Postempire: On memory,legacy and deimperiality

Introduction: empires strike back

In recent years, bygone empires have dramatically refused to remain confined to the past. Like revenants (Derrida, 2006: 2) brimming with new, unanticipated vigour, a host of former empires has become uncannily present, striking back in a variety of forms, from new monuments to rose-tinted political movements. Brexiteers clad in the Union Jack and Rule Britannia paraphernalia in London (Ward and Rasch, 2019), gargantuan statues of Alexander the Great in Skopje (Graan, 2013) and Genghis Khan in Ulaanbaatar, restored Ottoman caravanserais and mosques in central Europe and the Balkans (Walton, 2016), Viennese-style cafes in Trieste (Carabelli, 2019), Budapest, Sarajevo and Lviv, and politicized pilgrimages to the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo (Lee, 2016) all illustrate the vivid recrudescence of empires and imperialisms. Postimperial longing is occasionally a laughing matter – for instance, in September 2023, social media buzzed virally with the news that many men obsess over the Roman Empire, and ponder it daily (Holtermann and Rojas, 2023). Far more darkly, imperial nostalgia fans the flames of irredentist political ideologies, as Vladimir Putin’s (2021) grotesque Romanov revisionism in the context of the invasion of Ukraine illustrates.

From the perspective of the late twentieth century – an epoch that now seems suddenly distant – this revival of imperial fascination and feeling is astonishing. According to most standard historiographic accounts, the twentieth century marked, and was marked by, the end of empire. Within a period of roughly 80 years, both the land-based empires of Eurasia and the overseas colonial empires of European states that aspired to encircle the globe shattered into a plethora of new nation-states. ¹ Three pivotal moments of political disjuncture and transformation punctuated this process. First, World War I and its aftermath witnessed the dismemberment of three massive continental empires, the Habsburg, Ottoman and Prussian, while the Romanov Empire was consumed in the bonfire of the February and October Revolutions. The Treaty of Versailles enshrined a Wilsonian vision of the world as a patchwork of nation-states, even as it also laid the groundwork for the emergence of a new imperial power in central Europe, the Third Reich (Mazower, 2008). After the setbacks of World War I, empire as a political form gained a lease on life during the interwar period in the form of fascist imperialisms: Nazi, Italian and Japanese. The second critical moment in empire’s decline followed World War II, when, in little more than two decades, the colonial empires of Western European powers – principally Great Britain, France and the Netherlands – came to a dramatic end in a tidal wave of decolonization. Although several imperial powers, notably Portugal, gripped firmly to their colonies for several decades longer, by the second half of the century, colonial imperialism, erected on ideologies of the racial and civilizational supremacy of Europe, was no longer a viable model for political life. ² Yet even as decolonization swept the globe, neo-colonialism (Nkrumah, 1965, cited in Khalili, 2021) and imperialism persisted in transmogrified forms during the Cold War, with both the Soviet Union and the United States donning the geopolitical mantles of erstwhile empires. The end of the Cold War in 1989, powerfully symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall, constituted the third key moment in the twentieth century dismantlement of empire. By the end of the century – reckoned by (neo)liberal apologists as no less than the end of history – the neo-Westphalian international order of independent nation-states had become globally hegemonic. Empire was consigned to history’s dustbin.

It is remarkable, then, that empire has struck back so forcefully in the first decades of the twenty-first century. In both popular and scholarly evaluations (Burbank and Cooper, 2010, 2023; Cooper, 2004; Darwin, 2008; Getachew, 2019; Harootunian, 2004; Kumar, 2017; Stoler and Cooper, 1997), empire as a concept and historical touchstone offers an indispensable perspective on the geopolitical tribulations of our day. For many, the unrivalled military might of the United States of America in the post-9/11 era, as well as the ‘blowback’ (Johnson, 2004) that this global regime of power has incited, warrants comprehension as an empire. ³ Among neoconservative American ideologues, imperialism enjoyed a certain vogue in the early 2000s, with writers such as Robert Kaplan maintaining that ‘throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by empires, Western or Eastern’ (Kaplan, 2014). ⁴ More abstractly, thinkers of the Left such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2001, 2019) have argued that the concept of empire effectively captures the asymmetries and alienations of capitalist political economy in the present, defined by the absence of contravening political-economic ideologies on a global scale. Postcolonial critics (e.g. Chakrabarty, 2000; Duara, 2004; Gandhi, 2020 [1998], Gopal, 2019; Mehta, 1999; Mishra, 2013) insist that the ongoing effects of the former colonial empires – their ‘remains’ (Young, 2012) – are inseparable from global hierarchies and inequalities today. Finally, defunct empires and their legacies have increasingly become the objects of collective memory, nostalgia, aspiration, identification and condemnation in a variety of public forums.

