Archives par mot-clé : Empire Habsbourgeois

Postcolonial, Decolonial, Post-imperial, De-imperial

Deadline : 17 November 2023

Conference :  15-17 May, 2024.  

Organizers : research group, “REVENANT-Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” (ERC #101002908),  https://revenant.uniri.hr.

(Details for submission: see below or call for paper)

Despite dating back at least half a century, postcolonial studies and the concept of postcolonialism evince no signs of obsolescence in middle age. The theoretical and political questions that postcolonial critique first posed, related to the racialized formations of knowledge-power that sustained colonial regimes and their ongoing effects, have only increased in urgency. Precursors such as Frantz Fanon’s understanding of colonialism as a mode of psychological-subjective subjugation, signature concepts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and Gayatri Spivak’s subalternity, and more recent coinages such as Achille Mbembe’s postcolony remain both staples of syllabi and inspirations for insurgent subjects.
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CATHERINE Horel, Multicultural Cities of the Habsburg Empire, 1880–1914, CEUPRESS, 2023 (574 P., 116.00€ )

Catherine Horel has undertaken a comparative analysis of the societal, ethnic, and cultural diversity in the last decades of the Habsburg Monarchy as represented in twelve cities: Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste, and Zagreb. By purposely selecting these cities, the author aims to counter the disproportionate attention that the largest cities in the empire receive.

With a focus on the aspects of everyday life faced by the city inhabitants (associations, schools, and municipal politics) the book avoids any idealization of the monarchy as a paradise of peaceful multiculturalism, and also avoids exaggerating conflicts. The author claims that the world of the Habsburg cities was a dynamic space where many models coexisted and created vitality, emulation, and conflict. Modernization brought about the dissolution of old structures, but also mobility, the progress of education, the explosion of associative life, and constantly growing cultural offerings.

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Catherine Horel a entrepris une analyse comparative de la diversité sociétale, ethnique et culturelle au cours des dernières décennies de la monarchie des Habsbourg, telle qu’elle est représentée dans douze villes : Arad, Bratislava, Brno, Chernivtsi, Lviv, Oradea, Rijeka, Sarajevo, Subotica, Timișoara, Trieste et Zagreb. En choisissant délibérément ces villes, l’auteur vise à contrer l’attention disproportionnée que reçoivent les plus grandes villes de l’empire.

En mettant l’accent sur les aspects de la vie quotidienne des habitants des villes (associations, écoles et politique municipale), l’ouvrage évite d’idéaliser la monarchie comme un paradis de multiculturalisme pacifique et d’exagérer les conflits. L’auteur affirme que le monde des villes habsbourgeoises était un espace dynamique où de nombreux modèles coexistaient et créaient de la vitalité, de l’émulation et des conflits. La modernisation a entraîné la dissolution des structures anciennes, mais aussi la mobilité, les progrès de l’éducation, l’explosion de la vie associative et une offre culturelle en constante augmentation.

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Discourses of Transition in (post-)Habsburg East Central Europe, 1917–1941

Bratislava, Slovakia, May 24–25, 2022. The submission deadline is Friday, March 1, 2022

 

4th annual conference of the ERC Nepostrans – Negotiating post-imperial transitions: from remobilization to nation-state consolidation. A comparative study of local and regional transitions in post-Habsburg East and Central Europe 1917-1930

When the political institutions, social ties, cultural traditions, and economic links of the Habsburg Empire were pulled apart at the end of the First World War, a change in the mental lives of its inhabitants also took place. When it became apparent that they would no longer live within Austria-Hungary, how did individuals think through the transition out of Empire and into whatever came after? Reflecting on one consequence of this historical rupture, the Hungarian economist Elémer Hantos wrote that

[t]he old world in the middle of Europe has disappeared. What has taken its place bears—easily recognizable—the stamp of the provisional, the unbalanced, and the unsatisfactory. But it is precisely this feeling of incompleteness which ought to inspire us to create new things, to prompt us to prepare ourselves mentally and spiritually (seelisch und geistig) for the work of reconstruction.[1]

At first glance, one may date this text to the months and years immediately following the functional collapse of the Empire in late autumn 1918. But these words were rather published in 1933—part of the introduction to Hantos’s Der Weg zum neuen Mitteleuropa—in the middle of the democratic, fascist, and authoritarian experiments in statehood that were taking place across the former territories of the Habsburg Empire. Hantos envisioned a new economic unit in the middle of Europe, one founded on the Empire’s old economic ties, but without the revision of the region’s political boundaries to the pre-1918 status quo ante. It was an unrealized alternative, but fully informed by a sense that with the loss of the old order, something new—perhaps something more just—could take its place.

Newness in and of itself was not a guarantee of harmony in the international system, however, nor was it a promise of coexistence at home, in the localities distant from cosmopolitan metropolises. Visions of post-imperial social, political, and economic orders were myriad. Discourses of transition in post-Habsburg East Central Europe took numerous forms and reflected quite different interpretations of the dynamic changes that had taken place. The scale of these processes operated globally as much as they did within a single household. Indeed, the temporality of these processes mattered a great deal as well: a social change that had become inert at one level could well have remained in action within another spatial horizon.

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