Category: Revenant

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Bouchout: A château shrouded in plants

By Adi Tufek

As I wander through the deserted Meise Botanic Garden on a freezing December morning, I read about the fictional king Amaryllo, who serves as a stylized guide for the youngest visitors of the former royal grounds. Situated just north of Brussels, I learn that it is now home to more than 20,000 plant species. The booklets, available at the non-fictional-Keizerin-Charlotte entrance, also inform guests that the 92-hectares estate is a place with deep roots.

While the quippy metaphor from the guide was aimed at the plants in the garden, it is the history of one particular building of the estate—Bouchout Castle—that prompts my early visit. According to the plaque positioned next to a model of the castle, the structure dates to the 12th century. It was possessed and renovated by several noble families over the years and came into its definite neo-Gothic form in the early 19th century. The Belgian royal family acquired the domain in 1879, transferring it to the Belgian State in 1938, which finally transformed it into a botanical garden. Although the castle underwent significant structural renovations in the 1980s, the presence of scaffolds and ladders indicates that ongoing works are still in progress.

Bouchout Castle, surrounded on three sides by a 17th-century artificial pond.

I also learn that the toponym Bouchout is likely to be etymologically related to boek, the Flemish word for the beech tree. Somewhere amidst my reflections on the multilingual landscapes of modern-day Belgium, rootedness, and uprooting, I recall Aleida Asmann’s  iteration of a botanic comparison made by Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century English polymath:  

There is no antidote against the Opium of time, which temporally considereth all things; Our Fathers finde their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our Survivors. Grave-stones tell the truth scarce fourty years: Generations passe while some trees stand, and old families las not three Oaks.

Assmann refers to his gloomy vision in order to emphasize the indispensable function of oblivion in cultural memory. However, I enter the castle with a different motivation: to explore what is remembered. Between 1879 and 1927, the building was home to Charlotte of Belgium (1840-1927), a Belgian princess, Archduchess of Austria and Empress of the Second Mexican Empire (1864-1867)—the focus of my academic interest. After returning from the other side of the Atlantic and unsuccessfully seeking help for her husband, Maximilian of Habsburg, from Napoleon III in France and Pope Pio IX in the Vatican, Charlotte was sent to Miramare in Italy and subsequently brought back to Belgium by her brother. Carlota, as she is known in the Spanish-speaking world, spent the years after her husband’s execution in Mexico at three locations in Belgium: the Palace of Laeken, which is still the official residence of the Kings of the Belgians; the Pavilion of Tervuren, which burned down in 1879; and Bouchout Castle, where she resided for nearly five decades. Maximilian’s widow, tormented by psychological problems and the failure of the imperial project orchestrated by Mexican conservatives, Napoleon III, her husband and herself, would spend her days embroidering, drawing, and playing the piano.

Some of the Empress’ personal belongings on display in the Blue Salon.

The castle’s ground floor is almost entirely dedicated to the history of the Botanical Garden. Visitors can peruse the biographies of notable Belgian explorers and botanists, echoes of colonial aspirations and exotic discoveries. It is only on the left side, in the Blue Salon hidden behind a massive wooden door, that more about Charlotte is presented. Maximilian’s drawn portrait, some of Charlotte’s belongings and several informative panels are all that remains of castle’s royal resident. As I gaze out through the large windows at the austere pond, backdropped by the deciduous forest behind it, accompanied by the quacking of ducks that use the ancient castle grounds, I imagine the frame that must have surrounded Charlotte during her hours in the Blue Salon, supposedly her favourite room in Bouchout. Mounted on the ceiling, the coats of arms of the eight families that once owned the place overlooked the princess whose life is habitually summarised as tragic.