This final development – the recent consolidation of collective memories of empires – has yet to galvanize the scholarly attention that it warrants. There are both disciplinary and conceptual reasons for this lacuna. While indispensable revisionist histories of empires and imperialism have made welcome additions to bookshelves and conversations in recent decades, ⁵ the debates that they have inspired remain largely siloed within the historians’ guild. Memory studies has begun to grapple with cultures of memory relative to many epochs and events, but its initial focus has been predominantly on collective memories of the twentieth century (Rigney, 2018: 371), with particular attention to World War II and the Holocaust (e.g. Assmann and Hartman, 2012). ⁶ Finally, anthropologists and scholars of postcolonialism have insisted on the persistence of imperial powers, patterns and effects beyond the cessation of empires as polities (Stoler, 2013; Young, 2012). Such interrogations of ‘imperial duress’ (Stoler, 2016) marshal a critique of memory as a concept – as Ann Laura Stoler writes, ‘memory suggests that the past resides predominantly in how we find to remember it, rather than in the durable and intangible forms of its making. Colonial entailments endure in more palpably complicated ways’ (Stoler, 2016: 35). Certainly, the ‘presentism’ (Hartog, 2015; cf. Armitage, 2023) and whiff of instrumental choice that characterize this romance of memory are insufficient to account for empires’ ongoing effects in the present. Nevertheless, the recent proliferation and sophistication of collective memories of empires, and their entanglement with imperial duress and durability, demand a reckoning.

Much of my recent research has grappled with the dilemmas that orbit the study of empire as collective and cultural memory. I have done so with reference to the aftermaths and afterlives of two of the empires that fundamentally shaped and reshaped central and southeast Europe and the Middle East from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries: the Habsburg and the Ottoman. For the programmatic and illustrative purposes of this essay, I rely on figures, events, and sites from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, as well as the Romanov/Russian. First, however, the general framework of my project requires expansion and buttressing.

The study of past empires in the present entails a focus on the dialectical relationship between imperial legacies and postimperial memories. This double focus necessitates an interdisciplinary approach that integrates the methods and insights of memory studies, on one hand, and postcolonial/decolonial studies and anthropological approaches to empire, on the other. Ongoing historical research on empires is also a fundament for this endeavour, even as the aim of postimperial studies – to interrogate the persistent textures and tribulations of empires that are no more – differs from that of imperial history.

My approach to the afterlives of bygone empires summons two distinct, inverse relationships between the past and present, encompassed by the concepts of legacy and memory. Legacies comprise the plethora of effects that the past continues to have on the present. For heuristic purposes, the concept of ‘legacy’ can be summarized as the force that the past exerts on the present. Conversely, and according to this formulation, memory comprises the myriad ways in which the present mediates and articulates the past. As a concept, ‘memory’ can be summarized as the force that the present exerts on the past (Walton, 2019a). ⁷ Legacies and memories of empires intertwine to shape and condition the distinctive object of study for the scholarship that I propose: postempire. ⁸ Below, I expand on the concept of postempire, which draws inspiration from Achille Mbembe’s (2001) hallmark concept of the postcolony. To clear the ground for this discussion, I first conduct an overview of memory and legacy in relation to empire as an historical concept and category.

Empires as memories

Although collective memory has occupied scholars across multiple disciplines since Maurice Halbwachs (1992) coined the concept in the interwar period, the consolidation of memory studies as a coherent, interdisciplinary endeavour has only transpired in recent decades (De Cesari and Rigney, 2014). While memory studies is a protean field (Olick, 2008; Olick and Robbins, 1998), its call to theorize collective memory as an inherently political matter (Verovšek, 2016) underscores the inseparability of political memories from the politics of memory generally. However, this emphasis on the political dimensions of collective memories has yet to yield a capacious lexicon for theorizing memories of past polities, especially empires.

Despite the criticisms that his work has attracted (Hartog, 2015; Huyssen, 2003: 23–24; Rothberg, 2013; Stoler, 2016: 158), Pierre Nora’s (1989, 1996) ambitious cartography of the lieux de mémoire that saturate and situate France provides a template for such a project. Nora’s introduction of the term ‘lieu’/‘site’ to the study of collective memory was revolutionary because it articulated the interplay between intersubjective and objectified forms of collective memory, as expressed in his distinction between milieux de mémoire and lieux de mémoire. Sites of memory include not only physical spaces and places, but also an array of material and discursive forms that objectify collective memories, including literature, images, archives, dates and commemorative objects of all sorts. ⁹ In the context of collective memories of empires, I expand and streamline Nora’s model by advancing a tripartite heuristic of persons, places and things. Collective memories of bygone polities achieve different accents and effects in their distinct personifications, emplacements and materializations. Furthermore, persons, places and things act as pivots between communicative memory and cultural memory in Jan Assmann’s (1995) sense. ¹⁰ They encapsulate and bundle aspects of the past in and for the present, and act as incitements to memory discourse.

