Articles
Imperial nostalgia in the era of post-socialist urban change
This paper discusses the spatial restructuring of Balkan cities and their imperial metropoles in relation to imperial nostalgia during early twenty-first century processes of Europeanization. Valuable as studies of cosmopolitan belonging, nostalgic imperial histories nevertheless aligned with neoliberal processes of urban change. The Europeanization of Rijeka, Belgrade, Vienna, and Istanbul harnessed academic and popular histories alike, funnelled to the tourism and real-estate sectors.
What's off-centre of empire? Introduction to the special issue
Introduction to the Special Issue "Empire Off-Centre: Public Memory, Orientations and More-than-Human as Imperial Cultural Formations". We highlight the original contribution of off-centring empire, which looks 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 off-centre, as we argue, is to focus on the electrifying force-field generated by the poles of imperial power, rather than oppose centre and peripheries to subvert their relationship.
Laudon's Garden: Habsburg Legacy and the Warped Space of Empire
This article traces how processes of physical displacement (and its corollary, re-emplacement) have emerged during multiple periods and in distant locales associated with the history and legacy of the Habsburg Empire. It focuses on an eighteenth-century Turkish garden made from Field Marshal Gideon Ernst von Laudon’s spoils of war on the outskirts of Vienna. Utilizing Anthony Vidler’s concept of “warped space,” the article explores Laudon’s garden as an exemplary form of imperial space. It then proceeds to argue that imperial capitalism continued to produce warped spaces based on processes of displacement and dispossession, using the example of the short-lived Austro-Hungarian concession in Tianjin. In doing so, the article argues for an understanding of imperial subjectivity that takes into account the built space of empire.
"Introduction" Special Section Empire Off-Center
The essay introduces the special section, which is intended to outline new, off-center perspectives on empire and imperial formations. We highlight moments and places in which the historical contours of empire become thinner, contrasting with the world they ostensibly speak of. Our common guiding principle is to heighten the discrepancy of such offsets and sharpen the haze beneath (Carabelli et al.). As we argue, doing so necessitates moving beyond the methodological center of historical scholarship. Putting history in conversation with sociology, theories of space, political economy, settler colonial studies, and anthropology, the essays in this special section explore theoretically and empirically how empire is constituted both within and outside other historical processes. We see the imperial longue durée as constitutive not only of the past, but of our broader social reality.
Whitewashed empire: Historical narrative and place marketing in 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.
Bourgeois Worlds and Urban Nightmares: The post-Ottoman Balkan City through the Lens of Milutin Uskoković's Newcomers
In the nineteenth century, the bourgeois elites of newly minted national capitals Belgrade and Sofia sought to produce ‘European’ urban space, their first step on a path to industrial modernity and a new relationship with the world. When such designs failed, their execution left real, devastating material consequences. This article explores the underside of elite dreams through Milutin Uskoković’s Newcomers (1910). Set in 1906 Belgrade, the novel’s tragic form emphasizes the futility of bourgeois aspirations on the periphery of global capital. I expand on such themes through archival sources, which consistently describe the post-Ottoman city as a landscape of dispossession. Ultimately, I argue that urban modernity has historically been informed by failed elite dreams and their resulting urban nightmares, particularly in spaces off-centre to capitalist flows.
‘The city in our hands’: urban management and contested modernity in nineteenth-century Belgrade
This article examines the image of the city and notions of urban management in the discourse of elite groups in Belgrade between 1830 and the late 1860s. It focuses on the negotiation of modernity in heterogeneous cultural spaces, particularly looking at the textual interplay of power, orientalized exoticism and notions of backwardness. These discourses were integral to the processes of managing urban populations and homogenizing the cityscape. The city's specific political situation as a site of dual authority, however, left room for minor acts of contestation which questioned the primacy of exclusion and dispossession as bases for modern urban transformation. This dynamic interplay framed the city as a site of conflict between mutually defining forces of ‘Europeanization’ and ‘backwardness’.
"Taming the Tavern: Social Space and Government Regulation in 19th Century Belgrade"
This article is about the relationship between the regulation of nineteenth-century Belgrade and various factors that shaped social life. It argues that the municipal authorities intervened in the public sphere from the very beginning by distancing these forms of public space from Ottoman social norms and brought them closer to officially approved cultural relations. Taxation, moral legal codes, zoning and financial initiatives all reinforced behaviors that were deemed Western or cosmopolitan. Through researching Belgrade municipal documents, the article shows how the specific urban form of the tavern was reinterpreted or given new function by the city authorities. Through this, the article concludes that the need to regulate taven life was intimately connected to the legitimization of Serbian autonomous rule.