Charlotte passed away in January 1927 at the age of 86, having outlived her husband Maximilian and her husband’s brother Franz Joseph I (Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary), as well as his wife Empress Elizabeth, commonly known as Sisi. She also outlasted her brother Leopold II of Belgium, Napoleon III (the last French monarch), Pope Pius IX, and Benito Juárez and Porfirio Díaz, who ruled Mexico after the downfall of the Second Mexican Empire. The woman secluded at the royal estate on the outskirts of Brussels was, thus, one of the last major actors of the ephemeral 19th-century Mexican enterprise. A constant witness of turbulent political history stashed away in a castle by a pond. Her body was buried at the Royal Crypt of the Belgian ruling family beneath the Church of Our Lady of Laeken, located only a few kilometres from the castle.

An enormous butterfly model resting on the Donjon Tower, considered to be the oldest preserved part of the castle.

During Charlotte’s stay, as geopolitical rearrangements were reshaping established power hierarchies, Bouchout Castle served as a spatio-temporal asylum for the living memory of the last imperial project executed in Mexico, an island providing shelter to the long 19th century that was coming to its end. The castle’s hauntological extraterritoriality is reflected in a widely retold episode from WWI: when German officers, on their way to occupy Belgium, noticed the Austro-Hungarian flag on the castle’s roof and learned of its resident, orders were given to leave the place untouched. Nowadays, no national flag flies over Bouchout Castle. There is only a giant Kafkaesque butterfly resting on one of its towers, a displaced materialization of concomitant imperial, colonial, entomological and botanic histories.      

On my way back, I pass by the art exhibition inspired by the Green Man motif, set along the tree-lined avenue connecting the castle with the entrance to the Botanic Garden. The pairs of masks representing the duality of winter and spring, created by a series of local artists, follow me as I advance toward the exit. In the Epilogue to his recent book, The Last Emperor of Mexico , Edward Shawcross described Charlotte’s funeral procession and the villagers who lined the road near the castle to bid farewell to their deceased noble neighbour. Shawcross’ words conjure townsfolk into the empty eyes of the masks for a brief moment, a flash of memory I could not possibly have. Empty masks for a funeral procession lost to time.

Artwork by Marina Roggeman, featured as part of the exhibition Face to Face set in the Botanical Garden.

Before departing, I inspect the gift shop. There, I discover cards adorned with organic patterns, typical postcards featuring the castle, botanic illustrations, and gardening tools, even plants, but no trace of the former royal resident of Bouchout Castle. In contrast to the commercialization of Sisi’s memory in Vienna, there appears to be no commodification of Charlotte’s presence on the estate-turned-botanic garden. With a couple of souvenirs in my pockets, as I am nearly leaving the premises, a solitary sculpture of a middle-aged woman catches my attention. Resting on a bench among the plants, it would be an appropriate visualization of the ‘’eternal present, without beginning or end—the living memory of a whole century frozen in time,’’  as Fernando del Paso described Carlota in News from the Empire, a 1987 novel that marked a turning point in the representation of the Empress in Mexican culture. When I approach the figure, I notice it is not Charlotte, but I read the name of the work nonetheless. Fertility, reads the plaque. Ironically, it is the question of Charlotte’s capacity to deliver an heir to the newly established throne that has operated as one of the central figures of memory concerning the Belgian princess.

The Plant Palace is just a few minutes’ walk from the castle. Its tropical rainforest section showcases various Mexican plant species, among others.

References

  • Aleida Assmann, Shadows of Trauma: memory and the politics of postwar identity (Ney York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
  • Edward Shawcross: The Last Emperor of Mexico (New York: Basic Books, 2021).
  • Fernando del Paso: News from the Empire (Champaign/London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009, 375).
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Cres Retreat as a Way of Slowing Down Unstoppable Time

A group of academic's sitting in a room in the Moise Palace and discussing.

By Magdalena Meašić and Matea Magdić

Two academic events happened in and around the University of Rijeka and Cres’s Moise Palace in the first part of 2023 that, although not directly connected, foreshadowed and entangled each other in the most enriching way. The first event happened on the 13th of April 2023 when Filozofski fakultet in Rijeka hosted a small symposium organized by the COST Action Slow Memory, and our team was invited to participate in the gathering. Apart from the event being a wonderful way of meeting new colleagues and engaging in exciting discussions, what stuck with us the most, and presumably with some of our colleagues as well, is the philosophy behind Slow Memory itself. As stated on their website,

Through transnational and interdisciplinary discussions, we will address urgency, emergency, crisis and acceleration by drawing together the ‘multi-sited’, ‘eventless’ and slow-moving phenomena that can best be studied by ‘slowing down’ our research methods, to afford capacity building, knowledge generation and impact activities.