Beyond their personifications, emplacements and materializations, collective memories of empires are shaped by the distinctive spatial logics of empires as polities. Unlike nation-states, which privilege and naturalize homogeneous, uniform space and time (Anderson, 1983; Benjamin, 1968), empire-states exhibit spatial open-endedness (Burbank and Cooper, 2010). The contrast between the national border and the imperial frontier illustrates this distinction. Imperial space, unlike national space, relates differentially to political-economic centres, especially on its margins. Consequently, the spatial and political relations between empires are ramified differently than the ‘zero-sum’ relations between and among nation-states: They are ‘analogue’ rather than ‘digital’, in the sense that they admit intermediary spaces and sites that cannot easily be categorized as ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ of the polity. ¹¹ As Burbank and Cooper (2010) argue, this protean character of empires applies to political statuses, as well as space – rather than the dichotomy between citizen and foreigner, empires encompass a plethora of communal identities, territorialities and legal categories. ¹² Such ‘analogue’ relationships and statuses result in forms of mutual influence between and among empires that are configured differently than inter-national relations.

Laura Doyle’s seminal concept of ‘inter-imperiality’—‘multiply vectored relations among empires and among those who endure and manoeuvre among empires’ (Doyle, 2020: 4) – captures this difference by highlighting the mutually-constitutive relationships among empires. Although empires are not ‘modular’ in the manner of nation-states (Anderson, 1983), they necessarily take shape in relation to one another. Consequently, the effort to theorize any empire in isolation is as futile as methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). Memory studies has suffered acutely from methodological nationalism in the past – as Perry Anderson (2009; quoted in Rothberg, 2013: 363) pointed out, Nora’s premium on national sites of memory dramatically silenced French imperial history. Replacing methodological nationalism with methodological imperialism, however, is not preferable. Empires must be provincialized, situated in both spatial and temporal relation to one another, and rendered ‘off centre’ (Carabelli and Jovanović, 2020). This inter-imperial labour of ‘off-centring’ is not merely a matter of imperial historiography – it also animates the inquiry into postimperial memories.

Inter-imperial exchanges, antagonisms and influences were especially dense among the three empires that orient my research. Beyond the diplomatic history of alliances, competitions and wars, the Habsburgs, Ottomans and Romanovs achieved self-definition in contrast to and in conversation with their imperial neighbours. ¹³ The empires shared frontiers: the Habsburgs and Ottomans in the Balkans; the Ottomans and Romanovs in the Caucasus and Crimea; the Romanovs and Habsburgs in Galicia and Bukovina. For several centuries, all three exerted influence over a triple frontier in Romania (Parvulescu and Boatcǎ, 2022). Despite intermittent antagonisms, the empires exchanged goods, fashions, technologies, ideas and people across these frontiers. Concomitantly, a study of contemporary collective memories of the Habsburgs, Ottomans and Romanovs must account for the manner in which such memories mirror and shape one another today. Postimperial collective memories are per force inter-imperial (Leupold, 2020), and inter-imperial persons, places and things are especially fecund sites of and for postimperial collective memories.

Imperial legacies

Collective memories of empires have expanded recently, mirroring the expansive tendencies of empires themselves. However, the vigour and kaleidoscopic variety of postimperial memories should not distract attention from other ways in which imperial pasts impact the present. In order to capture the multiple relations between bygone empires and the present, the concept of memory requires supplementation and complementation by the concept of legacy.

Maria Todorova’s pioneering work, Imagining the Balkans (2007 [1997]), offers a robust model for the interpretation of imperial legacies beyond explicit formations of postimperial memory. ¹⁴ The crucible of the Balkans, with its palimpsest of imperial pasts, is the forge for her concept of legacy:

Historical legacy retains the valuable features of spatiality while simultaneously refining the vector of time, making it more historically specific . . . while tradition involves a conscious selection of elements bequeathed from the past, legacy encompasses everything – chosen or not – that is handed down from the past. In this sense, legacy neither betrays the past nor surrenders it to active meddling. Legacy may be exalted or maligned by successors, but this comes as a secondary process. Legacy as an abstract signifier is neutral (Todorova, 2007 [1997]: 198, my emphasis). ¹⁵

Todorova’s analysis buttresses my understanding of legacy as the force that the past exerts on the present. She insists that although collective memory – tradition, in her rendering – necessarily works on and through historical legacies, it should by no means be equated with them. ¹⁶

Todorova’s concept of historical legacy also resonates with Ann Laura Stoler’s interrogation of ‘imperial duress’ and durability (Stoler, 2016), though Stoler incriminates ‘duress’ in a manner that departs from Todorova’s neutral depiction of legacies. For Stoler, racism, asymmetrical governance and both psychic and material ruination are the grotesque legacies of imperialism and colonialism, an inheritance that demands denunciation. Like Todorova, however, Stoler insists on expanding the purview on the past beyond the settlements of collective memory and its iterations: heritage (Gentry and Smith, 2019), nostalgia (Boym, 2001) and invented tradition (Hobsbawm, 1983).

