By Abdulla Majeed

Emergent Conversation 18

This essay is part of the series Remnants of Empire, PoLAR Online Emergent Conversation 18 

This series calls upon scholars to reflect on the location of empire and imperialism not only as an object of study, but also as a method for knowledge about sovereignty, citizenship, and anthropological knowledge production. It asks what can an anthropological approach, with its emphasis on the unfolding and ordinary present, tell us about the mundane and routine ongoing workings of imperiality? In what forms does imperiality manifest in the everyday life of ordinary subjects? In particular, it seeks to understand how the encounter with imperial statecraft reshapes political subjectivity in the present from the vantage point what appears as empire’s margins. Here, imperiality is conceptualized not merely as “histories of foreign policy” or militaristic endeavors that trouble, or at times constitute, stately claims to territorial sovereignty, but also as a lived encounter that manifests through the intimacy of everyday life (Stoler 2007), and comes to be entangled with multiple overlapping relationalities organizing ordinary people’s lives.

In her groundbreaking work, Ann Stoler (2016) reminds us that to think through “ruins is to broach the protracted quality of decimation in people’s lives, to track the production of new exposures and enduring accrued damage” (350). The stories here are as much as about ruination as much as they are about the cultivation and regeneration of new forms of life that emerge in the midst of imperiality, sometimes in explicitly toxic ways. Remnants of Empire speaks not only about past presences, or present absences, but also about things, relations, and practices that imperiality’s continuing omnipresence constitutes as if they are mere “traces” of the past. Remnants here are not merely about “dead matter” (350), but they also possess a vital presence co-constituted through the duality of absence and excess. Thus, remnants of empire emerge as a critical conceptual tool to interrogate how certain relations and practices are reproduced as mere “traces,” and how in turn such categorizations reproduce new iterations and arenas of imperiality.

Rather than treating “peripheral zones” or “quasi-sites” of empire as marginal parts of the story of imperialism, thus reproducing the hegemonic categories of empire itself, this series takes “peripherality” as a vantage point to investigating imperiality. In doing so, it seeks to trouble claims to and productions of marginality, as echoed by Veena Das and Deborah Poole’s work on the state (2004, 38), in which “peripheral” zones and practices come to be read not merely as “powerful techniques of power,” but also as constitutive threat to the “state,” or in this case empire itself, that are necessary for its sustainability. Peripherality and partiality, as Ann Stoler and Carole McGranahan (2007) remind us, are merely one of the many techniques through which imperial formations assure not only their vitality, but also establish their legitimacy (10). Marginality here is not only about nonconformity to particular socialities, or even spatiotemporal positionalities, but also the margin’s epistemic location to different regimes of knowledge that constitute both imperiality and its many others as marginal or otherwise.

To that end, Rebecca Bryant’s opening contribution to this series takes us back to the early days of the pandemic in Northern Cyprus, where social isolation became not only a matter of concern, but was also exasperated by geopolitical isolation. There, Bryant unpacks the many metaphors of sovereignty that emerge around “de-facto” states like Northern Cyprus, developing what she refers to as “black holes of sovereignty,” sites where geopolitical attention, or recognition, is differentially (mis)managed in ways that sketch the hierarchical contours of a hegemonic international order. Specifically, Bryant demonstrates how management and experimentation with the limits (un)knowability comes to be one of the key sites and practices for effecting a geopolitics of imperiality, while simultaneously forging a space for ordinary people to claim a sovereign way of being despite their isolation and unknowability.

Occupied with similar concerns, in our conversation Maira Hayat reflects on empire’s “blurred genres [and grammars] of rule” (Stoler 2006, 138), focusing particularly on how empire’s qualification of its violence in the language of “collaterality” and “accident” comes to be a central site for the negotiation of claims and counterclaims of stately and popular sovereignties. Centered around Hayat’s (2020) article on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan, Hayat troubles the analytical purchase of sovereignty as a conceptual tool, while also reflecting on how her own intellectual and political commitments have been entangled with the omnipresence of imperiality in ways that refuse its many attempts to and claims of marginality.

