From the Editors

Within the annual journal theme, “Assemblage Points of the Imperial Situation: Places and Spaces of Diversity,” issue 2/2014 turns to the most plausible recipe for producing the imperial situation: the physical contact of diverse groups in space and time. How exactly do “assemblage points” emerge as a result of such a contact – or, at least, which types of contact make their emergence possible?

Obviously, we are most likely speaking about an involuntary proximity that compels people to merge into hybrid multifaceted communities of the imperial situation. Whether people found themselves in this position in the course of the unseen “course of history” or after political and economic cataclysms, the themes of coercion, suppression, and hegemony appear as central to discussion of the imperial situation as a result of “coexistence.” Even without formal imperial structures, “empire” reveals itself in the very necessity to modify and defend one’s group specificity in the process of integration into a common sociopolitical space. Still, the question remains, why does this forced coexistence sometimes result not in the absorption of the weaker force by the hegemonic force, on its terms, but in the creation of some new synthetic reality, common to everyone and not completely anyone’s “own”? This new common sphere is what we characterize as the imperial situation, a contact zone and a space of coexisting and partially overlapping different political, social, and cultural hierarchies, of various logics of making sense of and navigating reality. Why then does “imperial” coercion bring about hybrid forms instead of imposing a single, unambiguous and monological norm of “metropole”?

First, the very approach to the phenomenon of “imperial coercion” should be reconsidered – not in the sense of a revisionist apology for empire, denying or minimizing the scale of empire’s violence, but as an analytical effort to “read” this violence as a nuanced and informative message. In this logic, how adequate is the central thesis of the postcolonial critique that sees the aim of imperial coercion in the imposition of the metropole’s hegemony? And does a single and universal scale exist for measuring degrees of hegemony and dependence throughout different epochs and in different cultures? Rather unorthodox answers to these questions are offered by contributors to the forum “Freedom, Labor, and Empires: Reciprocal Comparisons and Entanglements” in the “Methodology and Theory” section of the issue. Working in the paradigm of “reciprocal comparison,” in articles on the history of African slave trade, the Dutch colonial regime in Indonesia, and the dynamics of serfdom in the Russian Empire, the authors try to capture the meaning of freedom and coercion in a society without resorting to some external fundamentally alien frame of reference. They suggest the avoidance of generalizing categories that were formed in a particular historical and cultural context (of British or American bourgeois society of the twentieth century) and instead the application of middle-range models and categories, such as “city,” “unfree labor,” “private property,” or “market.” Decentering the perspective of comparison leads to a discovery that market relationships in the West were no less “peculiar” than in the Orient, that the system of African slavery, formed long before the European colonization, had played a key role in African state-building and market economy. Thus, a whole variety of forms of imperial coercion are reconsidered as practices that entered into complex relationships with indigenous structures of coercion and violence, sometimes with the purpose of suppressing or substituting those local forms. The imperial situation emerges then out of the partial overlapping of those different interests, practices, and values. A question remains, though, as to whether the contributors to the forum are as critical of the categories of comparison they use in striving to neutralize the hegemonic West-centered discourse (whether imperial or postcolonial), as they are of the generalizations they want to deconstruct, such as “slavery” or “freedom.” Do the notions of “market” and “property” they are using as seemingly self-evident not require the same procedure of relativization through reciprocal comparison?

The second possible reason why “imperial” coercion does not necessarily result in widespread cloning of the metropole can be seen in the ambiguity or inaccuracy of the self-perception...