Stoler illuminates another key facet of the concept of legacy: the effects of occlusion, erasure, and aphasia that imperial duress entails:

Occlusion is neither an accidental byproduct of imperial formations nor merely a missed opportunity, rendered visible to a critical witness ‘after the fact’. They are not just neglected, overlooked, or ‘forgotten’. Occluded histories are part of what such geopolitical formations produce. They inhere in their conceptual, epistemic, and political architecture (Stoler, 2016: 157).

Rot and ruin, detritus and debris (Stoler, 2013), patterns and powers that collective memory obscures rather than harnesses, impact the present despite campaigns of disavowal and mandated amnesia. This is the domain that Robert Young evocatively describes as ‘the hidden rhizomes of colonialism’s historical reach, of what remains invisible, unseen, silent, or unspoken’ (Young, 2012: 21). In light of such occluded remains, knowledge of the past must grapple with the ways in which the past’s legacies militate against such knowledge itself. As Michel Rolph Trouillot (1995) keenly argued, the production of historical knowledge is a process of ‘silencing the past’. ¹⁷ Amnesia (Huyssen, 1995), whitewashing (Jovanović, 2019), and oblivion (Augé, 2004) are not antagonists of knowledge about the past, but its very conditions. As such, a critique of collective memory must account for the silencing effects of historical legacies.

The concept of legacy also intersects with Astrid Erll’s delineation of ‘implicit collective memory’ (Erll, 2022). Unlike Stoler’s occlusion, which signals the evisceration of memory, implicit memory registers ‘non-commemorative’ forms of memory (Schudson, 2014), and ‘the myriad possibilities of the past affecting the present in ways that most people remain unaware of’ (Erll, 2022: 2). Erll’s formulation of implicit collective memory corresponds closely to the understanding of legacy that I advocate. Erll herself occasionally renders implicit memory and legacy synonymous, as, for instance, when she considers how ‘implicit legacies of colonialism (affective, archival, discursive) continue to shape mentalities and guide political action long after decolonisation’ (Erll, 2022: 9). Ultimately, the distinction between implicit collective memory and historical legacy may be terminological. Nonetheless, like Stoler (2016: 35), I am hesitant to subsume the effects of the past on the present within the concept of memory. Legacy, beyond memory, offers a more capacious perspective on the past’s effects in the present.

Postempire

Collective memories and historical legacies form especially dramatic constellations in what I call the postempire. I adapt this term from Achille Mbembe’s (2001) interrogation of the postcolony. On the Postcolony opened new horizons for postcolonial critique by foregrounding the temporal and spatial contradictions that harry postcolonial contexts. Analogously, the concept of postempire aims to capture the political, aesthetic and discursive dilemmas of postimperial time and space. A study of the aftermaths of bygone empires is a study of postempire and its distinctive configurations of postimperial collective memories and imperial legacies.

For Mbembe, a specific mode of temporality defines the postcolony. The postcolony is a temporal scandal, an entangled bricolage of times:

A number of relationships and a configuration of events – often visible and perceptible, sometimes diffuse, ‘hydra-headed’, but to which contemporaries could testify since very aware of them. As an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement (Mbembe, 2001: 14, emphasis in original).

In the postcolony, ‘time is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones’ (Mbembe, 2001: 16, emphasis in original). The entanglements and displacements of the postcolony are principally effects of the universalizing trio of ‘modernity, rationalism, and Westernism’ (Mbembe, 2001: 10) and the disciplining power that this trio exerts on its Others. Like Said’s (1978) Orient, the postcolony is a political space encumbered by temporal disciplines and practices that originate in Western metropoles. To the degree that these temporal disciplines condition the postcolony, postcolonial dilemmas of subjectivity and alterity are ensnared in a time trap.

As the conceptual and political sibling of the postcolony, postempire also expresses a plethora of temporal entanglements. These entanglements encompass both postimperial memories and imperial legacies. Specifically, the postempire articulates a constellation of temporality and historicity that revolves around the trio of nostalgia, abnegation and uncanniness. Nostalgia and abnegation constitute the antithetical formation of collective memory in the postempire. According to this antithesis, either the present prostrates itself before the precedent of the imperial past, or the present abjures the imperial past through a posture of rejection, rupture, and absolute difference. While nostalgia sanitizes the imperial past to render it amenable to contemporary sensibilities and projects (Ballinger, 2003; Schlipphacke, 2014; Yavuz, 2020), abnegation erects a cordon sanitaire between contemporary sociopolitical life – typically imagined as national (Anderson, 1983; Leerssen, 2024) – and disavowed imperial inheritances. ¹⁸

Nostalgia and abnegation form the Janus-faced profile of collective memory in the postempire, yet this antinomy does not fully encompass postimperial temporal entanglements, inasmuch as collective memory does not monopolize historical legacies. Historicity – the ‘negative dialectic’ (Adorno, 1994 [1966]; Buck-Morss, 1977) between memories and legacies – is irreducible to the presentist imperatives of memory. Imperial legacies persist because duress resides in material (Walton and İlengiz, 2022; Walton et al., 2023), discursive and affective domains that are not fully accessible to ideologies and narratives – the repositories of ‘implicit collective memory’ in Erll’s (2022) sense.

