2014/10/01 by Rashid Khalidi · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
paper · doi:10.1093/ahr/119.4.1223
openalex publication_date 2014/10/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30
The focus of this collection of essays is on the long-term effects of empire and the ruins and ruination that may last for generations in the memories, habits, practices, and environment of formerly colonized peoples, and sometimes of their colonizers or citizens of the imperial metropole. The book constitutes a forceful intervention in the debate about the lasting nature of empire. It provides much rich data showing the impact of empires and is a welcome redirection away from the iconic ruins of Europe, the focus of much of the scholarship devoted to the topic by the English romantics, and by others including Walter Benjamin, with his seminal writings on ruins, W. G. Sebald, author of The Natural History of Destruction (1999), and others. In an edited volume in which six of the authors are anthropologists, two are historians, one, the editor, is both an anthropologist and a historian, and one is neither, there is a wide divergence of approaches. Nevertheless, Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination holds together remarkably well in spite of this disparity and in spite of the range of topics covered in the ten contributions. This is true notwithstanding the occasional slip into jargon (“performed the betrayal of a proper sexuality” [p. 132]) and a few other infelicities. Indeed, for the most part, the mix of anthropologists and historians provides for a number of unexpected pleasures in reading this volume. It offers several examples of why the interaction between scholars of these two disciplines has so often been productive. Historians, however, may find themselves profiting the most from Ann Laura Stoler's comprehensive and intelligent introduction to the volume, and from the contributions of the two other historians, Greg Grandin and Nancy Rose Hunt, and the filmmaker, Ariella Azoulay, as well as those of the more historically minded of the contributing anthropologists: Val Daniel, Gastón Gordillo, Joseph Masco, and Vyjayanthi Rao. The much more personal essays, by Sharad Chari and John Collins, are perhaps of a genre that only a trained anthropologist can appreciate.