Race, Nation, Democracy, and State in and after the Russian Empire

AHA Session 238
Sunday, January 10, 2016: 8:30 AM-10:30 AM
Room 304 (Hilton Atlanta, Third Floor)
Chair:
Sergey Glebov, Amherst College and Smith College
Papers:
Scientific Networks of Empire: Grigory Potanin and Siberian Regionalism
Dmitry Mordvinov, University of British Columbia
Pacific Russia after Empire: The Far Eastern Republic and Transnational Governance
Ivan Sablin, National Research University Higher School of Economics
Comment:
Alexey Kojevnikov, University of British Columbia

Session Abstract

Empires are often approached from an analytically rigid standpoint of sharp core-periphery distinctions. In the proposed panel we would like to show analytical benefits of abandoning these in favour of looking at several “imperial situations” and examining imperial networks that played out in the late Russian Empire. This theoretical focus allows us to bring more analytical clarity to situations of imperial heterogeneity. We address such crucial aspects of empires as race, nation, democracy, and state and define them in terms of “imperial situations.” In analysing those, we seek to answer what made these questions particularly defining of empires in general and the Russian Empire in particular; we show how interlocking notions of race, nation, and state defined imperial situations on the Russian imperial periphery, and what were the consequences of this for the Russian Empire as a whole. As such, the panel will be of interest to scholars of empire, intellectual history, and history of notions of race. The panel will provide them both with theoretical models that can be applied to other imperial and post-imperial contexts, as well as ample material on the Russian Empire as a space of “imperial situations.”

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