Even though the subject of the research is of undeniable importance, the sentiment about “slowing down our research methods” or our research in general, at first, seemed even more provocative than the research topic itself. Although we were prepared to reconsider our working tempo and contemplate introducing “slowness” into our schedules, we didn’t have an opportunity to put the new philosophy into practice until our work retreat at the Moise Palace on the island Cres, which took place from 8th to 10th of May 2023. Thus, the thinking about slowness during the first event in Rijeka came into play in action in the second on Cres.

A photo of the town of Cres taken by one of the participants of the event

It was hard to conceal our astonishment while stepping into the stunning edifice of the Renaissance-palace-turned-conference-center and exploring all its hidden corners, and even more so when realizing that we had it all to ourselves. The idyllic atmosphere of a hidden Mediterranean haven contributed to the slowly growing sense of tranquility. Jeremy’s well-organized schedule for the three days ahead of us turned out to be particularly fruitful. In addition to reading the papers of our colleagues and actively engaging with them before our trip, the extended time window for discussions proved to be especially helpful. After setting the tone to the retreat, but also to the entire project, with his prestation titled “In the time of post-empire”, Jeremy gave the floor to us to present our papers we’ve been working on for the last few months.

Our group is fairly small, which translated well into each of us having about an hour to present and receive feedback from our peers. This practice proved particularly useful for doctoral scholars Goran, Magdalena, Matea, and Adi. We were all keenly interested in Adi’s presentation in particular since he joined our group last and presented a proposal for his future doctoral research.

Adi’s research paper was centered around Maximilian I of Mexico and his wife, Charlotte of Belgium. He was then in the process of applying for his PhD program and has outlined his research questions. We are happy to report that by the time of the publication of this blog, Adi’s application was successful and he has started his PhD at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Back on Cres, he already presented how his doctoral thesis aims to recognize the role of literary texts, movies, and popular culture in creating collective memory. Additionally, he intends to explore how imperial legacies operate in Mexican culture today. Maximilian I and Charlotte of Belgium are perfect examples to study this phenomenon due to their Habsburg roots and imperial background. Adi also emphasized the paradoxical but often engaging ways in which their example illustrates the interplay between colonialism and imperialism.

However, the main part of Adi’s paper was the suggestion of close reading of novels, dramas, telenovelas, and different texts of popular culture that feature representations of Maximilian and Charlotte. One interesting observation was that Charlotte received more attention than Maximilian in popular culture, which may be due to the rich typology of women characters in literature.

The group raised a question about the relationship between literary texts and reality, and how we can examine it. Specifically, we wondered what role history, nonfictional events, and literature, movies, and other mediums play in constructing collective memory. Matea’s presentation raised similar questions as Adi’s since they are both literary scholars and both of their work will focus primarily on literature. Adi’s case studies will focus on Mexican literature and popular culture, while Matea will be examining Croatian literature.

Matea (University of Zagreb) presented the first chapter of her doctoral thesis that discusses an old Croatian epic called “Vazetje Sigeta grada” written by Barne Karnarutić. In this chapter, she aims to find out why has the epic work received negative reviews. Additionally, she examines how the epic manages to convey historical events in a more memorable and understandable way. During her presentation and the subsequent discussion with her colleagues, the focus was on the blurred and fairly fluid distinction between arts, such as literature, and historical knowledge, which is a contemporary phenomenon. This distinction was not present in earlier stages of literature. Matea is grappling with the challenge of developing a system that can seamlessly handle the literary text as both a fictional (nonreal) reality while also considering the effects of historical knowledge on both the literary text and the nonfictional world. Both of these elements work together in creating collective memory, as Matea aims to demonstrate. Considering the shared methodological and theoretical framing of Matea’s and Adi’s research, they concluded the discussions on Cres were just the beginning of their future collaboration within the project