While collective memory tends to colonize historical consciousness, legacies comprise both conscious and unconscious relationships to the past. This gesture to legacies as features of the historical unconscious underpins a crucial Freudian supplement to the concept of postempire. In their unconscious aspect, legacies frequently partake in the Freudian sense of the uncanny, the unheimlich (the unhomely). As Charles Stewart (2017) argues, uncanniness—‘that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar’ (Freud, 2003 [1919]: 124)—permeates postimperial contexts (see also Bryant, 2016). Postempires are uncanny polities (Walton, 2024) and sites of uncanny mediations (Tambar, 2017). The persons, places and things that inhabit postempires were once familiar, yet are no longer so. They represent the ‘return of what has been repressed’ (Freud, 2003 [1919]: 155), the irruption of the imperial past in the postimperial present. ¹⁹ Postimperial uncanniness persists despite the herculean efforts of collective memory and heritagization to neutralize and domesticate ‘difficult’ imperial legacies (Macdonald, 2008). Postimperial studies are therefore a discipline of hauntology (Derrida, 2006). In Derrida’s terms, postempire is spectral: an uncanny, ‘paradoxical incorporation . . . some “thing” that remains difficult to name: neither soul nor body, and both one and the other’ (Derrida, 2006: 5). This haunted, haunting ‘thing’ is, precisely, the return of repressed imperial legacies.

As haunted, uncanny polities, postimperial states and societies appear as the doubles or doppelgängers of past empires. In her meditation on the exasperations that have resulted from public confusion between the writer Naomi Wolf and herself, Naomi Klein explores the potential of the doppelgänger as a critical concept: ‘The idea of our duplicates walking around stands in for the roads not taken. Who might we be if our lives had been slightly – or radically – different? What latent versions of ourselves exist but never got the chance to be realized because we took one road rather than another?’ (Klein, 2023: 334). ²⁰ By summoning the past and disclosing its foreclosures, the doppelgänger inspires re-evaluation of the present. Doppelgängers are ghostly and haunting, in Avery Gordon’s sense – they are ‘singular yet repetitive instances . . . when your bearings on the world lose direction, when the over-and-done-with comes alive, when what’s been in your blind spot comes into view’ (Gordon, 2008 [1997]: xvi). Postempires play an analogous, doppelgänger-like role in relation to the empires of the past. Postimperial uncanniness illuminates political ‘roads not taken’ in the aftermath of empire, and thereby provincializes the universalizing conceits of both empires and their successor states.

Postimperialism, postcolonialism, decoloniality

The relationship between the postcolony and the postempire is one of complementarity and supplementation, rather than mutual exclusion. The two concepts offer productively contrasting perspectives on the dilemmas of powers past in power’s present. However, an intractable debate shadows this complementarity: To what extent are the notions of coloniality and imperiality distinct or mutually entailing? Is their relationship that of part to whole, in which the latter (imperial) encompasses the former (colonial)? Are colonial polities one species of a broader genus, that of empire? Alternatively, is there a definitive contrast between colonial and imperial formations, and, therefore, their legacies and aftermaths as well? What are the consequences for both interpretation and political action if one advocates synonymous or, conversely, contrasting concepts of the colonial and the imperial?

Recently, such definitional dilemmas have inspired sharp debate in relation to the Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov Empires. Historians have theorized the ambiguous, ambivalent relationship of these three empires to the political economy of eighteenth and nineteenth century colonial imperialism articulated by western European empires, especially the British, the French and the Dutch (e.g. Göçek, 2012; Hartmuth, 2015, 2024; Khodarkovsky, 2018; Morozov, 2015; Türesay, 2013). While the nuances of these debates are beyond my scope here, two points have clearly emerged on the basis of recent historiography. First, the vast land-based Eurasian empires were not colonial in the same sense as western European maritime empires: They did not systematically yoke extractive labour to sociopolitical hierarchies based on the concept of race, which in turn sanctioned imperial-colonial civilizing missions and their characteristic modes of temporality. ²¹ Due to this difference, collapsing the distinctions between imperiality and coloniality risks conceptual imprecision and political foreclosures. As Joseph Grim Feinberg points out in his analysis of Romanov and Soviet rule, imperiality and coloniality involve different types of states; distinct modes of governance; contrasting strategies for coordinating difference; variant forms of subjecthood; distinct notions of space and borders; and, divergent economic structures; they also provoke different forms of resistance (Feinberg, 2024). Efforts to render coloniality and imperiality synonymous, however well-intentioned politically, obscure these differences. ²²

