Get your Empire on!
CPCI Public Lecture on EMPIRES IN WORLD HISTORY
Queensland College of Art
Griffith Graduate Centre Lecture Theatre (S07 Bldg, Room 1.23)
South Bank Campus
Tuesday 5 June
5.00 Drinks for 5.30 - 7.00 pm Lecture
RSVP: By 29 May to j.jones@griffith.edu.au or (07) 373 57338
EMPIRE, RIGHTS, and CITIZENSHIP
Abstract
This paper explores the idea of citizenship and rights in empires, looking beyond the conventional linkage of citizenship to the nation-state and of rights to popular sovereignty. We look at two different kinds of imperial regimes - the Russian and the French. Russian rulers explicitly recognized that the polity consisted of different people who would be governed differently, while in "Greater France," especially under the republics, the supposedly republican idea of a unitary state with a single, homogeneous, national citizenship was in fact unstable and contested. The notion of "imperial citizenship" surfaced repeatedly, notably during the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 and again after World War II, when leaders from African colonies as well as European France debated ways of conjugating difference and equality. Reading across these two histories, we investigate both the possibilities and the limits of ways in which citizenship and rights could be conceptualized within the context of empire.
Speakers
Frederick Cooper’s research and writing focuses on 20th-century African history, empires in world history, and colonization and decolonization. His books include Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (2000), and co-editor of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), of International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997), and of Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (2006).
Jane Burbank is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 and Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917, and co-editor of Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, and Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700-1930, to be published in 2007. At present she is writing, with Frederick Cooper, a study of empires in world history. Her current research addresses the intersections of empire, law and political practices in Eurasia.
The serious flyer is here.
~Niveau
Queensland College of Art
Griffith Graduate Centre Lecture Theatre (S07 Bldg, Room 1.23)
South Bank Campus
Tuesday 5 June
5.00 Drinks for 5.30 - 7.00 pm Lecture
RSVP: By 29 May to j.jones@griffith.edu.au or (07) 373 57338
- Frederick Cooper, Professor of History, New York University
- Jane Burbank, Professor of History and Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University
EMPIRE, RIGHTS, and CITIZENSHIP
Abstract
This paper explores the idea of citizenship and rights in empires, looking beyond the conventional linkage of citizenship to the nation-state and of rights to popular sovereignty. We look at two different kinds of imperial regimes - the Russian and the French. Russian rulers explicitly recognized that the polity consisted of different people who would be governed differently, while in "Greater France," especially under the republics, the supposedly republican idea of a unitary state with a single, homogeneous, national citizenship was in fact unstable and contested. The notion of "imperial citizenship" surfaced repeatedly, notably during the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 and again after World War II, when leaders from African colonies as well as European France debated ways of conjugating difference and equality. Reading across these two histories, we investigate both the possibilities and the limits of ways in which citizenship and rights could be conceptualized within the context of empire.
Speakers
Frederick Cooper’s research and writing focuses on 20th-century African history, empires in world history, and colonization and decolonization. His books include Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Africa Since 1940: The Past of the Present (2002), and Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005). He is also co-author of Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Post-Emancipation Societies (2000), and co-editor of Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (1997), of International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays in the History and Politics of Knowledge (1997), and of Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power (2006).
Jane Burbank is the author of Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 and Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917, and co-editor of Imperial Russia: New Histories for the Empire, and Russian Empire: Space, People, Power 1700-1930, to be published in 2007. At present she is writing, with Frederick Cooper, a study of empires in world history. Her current research addresses the intersections of empire, law and political practices in Eurasia.
The serious flyer is here.
~Niveau