Goran, who had enrolled in his PhD program at KU Leuven just a few months earlier, took the opportunity to brief the entire team on the outline and basic structure of his research. Under the preliminary title “Intercultural Theology, Identity, and Memory: The Formation of Bosnian Catholicism between Two Empires,” Goran’s doctoral research aims to investigate the relationship between memory and theology in the historical context of late 19th and early 20th century Bosnia and Herzegovina, particularly during the transition from Ottoman rule to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It employs a comparative case study approach, focusing on two influential figures of the time: Franciscan friar Ivan Franjo Jukić and Archbishop Josip Stadler. Goran’s study examines how these two contrasting figures, with Jukić as an imperial rebel and Stadler as a loyalist to the Habsburgs, shaped the complex Bosnian Catholic culture through their representations in intellectual, cultural, and religious works. This research not only enhances our understanding of how religious identities transformed into cultural resources during the nation-building period but also contributes to discussions in intercultural theology regarding the cultural evolution of local contextual theologies in the Balkans.

Magdalena, already deeply immersed in her PhD research on gender representation in Soviet opera in Heidelberg, prepared a paper on the Soviet and Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin’s opera “Not Love Alone” (Ne tol’ko lyubov’, 1961). She subsequently presented this paper at the 17th International Scientific Conference, “Music Science Today: The Permanent and the Changeable,” organized by Daugavpils University just a few days after our retreat in Cres. In her paper, Magdalena argues that Shchedrin’s opera holds unique historical and cultural significance in the context of Soviet opera history. Despite being created during the Thaw period, the opera faced early dismissal due to uncertain political and cultural attitudes toward new artistic works and their portrayal of Soviet society. The opera itself encapsulates a tension between old and new cultural narratives, evident in both its text and music. Specifically, Magdalena’s paper aimed to explore how Shchedrin’s opera reflects both Stalinist and Thaw-era themes, motifs, and tropes in its depiction of post-war Soviet collective farms and their intrigues.

The group hard at work in Moise Palace

As for the postdoctoral scholars in our group, Lili, Kevin and Ivan, they had a much clearer vision of what their work is going to look like. For instance, Kevin presented the second chapter of his book in which he explores the ways language and place have been intertwined throughout history. By investigating how language has changed over time in a particular geographic location, we gain a deeper understanding of the cultural and social influences that have shaped our world.

Kevin has a keen interest in Sarajevo, a city in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The title of his paper and presentation was “Bridges” which highlights the main focus of the presented chapter. The bridge that is central to his historic and linguistic research is now called “Latin Bridge”, though its name has changed over the centuries. In his paper, Kevin examines the plaque that commemorates the sponsorship of Hadži Abdulah Briga, who renovated the bridge at the end of the 18th century. The most compelling and significant part of Kevin’s paper was his linguistic and literary analysis and interpretation of the plaque, which he translated into Latin script and English language.

Kevin’s paper illustrates how conventions operate and their function in honoring and remembering individuals. Additionally, Kevin establishes that the authors of these commemorative plaques possess considerable poetic and artistic abilities, as they manage to adhere to the literary conventions while also creating something distinctive.

Our project, REVENANT, focuses on investigating different aspects of imperial relics. These aspects can be divided into three groups: places, persons, and things (this is the distinction the project research leader, Jeremy F. Walton, proposes in his work). Kevin’s paper examined one aspect of the imperial revenant, places, while Ivan presented his paper on Nikola Tesla as a semiotic ghost, fulfilling the second major part of our project, namely, persons.

