Overview

This volume presents ten visual essays that reflect on the historical, cultural and socio-political legacies of empires. Drawing on a variety of visual genres and forms, including photographs, illustrated advertisements, stills from site-specific art performances and films, and maps, the book illuminates the contours of empire's social worlds and its political legacies through the visual essay. The guiding, titular metaphor, sharpening the haze, captures our commitment to frame empire from different vantage points, seeking focus within its plural modes of power. We contend that critical scholarship on empires would benefit from more creative attempts to reveal and confront empire. Broadly, the essays track a course from interrogations of imperial pasts to subversive reinscriptions of imperial images in the present, even as both projects inform each author's intervention.

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9781911529644

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GIULIA CARABELLI is a sociologist (PhD Queen's University Belfast) and a member of the ""Empires of memory"" research group. Her current project is a comparative and ethnographic study of 'Viennese' coffeehouses in Vienna, Trieste, Budapest, and Sarajevo. Reflecting on the imperial imprint of these preserved establishments, the project explores how the legacies of the Austro-Hungarian empire affect processes of identity formation and aspirations in these cities. Her first book, The Divided City and the Grassroots. The (un)making of ethnic divisions in Mostar was published in 2018 by Palgrave. MILOS JOVANOVIĆ is a historian, urban studies scholar and member of the ""Empires of Memory"" Max Planck Research Group (2016-19). Milos' research interests include the Balkans, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, capitalism, Marxist theory and history, and visual methods. He is presently completing an urban history of post-Ottoman Belgrade and Sofia, as well as an interdisciplinary study of imperial historicity in four Danubian cities, from Vienna to Ruse. With KURS, Milos is the co-author of the feature-length documentary Waterfront - a post-Ottoman post-socialist story (Germany/Serbia, 2018). Since November 2019, he is Assistant Professor of History at University of California, Los Angeles. He is interested in history as an emancipatory practice. ANNIKA KIRBIS is a social anthropologist and a member of the ""Empires of Memory"" research group. In her doctoral research she explores the transformative potential of transnational memories, specifically the musealization of migration (hi)stories, and their impact on established museum collections in the context of Vienna's urban heritage. Her most recent research engages with the role of more-than-human imperial legacies. Tracing how an imperial wasteland turned into a natural monument, where once former Habsburg brickworks were located, she explores the notion of heritage-making as multispecies collaboration.

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