Despite this cautionary note, the concepts of colonialism and coloniality have inarguably inspired new vantages on the modes of hierarchy, governance and political practice that Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov rule entailed. ²³ In this context, there is a clear distinction between postcolonial studies and decolonial critique. The conceptual-political edifice of (post)colonialism remains awkward in its application to the Habsburgs, Ottomans and Romanovs, with certain exceptions – notably, central Asia in the Romanov era (Khodarkovsky, 2002; Sunderland, 2004), especially the nineteenth century, and Bosnia-Hercegovina after the onset of Habsburg sovereignty in 1878 (Ruthner, 2001). Decoloniality, on the other hand, has migrated across partitions of time and space to reorient perspectives on empires that were not ‘colonial’ in a western European sense. ²⁴

This reorienting effect of decoloniality, in contrast to postcolonialism, partially reflects the separate genealogies of the two concepts (Bambra, 2014; see also Wegner, 2025). Postcolonial studies emerged from two principal wellsprings: Edward Said’s indictment of Orientalism as the discursive formation of British and French imperialism in the Middle East, and the Marxian arguments of the Subaltern Studies group orbiting Kolkata, which were especially attuned to the legacies of the British Empire in South Asia. Gayatri Spivak (1989) provided a bridge between Said and Subaltern Studies by fortifying postcolonialism with a poststructuralist perspective on language, speech and subjectivity. Decolonial critique, on the other hand, took shape among leftist South American sociologists and scholars of comparative literature, and was consequently oriented towards the long durée of Iberian empires in the Americas. In particular, Aníbal Quijano’s signature concept of the ‘coloniality of power’ (Quijano, 2000; see also Mignolo et al., 2024) proved highly adaptable. ²⁵ Like Foucauldian discipline, Gramscian hegemony and Said’s Orientalism, the coloniality of power has transcended its context of origin to stir analysis and interpretation in a plethora of sites, including many that are not postcolonial in a strict sense. Consequently, decolonial critique has become a deterritorialized endeavour to establish lines of flight away from this pervasive structure, the coloniality of power, by fostering and amplifying forms of radical alterity that evade it (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018). ²⁶

With its capacity to bolster a politics of liberation based on radical difference, decoloniality has migrated rapidly through academic, artistic and activist circles to inspire new vantages on asymmetries of power in post-Soviet realms (Tlostanova, 2018) and the Balkans (Rexhepi, 2022), as well as on feminism at large (Lugones, 2010). From a decolonial perspective, the global breadth of the coloniality of power renders debates over the relationship between imperialism and colonialism secondary. Radical alterity – like all ‘romances of resistance’ (Abu Lughod, 1990) – inculcates a dichotomous image of power as unidirectional and repressive, rather than distributed and formative. The political efficaciousness of such assertions of totalizing power and absolute difference should not be underestimated, especially vis-à-vis the inspirational theorist-activists of an earlier, anticolonial generation such as Frantz Fanon (1967 [1961]) and Aimé Césaire (2001) (see also Gopal, 2019; Rothberg, 2013: 365–366). Simultaneously, the ascendancy of decoloniality potentially precludes the possibility of theorizing imperial legacies as expressions of multiple, divergent practices of power, spatially and temporally organized according to imperatives and logics that were by no means innocuous simply because they were not fully colonial. As Jane Burbank and Fred Cooper (2010) have shown, many empires – especially nonmodern empires – organized social, political and religious difference along shifting, multiple axes that defy the essentialist expectations of modern identities. To shoehorn the collective memories and legacies of all imperial polities within the frame of decoloniality risks obscuring this heterogeneity.

On the whole, memory studies has remained a bystander to developments within postcolonial and decolonial studies. More than a decade has passed since Michael Rothberg identified the ‘paradoxical relation’ between postcolonial studies and memory studies (Rothberg, 2013: 359), rooted in the two fields’ mutual disengagement from each other despite their overlapping concerns and commitments (see also Craps, 2012; De Mul, 2011). In the intervening years, postcolonial and decolonial arguments and interlocutors have become ubiquitous in memory studies, resulting in a welcome expansion of the discipline’s conceptual and thematic purview. However, the adaptation of memory studies to postcolonial studies has largely been one-sided, and the framework of collective and cultural memory remains peripheral to debates between postcolonial and decolonial activists and scholars.

The concept of postempire directly addresses this enduring lacuna between postcolonial studies and memory studies. Postempire, like Mbembe’s postcolony, is a modality of temporality; furthermore, it is a form historicity and collective memory defined by the antithesis of nostalgia and abnegation. The methods and concepts of memory studies are indispensable to postimperial studies because postempire is a phenomenon of collective memory. Simultaneously, the critique of postempire follows from postcolonial studies’ insistence on the durability of imperial legacies and ongoing effects of ‘colonial remains’ (Young, 2012). Finally, the constitutive uncanniness of postempire, its doppelgänger-like spectrality, provides the platform for a method and practice that parallels decoloniality: deimperiality.