In his paper, Ivan explores the fascinating relationship between Tesla and the editor of the magazine in which Tesla’s autobiography was published, Hugo Gernsback. Ivan’s research delves into the incorporation of different philosophical premises with the study of memory and collectivity, while also conducting a significant historical investigation. Ivan’s primary concern is to find a way in which ones’ autobiography can be read and perceived differently by different collectives, each with different agendas. He argues that the various interpretations, readings, and receptions of Tesla’s autobiography are what have turned it into what he calls a semiotic ghost: “The ghost was bound by the autobiography, but it was sustained by the collectives reframing that autofiction.”(Flis 2023)

Lili’s talk delves into the idea of a sentient and alive landscape, as perceived by a community of Sufi Muslims and their closely associated volunteers, who tend to a sacred landscape in Bashkortostan, Russia’s Urals. Namely, Lili has spent the summers between 2018 and 2021 conducting fieldwork in Bashkortostan, where she visited numerous sacred sites but also participated at religious ceremonies herself. In her paper titled „A remembering and worshipping landscape: Sentient landscapes, oneness and Muslim pilgrimage in Russia’s Urals“ Lili presented us with a fresh perspective on human-nature relationships, drawing from Muslim ontologies, and delved into how Sufism’s “open heart” and “heart-knowledge” contribute to the perception of the landscape as imbued with life and unity.

All in all, the presented papers showed a level of motivation of all the participants – all the presenters and all the commentators were really well prepared and ready for a constructive discussion.

During our retreat on Cres, we not only delved deeper into our own and our colleagues’ topics and projects but also took the opportunity to get to know each other better. It was something we had been wanting to do for a while but never had time for. The retreat offered a much-needed break from our busy and overwhelming everyday work and research, allowing us to find joy in the small moments, work related and non-related talks and discussions.

Our group, which has grown larger, welcomed two guests from the University of Rijeka, Sarah Czerny and Vjeran Pavlaković. They not only provided valuable opinions and suggestions but also proved to be great company during our informal hangouts.  During the discussion, Vjeran stood out as one of the most present commentators and a very pleasant feedback giver. He has a knack for pointing out obscure facts that others may have missed.

Sarah presented her paper that focuses on scholarly values and behaviors in the Croatian educational and academic system. She examines the way research is conducted and disseminated to the relationships between faculty, students, and staff and the workings of institutions in Croatia. Her main hypothesis was that the steps one must take when dealing with an institution and its forms were carefully considered. Her approach had a highly anthropological perspective and her work garnered a lot of attention from our group. We were so intrigued by her paper that we even discussed it on our way back to Rijeka.

Group photo in front of the anti-facist “Spomenik palim borcima” monument in Cres

As time passes, nostalgia often creeps in. Nostalgia has always been a familiar presence in our research group. We frequently revolve around the idea of recalling things in certain ways. Now, we find ourselves as the subjects—or rather, the objects—of our old friend nostalgia. This sentiment isn’t very common among workers and researchers, especially those operating within the Croatian system. So, ironically, we are pleased to discover ourselves feeling nostalgic about the times spent with our colleagues. We now yearn for our discussions and the stimulating conclusions we reached, which were not always groundbreaking but almost always interesting.

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Spectral Themes: An Introduction

By Jeremy F. Walton

An inaugural screed intended to frame a blog is a fitting space in which to exercise the prerogative of levity. Academic blogs such as ours are defined to a large degree by what they are not: peer-reviewed research articles steeped in disciplinary habits of citation and exposition, often at the expense of investigations of lateral affinities or arguments that perforate professional and conceptual boundaries. Laterality and perforation are two keywords and beacons for our meditations here at Spectral Themes; they are not alone.

We also take inspiration from the etymology of the term “blog” itself. Consider the original portmanteau: weblog. The provocative contrast between the two halves of this Internet 1.0 coinage is rarely appreciated. A web is a multicentered, diaphanous entity; its sophisticated synonyms include “rhizome” and “assemblage”. Heterogeneity and multiplicity are its calling cards. A log summons divergent associations. Whether understood as a record of occurrences or, less aptly in this context, as a unit of timber, the log is a sign of homogenization, of the submission of disparate qualities (a congeries of events; grain and hardness) to a single system of enumeration. Examined according to these metaphorical logics, a weblog is an oxymoron: both diverse and uniform, both multipolar and singular. This fits our purposes nicely.

