Emergent Conversation 18

Edited by Abdulla Majeed

“British troops entering Baghdad.” Having recaptured Kut from the Turks on 24 February, British and Indian troops under General Maude finally seized Baghdad on 11 March 1917. This photograph shows the 1st Division of the 4th Hampshire Regiment entering the city past a large crowd of local onlookers. The division was, in fact, based at a garrison just outside Baghdad and was ordered to march into the city specifically for the purposes of this staged photograph. Not visible in the photograph is the Union Jack flying over the remnants of Bab Al-Mu’azzam gate through which the British marched. Bab Al-Mu’azzam was significant in being Baghdad’s northern gate under Ottoman rule, leading to the one of the city’s social, religious, and economic hubs. The gate no longer sits in place and was demolished in the 1930s during road reconstruction projects. What appears as a monumental colonial event in our present lens, was actually an orchestrated and staged one to demonstrate the end of one empire, and the beginning reign of another. Public Domain. See also: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/firstworldwar/battles/p_baghdad.htm.

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? What forms do empire and imperialism take 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 of the 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 ordinariness 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 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 metaphor through the scholarly analysis of how certain relations and practices are reproduced as mere “traces,” and how 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).