Deimperiality

Unlike decoloniality, deimperial critique does not wield a romance of radical alterity. Accordingly, deimperiality does not aspire to resolve the contradictions of postempire in the way that decoloniality ostensibly overcomes the coloniality of power. Rather, deimperiality harnesses the distinctive uncanniness of postempire to construct a platform for critique. Deimperiality inhabits and accentuates postimperial uncanniness. The uncanny is both a means and an end for deimperial critique: a means to destabilizing the settlements of the imperial past in the present, and an unsettling, unsettled end in and of itself (Walton, 2024). Uncanniness unravels the dichotomy of the familiar and the unknown by historicizing and integrating both – that which was once familiar is now difficult to know, and that which was unknown emerges as strangely recognizable. ²⁷ Deimperial critique operates analogously in order to render the uncanny textures of the imperial past as it endures over time, both in the present and at unanticipated junctures in the future. Consequently, deimperiality fosters a normative critique of dominant postimperial collective memories. The deimperial perspective insists that both nostalgia and abnegation are insufficient figures of memory in relation to empires of the past. For deimperiality, the postempire is inescapably uncanny.

In my previous work, I have described this approach as ‘textured historicity’: the negative dialectic between historical subjects and historical objects (Walton, 2019a). At basis, deimperiality is a practice of textured historicity aimed at amplifying the uncanniness of postempire. Deimperiality intersects with Walter Benjamin’s devastating critique of historicism and his focus on ‘the constellation(s) which . . . (one) era has formed with a definite earlier one’ (Benjamin, 1968: 263). Deimperial critique magnifies uncanny constellations of postimperial memories and imperial legacies that refuse to abide by the teleological imperatives of abstract, deracinated, serialized universal time. Seeking to grasp the constellations between the present and empires of the past entails a delicate balancing act: between the drama of images and the thunder of silences; between the pull of memory and the push of legacy; between the imprint of the past and the mould of the present.

Deimperial constellational thinking is equally a method of countermemory in Foucault’s (1977) sense. Despite their contrasting intellectual inheritances and projects, Benjamin and Foucault harmonize in their scepticism of teleology (Jameson, 2022: 47) – together, they are two towering ‘off-modern’ (Boym, 2001: 30) theorists of anti-historicism. For Foucault, countermemory is an effect of genealogy, ‘the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates and disperses, that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements’ (Foucault, 1977: 153). ²⁸ This liberation of marginal elements ‘constructs a counter-memory – a transformation of history into a totally different form of time’ (Foucault, 1977: 160), analogous to the constellations that snap into being in Benjamin’s messianic Jetztzeit or kairos, ‘time filled by the present of the now’ (Benjamin, 1968: 261). Countermemory congeals when peripheral aspects of the past form new ‘memory constellations’ (Wegner, 2022) in the present – accordingly, as Jarula Wegner writes, ‘countermemory is . . . related to and in opposition to a memory that attracts veneration, identification, and absolute truth claims’ (Wegner, 2020: 1222). More specifically, postimperial countermemory interrogates the ‘absolute truth claims’ of both nostalgia and abnegation in the postempire.

Although Foucault did not explicitly theorize countermemory in relation to his notion of heterotopia – both concepts are preliminaries in his oeuvre – there is a clear affinity between them. Countermemory’s relation to memory mirrors heterotopia’s relation to public space at large; Foucault refers to heterotopias as ‘something like counter-sites’ (Foucault, 1984: 3). Beyond this analogy, heterotopias are crucibles for countermemories because they ‘are most often linked to slices of time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies’ (Foucault, 1984: 6). Just as ‘the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ (Foucault, 1984: 6), the heterochrony juxtaposes multiple, otherwise incompatible times (Walton, 2022a: 379). As formations of ‘the non-simultaneous occurring simultaneously’, ²⁹ in Reinhart Koselleck’s (2004: 266) apt formulation, heterochronies integrate divergent legacies of the past that defy hegemonic cultural memory. In this respect, heterotopias and heterochronies are sites of and for countermemory. Heterotopic and heterochronic countermemories act as distorting mirrors to dominant social space and time. ³⁰ The heterotopic mirror is a paradigmatic doppelgänger, a locus of the spectral and the uncanny; heterotopias and heterochronies are definitively uncanny, as well. They render familiar social spaces and social times provocatively unfamiliar, productively strange. In this, the heterotopia coincides with the notion of the ‘spatial uncanny’, in Anthony Vidler’s sense (Vidler, 1992; see also Navaro-Yashin, 2012).

Deimperiality traverses and harnesses uncanny spaces and times. To summarize: A set of disparate concepts – Foucauldian countermemory and heterotopia, Benjaminian constellations and Jetztzeit, and Freudian uncanniness – orients and enlivens deimperiality. Together, the ‘interdependence’ (Adorno, 1994 [1966]; see also Wegner, 2022: 1424) of these concepts constitutes a potent method for destabilizing the settled, dominant images of bygone empires. Deimperial critique articulates heterotopic and heterochronic countermemories that dwell in the uncanniness of the ‘now’, a moment that, contrary to the historicist conceit of homogeneous, linear time, is replete with contradictory legacies of multiple pasts. Such uncanny countermemories tribulate both imperial nostalgia and total rejection of imperial heritage – the dominant modes of collective memory in the postempire.

