trieste, Thessaloniki, Zagreb, and Belgrade. We seek contributions from historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and scholars of comparative literature and architecture—among others—that pursue the politics and cultures of memory in one or more of our eight cities. Paper proposals should speak to two general, interrelated questions: "What are the effects of imperial legacies on contemporary cities?" and "How do present-day urban processes reshape the forms of post-imperial memory and forgetting?"
The conference will convene at the Max Planck
Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity from April
26th to 28th, 2017. Conference participants will be provided with
lodging and will be reimbursed for their travel.
Please send abstracts
of 250 words, along with a brief academic biography, to Marina
Cziesielsky at Cziesielsky@mmg.mpg.de by December 1st, 2016.
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