There is a paradoxical aspect to a blog about specters, as well. Ghosts are central to our research group’s endeavors as a whole, as our acronymic name, REVENANT, suggests. We take inspiration from Derrida’s famous meditations on specters: “A ghost never dies, it remains always to come and to come-back.”[1] Eternal returns of the ghosts of empires—specifically, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires—orient REVENANT’s inquiries, as well as the explorations of our blog. More specifically, we ponder post-imperial persons, post-imperial places, and post-imperial things—the tripartite heuristic for REVENANT’s research, and a theme that I take up at greater length here.

Post-imperial hauntings in Sarajevo’s Eugene of Savoy (Jajce) Barracks. Photo by Jeremy F. Walton.

Beyond these thematic generalities, it is worth tarrying a bit longer with the paradox of writing about specters and revenants. To write for an audience, whether of an academic blog or otherwise, is to render the objects of one’s inquiries and meditations public. How can this act of publicization, with the imperatives of coherence and legibility that define it, possibly capture a ghost? How can the uncanny and the untoward features of haunting persist across the gap between phenomenological and the discursive? Cleary, uncanniness is not merely neutered and neutralized by publicization: ghost stories and horror films tell us otherwise. Yet, if we genuinely aspire to “learn to live with ghosts,”[2] as Derrida proposes, such dilemmas cannot be easily jettisoned. The afterlives of empires, in both their web-like multiplicity and log-like uniformity, demand nothing less.

[1] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Peggy Kamuf, trans. (London and New York: Routledge, 1994),  p. 123.

[2] Ibid., p. xvii-xviii.

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Imperial Revenants: Persons, Places, Things

by Jeremy F. Walton

“As soon as roses fade,
Breathing ambrosia,
Their souls are flying, 
Lightly to Eylsium.

There, where tired waves
Are bearing oblivion,
Their fragrant shades
Bloom over Lethe.”

--Alexander Pushkin, “To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” [1]

March 20th, 2014, is a date intimately entwined with Alexander Pushkin in my memory. That morning, as I was preparing to board a flight from Istanbul to Zagreb, an unsettling ghost of empire haunted the departures board at Atatürk Airport. Nestled between upcoming flights to Bucharest and Tehran, Toulouse and Lisbon, a scheduled Atlas Jet service to Simferopol, Crimea’s second largest city, simply read “cancelled.”  The previous month, Vladimir Putin had ordered the invasion of Crimea in a sinister, irredentist effort to wrest it back from Ukraine and, concomitantly, to redraw the post-Soviet map. Russia’s formal annexation of Crimea had occurred only two days early, on 18 March, and travel to and from the peninsula was accordingly upended.

The departures board at Atatürk Airport, 20 March 2014.

Simferopol is a mere thirty kilometers from the Bakhchysarai, the eponymous Crimean town famous for the palace of the Crimean Khanate that so inspired Pushkin. When Pushkin penned his verses in the early 1820s, Crimea was a relatively new acquisition on the part of the Romanovs, part of the spoils of Catherine the Great’s victories over the Ottomans in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1774, though it was not officially annexed until 1783. The late winter of 2014 was witness to an uncanny repetition of an era of 18th Century imperial rivalry and expansionism—a revenant that has only become bloodier since February of 2022.

I cannot claim to have recalled Pushkin’s poem on that March morning—I did not know it at the time. Once “To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” found its way to me, however, its verses became inseparable from both the specific neo-imperial politics of Russia on the northern Black Sea coast and from the longer, stranger durée of post-imperial formations that saturate political, cultural, and socioeconomic life throughout central Asia, the Middle East, southeast Europe, and beyond. The legacies and memories that form the bedrock for such post-imperial formations are the inspiration for our research group, REVENANT—Revivals of Empire: Nostalgia, Amnesia, Tribulation (ERC Consolidator Grant # 101002908).