Towards the study of postempires, or, postimperial studies as such

Having established the genealogical and conceptual field of postempire and deimperiality, methodological dilemmas rise to the surface. How to study a postempire? In other words, how do collective memories of bygone empires achieve articulation, and how do these memories both register and occlude imperial legacies? The threefold heuristic of persons, places and things provides a compass for this inquiry, and yields three further, more specific sets of questions. First, how and why do certain historical personages come to embody collective memories of empires? How do these memories envelope, amplify and contradict the legacies of the individuals in question? Second, what processes produce specific places as sites of postimperial memory? How and why are other places and spaces excluded? Third, how do bygone empires achieve contemporary embodiment through a variety of objects and material culture? What determines whether, and how, material legacies of empires achieve the status of imperial heritage, or, alternatively, become subject to ruination and desuetude?

For the remainder of the essay, I explore these questions in greater detail with reference to Habsburg, Ottoman and Romanov postempires. In particular, I highlight how the personifications, emplacements and materializations of postempires inhabit and articulate inter-imperial memories and legacies. Throughout, I aim to foster a perspective on postimperial persons, places and things as objects of and for deimperial critique, the double movement of rendering the imperial past strangely familiar and familiarly strange.

Conclusion: postimperial affect and deimperial critique

In their capacity to personify, emplace and materialize imperial pasts, postimperial persons, places and things are impetuses for postimperial affect. Previous investigations of postimperial affect have been both promising and piecemeal. Svetlana Boym’s (2001) distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia provided a panoramic vocabulary for interpreting the affective relations between modern subjects and multiple pasts, including those of empire. More critically, Renato Rosaldo (1989) and Paul Gilroy (2005) have interrogated imperialist nostalgia and postcolonial melancholy as affective symptoms of the loss of power and privilege on the part of metropolitan elites (see also Fabian, 2014 [1983]). Melancholy – the failure to mourn effectively, in Freud’s (1957 [1915]) famous formulation – permeates non-scholarly accounts of postimperial affect, as well. Orhan Pamuk’s (2003) evocation of the hüzün of post-Ottoman Istanbul is an iconic account of such postimperial melancholy (see also Walton, 2017: 198–199). This is telling – postempire is a condition of failed mourning for empires past. Yet melancholy does not monopolize postimperial affect – for instance, as Mišo Kapetanović (2025, personal communication) has observed, post-Ottoman domains in the eastern Mediterranean, from Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro to the Levant, exhibit a shared, postimperial affect of pleasure (keyif/kejf) (see also Işın, 2010). Other postimperial affects, including resentment, pride, anxiety and cynicism, await investigation.

A focus on postimperial affect bolsters both the interpretation of postempire and the critical intervention of deimperiality. The affects that orbit postimperial persons, places and things are an immanent, formative feature of postempire. As William Mazzarella (2012) has argued, affects register and channel aspects of the social that otherwise defy discourse. The temporality of affect is ‘spectral’ and haunted in a Derridean sense: ‘One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being-there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge’ (Derrida, 2006: 5). Spectral postimperial affect is a domain of postempire that persists and persuades precisely because it is not fully objective, not fully knowable.

The uncanny temporality of postempire – the peculiar ‘simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’ (Koselleck, 2004) in postimperial polities and societies – is a spur and summons to deimperial critique. Uncanniness overtly inhabits many postimperial lieux de mémoire. Derelict barracks, overgrown cemeteries and hollow-eyed assassins vividly embody in the eeriness of the imperial past. Dominant postimperial sites, by contrast, defy uncanniness in their pomp and polish. Yet the contention and task of deimperiality is to insist that air-brushed empresses and scintillating Schlösser are as uncanny as cadavers and ruins. The constellational thinking of deimperial critique reads and writes against the grain of the settlements of the present. Uncanniness – postimperial or otherwise – is not a quality of objects but a relationship between the present and the past in which familiarity and its comforts erode. And when the familiarity of the postimperial present wanes, the textures and entailments of postempire achieve clarity and urgency.

Properly understood as an inquiry into postempire, postimperial studies attains precision. It is an inquiry into the constellations and contradictions of postimperial collective memories and imperial legacies. At each juncture, this project situates silences, absences and occlusions in relation to the visible, audible, affective and legible forms that postempire takes. Collective memories occlude the past, even as the past bequeaths other silences. Through the negative dialectic between legacies and memories, between the force that the present exerts on the past and the force that the past exerts on the present, postempires acquire shape and substance in ways that are never innocent of the entanglements and dislocations – the duress – of multiple, layered times and the tribulations they continue to provoke. Beyond nostalgia and abnegation, the present necessarily inhabits the uncanny terrain of postempire.