Speaking directly to the machinery of anthropological knowledge production, Fadi Bardawil’s critical contribution in this series over two parts offers a reading of Talal Asad’s scholarship on imperialism. In the two parts, Bardawil examines how the location of the “subject” shifts for Talal Asad over the span of his canon. In the first part, Bardawil discusses Asad’s insistence on the analytical purchase of examining how anthropology “molded” its objects of inquiry in the midst of coloniality, rather than merely the positionality of its authors. In particular, Asad’s critique of anthropologist Abner Cohen’s analytical framework in his work in Palestinian villages in the 1960s gripped Bardawil’s attention. In part two Bardawil sketches an Asadian conception of imperiality as a project of “worldmaking” and “homogenizing” that requires attention less to questions of authorship and more attention to how imperiality (dis)orders life itself. Bardawil closes his contribution by reflecting on the renewed political and epistemic valence of the “subject” in Tala Asad’s most recent work.

This emergent conversations series closes with Omar Dewachi’s timely contribution coinciding with the 20^th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, where he speaks to empire’s remnants by taking us his most recent work at al-Wahda hospital in Mosul, a site for the “witnessing of the visible and invisible aftermath of that war and its biological afterlives.” There, Dewachi examines how medical professionals in the city navigate the ominous terrain of a proliferating antimicrobial resistance among Iraqis in the aftermath of a corrupting imperial violence and violating post-occupation corruption. By tracking how this antimicrobial resistance no longer manifests only in conflict related injuries, but now proliferates in ordinary work and traffic injuries, Dewachi offers a foreboding future afterlife of imperiality: a new war biology.

The contributions here are by no way comprehensive of the many manifestations of imperiality in our contemporary present. However, what unites them is a commitment to decentering our analytical gaze by following the multiple and fragmented imperial relationalities that emerge from their particular ethnographic contexts to constitute imperiality. In such an approach, one questions how certain imperial affinities, what Laura Doyle (2014) refers to as inter-imperialities, come to been denied or excluded from the story imperialism (Stoler and McGranahan 2007, 11). Here, for example, the story of US empire comes to be not the only story of imperialism, but one node in a larger imperial system whose often occluded parts sustain each other and come to be the “faithful” remnants of empire. Indeed, the four contributions in this series reveal a striking, overlapping familiarity, if not familiality, between imperial systems. Imperial formations witness, learn from, replicate, and revamp each other’s practices (14). The pieces in the collection begin to unpack that replicability and highlight ways for anthropologists to continue critical examinations of empire—not merely as a past curiosity, or a trace to be unearthed, but as a living, vital part of the present.

?w=191″ alt=”” width=”191″ height=”200″ />Abdulla Majeed is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. His work lays at the intersections of everyday statecraft, exile, citizenship, and temporality. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork among Iraqi migrants in Jordan, his dissertation examines how the Iraqi exilic experience comes to be entangled with multiple statecrafts that (dis)order ordinary citizen-migrants aspirations for and constructions of political imaginaries for the future that transcend, or coexist along, traditional forms of governance and ethical citizenship. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Abdulla is curating the series Remnants of Empire that reflects on the everyday relevance of empire and imperialism not only as an object of study, but also as a method for knowledge about futurity, citizenship, and sovereignty.

Works Cited

Das, Veena, and Deborah Poole. 2004. Anthropology in the Margins of the State. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Doyle, Laura. 2014. “Inter-Imperiality: Dialectics in a Postcolonial World History.” Interventions 16(2): 159-196.

Hamilakis, Y. (2009). “The ‘War on Terror’ and the Military–Archaeology Complex: Iraq, Ethics, and Neo-Colonialism. Archaeologies 5: 39-65.

Hayat, Maira. 2020. “Empire’s Accidents: Law, Lies, and Sovereignty in the ‘War on Terror’ in Pakistan.” Critique of Anthropology 40(1): 49-80.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2008. “Imperial Debris: Reflections on Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23(2):191-219.

Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Duke University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura and Carole McGranahan. 2007. “Refiguring Imperial Terrains.” In Imperial Formations, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter C. Perdue, 3-40. Santa Fe, NM:  School of American Research Press.