You are cordially invited to the lecture entitled Poland’s imperial plight from the vantage of Istanbul: On postimperial, interimperial persons, places, and things, which will be hosted by
Dr. Jeremy F. Walton from University of Rijeka, Croatia,
as part of the Next Generation PhDs – Innovations, NAWA STER – Internationalisation of Doctoral Schools project
The lecture will take place on 14 May at 16.00 at The T. Manteuffel Institute of History Polish Academy of Sciences, room 32 (Rynek Starego Miasta 31, Warsaw)
The concept of postempire—an uncanny relationship between the postimperial present and multiple imperial pasts—entails a focus on the specific persons, places, and things that convey timperial legacies and inspire postimperial collective memories in the present. In this lecture, I first offer a general model for the study of postempire before exploring the potency of postimperial persons, postimperial places and postimperial things on the basis of three specific, evocative cases. My examples all relate to Polish legacies in contemporary Istanbul. First, I consider Adam Mickiewicz as a postimperial, inteimperial person—a renegade against the Romanov Empire, in particular, who sought shelter and ultimately passed away in the Istanbul neighborhood of Beyoğlu/Tarlabaşı. The house in which he died is an ambivalent, exilic site of memory today. Following this, I examine Istanbul’s Polonezköy (Adampol) as a peculiar postimperial, interimperial place. Founded in 1842 by Prince Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, it sheltered émigrés who fled following the failed November Rebellion and remains home to a dwindling Polish-Turkish community, who navigate dilemmas of postimperial identity, citizenship, and placemaking. Finally, I consider a number of flags as distinctive, postimperial and interimperial things. Both the municipal standard of Polonezköy today and an historical flag from the 19th Century feature remarkable constellations of Polish and Ottoman coats-of-arms and insignia. Ultimately, this vantage on Polish imperial entanglements from postimperial Istanbul offers a welcome perspective on the dilemmas and uncanny formations of postempire in general.
Jeremy F. Walton is a cultural anthropologist whose research resides at the intersection of memory studies, urban studies, the comparative study of empires and imperialism, and critical perspectives on materiality. He leads the research group “REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation” at the University of Rijeka, Croatia, with support from a European Research Council consolidator grant (#10100290). Prior to this, he led the Max Planck Research Group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. Dr. Walton received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2009. His first book, Muslim Civil Society and the Politics of Religious Freedom in Turkey (Oxford University Press, 2017), is an ethnography of Muslim NGOs, state institutions, and secularism in contemporary Turkey. He has also held research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, and New York University’s Religious Studies Program. His writing has appeared in a plethora of scholarly and popular journals, including American Ethnologist, Sociology of Islam, Die Welt Des Islams, History and Anthropology, The Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Jadaliyya, and Sidecar (The New Left Review). REVENANT, which Dr. Walton designed, is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on postimperial memories and legacies in post-Habsburg, post-Ottoman realms, and post-Romanov realms.
The workshop will be conducted in English.
Photo: https://revenant.uniri.hr/?page_id=298