“To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” neatly encapsulates the conceptual and methodological commitments of REVENANT. A threefold heuristic of post-imperial persons, post-imperial places, and post-imperial things grounds the collaborative, interdisciplinary, and multiregional research to which REVENANT aspires. “To the Fountain of the Palace of Bakhchisarai” includes examples of each of these guiding rubrics. Alexander Pushkin is an iconic post-imperial figure, one of the dominant embodiments of collective memory of the Romanovs. Bakhchysarai Palace and its surroundings are profoundly post-imperial places—they are the principal architectural legacy of the Crimean Khanate, a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire, as well as ambivalent sites of Russian-Romanov and Soviet memory. Finally, the fountain of Pushkin’s rhapsody exemplifies how specific things harness, embody, and lend texture to the political and cultural abstractions of empire.

The fountain at Bakhchysarai. A bust of Pushkin is visible on the left.

REVENANT’s geographic ambitions are expansive and, accordingly, vulnerable to the politics of neo-imperialism in the present. Initially, the research group aspired to encompass the legacies and memories of the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov Empires in nine distinct national contexts: Austria, Bosnia Hercegovina, Croatia, Georgia, Greece, Romania, Russia, Turkey and Ukraine. A tripartite logic guided this selection of nation-states and cities within them. Austria, Russia, and Turkey represent the dominant nation-state heirs to the Habsburg, Romanov, and Ottoman Empires; Bosnia-Hercegovina, Romania, and Ukraine, as well as Georgia, each evince inter-imperial legacies as national sites of two or more of the former empires; finally, a triad of port cities in Croatia, Georgia and Greece—Rijeka, Batumi, and Thessaloniki—constitute a distinctive post-imperial urban constellation. As a result of hiccoughs resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic, the project officially began somewhat later than expected, on  April 1st, 2022. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 unambiguously, and viciously, illustrated that the politics of imperial pasts and the politics of the neo-imperial present are inseparable. Imperial revenants are unruly. Even before beginning REVENANT, I was compelled to reconsider its scope.

REVENANT’s reorientation has been welcome, not least because the initial stipulation of field sites was excessively schematic. Even as Russia and Ukraine have become inhospitable research contexts, partially for reasons that our research aims to illuminate, other exilic and post-imperial sites have entered our purview. In the Balkans, abiding by contemporary nation-state borders makes little sense in the context of REVENANT—sites in other southeast European nation-states, including Italy, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Serbia, also beckon. Simultaneously, collective memories of the Romanovs and their inter-imperial relationships continue to inspire us, even as the methods available to our research rely on archives and field sites outside of the primary inheritor states of the empire. The post-imperial persons that specific members of REVENANT pursue in their research include 19th Century Bosnian Franciscan intellectuals, a 16th Century Habsburg military hero, Habsburg Archduke and Mexican Emperor Maximilian and his wife Charlotte, and one of the most famous inventors of the fin de siècle, Nikola Tesla. REVENANT’s post-imperial places are myriad—among them are a sunken island in the Danube, an arctic archipelago, a fortress overlooking the Adriatic, and sites of memory for Bashkir Sufis, both shrines on the slopes of the Urals and war memorials in western Europe. Finally, REVENANT’s research constitutes a cabinet of curious post-imperial things, ranging from the scores and librettos of Soviet operas to gigantic memorial bells cast from cannonballs and Neo-Ottoman cuisine.

The triad of nostalgia, amnesia, and tribulation, which supplies the subtitle for REVENANT, underscores the ambivalent forms, inhabitations, and effects of post-imperial revenants. This triple thematic brings us back to Pushkin and Bakhchisarai. Post-imperial nostalgia, yearning for a faded rose, is endemic to former Habsburg, Ottoman, and Romanov lands. Yet post-imperial memories often “bloom over Lethe,” the river of forgetting—amnesia and forgetting are inextricably bound with nostalgia. And both nostalgia and amnesia are buffeted by “tired waves,” the tribulations of imperial legacies that remain resolutely present in uncanny, remarkable, and unappreciated ways. 

[1] Alexander Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman: Selected Poems of Alexander Pushkin, trans. D. M. Thomas (New York: Viking, 1982), p. 45.