FIGURES OF VIOLENCE How does one reckon with atrocity? Do our analytical vocabularies help, hinder, or even fail when attempting to account for forms of displacement that seem ever-present? These questions have significantly animated and shaped scholarship on violence and displacement in a variety of disciplines. Writing from distinct scholarly locations and working on radically different scales, the two articles in our first rubric nonetheless seek to provide conceptual frameworks for reckoning with violence.

In “Ritual and the Enemy Body: A New Approach to Modern Atrocity,” David Frankfurter turns to the concept of ritual to understand the construction of meaning through violence in contemporary forms of atrocity. While the modernity of violence is often marked through its transformation into industrial and mass forms, Frankfurter shows the continuing prevalence of ritualized forms of atrocity not as repetitive action or some underlying mythic program but as tied to the affordance of bodies and spaces, forms of prescription, and performative declarations. In doing so, his article expands understandings of ritual while also illuminating the meaningfulness of violence, a meaningfulness that, more than simply a cognitive mode of meaning-making, is an affective sense of doing things (in this case horrific things) “the right way.”

Foroogh Farhang’s “Death of the Gharīb: A Window towards a Regional Understanding of Displacement in the Middle East” is both a sensitively rendered ethnography of displacement and a genealogical excursion into the varied meanings of gharīb that brings to the fore the concept’s theoretical and analytical possibilities. The term gharīb exists in a variety of languages inside and outside the boundaries of an academically defined Middle East. A reference to the poor, the estranged, and the displaced, the gharīb productively transcends analytical divisions between citizen or refugee, local or foreigner, and others that have grounded understandings of displacement and violence, particularly in the Middle East. In Farhang’s ethnography and genealogical analysis, the gharīb productively breaks apart methodological nationalism while bridging figures that are usually considered separate. In doing this, the paper is a powerful call for rendering social worlds within categories that are neither “local” nor abstract “universals.”

DOCUMENTARY POLITICS The archival and materiality turn in history and anthropology has sought not just to mine documents for data and content but to also ask questions about their compilation and their material effects, as well as the affordances of documents as documents. The three papers in this rubric share a commitment to thinking through the complex politics of documents and what they reveal about state power and its limits.

In “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying State Archives in Egypt,” Chihab El Khachab asks a deceptively simple question: what is a state without an archive? This is a story not just of absence—of missing documents and issues of access and restriction—though that is of course a serious concern, especially in a place like post-revolution Egypt, but also about the spatial limits and boundaries of what we can consider a “state archive.” As El Khachab explains, the difficulty of studying state archives in Egypt is not merely one of access that arises from convoluted permit-seeking processes, state surveillance, and other bureaucratic hurdles; an added challenge is that state documents are scattered between government archives, private homes, and the second-hand book and paper market. This spatial and conceptual dispersal means that what we consider to be the state and its documentary traces is constituted through not only bureaucratic modes of selection and evasion, but also the logics of the market, in this case what dealers and peddlers of second-hand books and papers in Cairo consider to be of value, as well as the positionality of researchers—who they know and what custodians of documents are willing to show them. El Khachab’s essay is a methodological contribution to how researchers assemble archives through which to tell stories about the state, but it is also a broader intervention in how archival fragmentation gives us new insights into the “state-idea” in Egypt and elsewhere.

Questions of coherence and fragmentation appear in a different guise in Renaud Morieux’s article, “The Politics of Colonial Lists: Conspiracies, Deportations, and Knowledge in 1790s Pondicherry.” He turns to the “colonial list” as a media technology, in this case lists of civilians scheduled to be deported from Pondicherry who had supposedly participated in a conspiracy against the English East India Company. By examining how compiling these lists—deciding who would be included in and excluded from them—was a contingent and performative act that was constantly evolving, Morieux emphasizes how colonial lists exemplify spatial, social, and intellectual challenges faced by imperial states in situations of emergency and war. By exposing the contradictions, errors, and cover-ups of mid-level British officers in compiling these deportation lists, including the vexed questions of racialization and family separations that were at the heart of deciding who to include, the article underscores the extraordinary and quotidian violence at the heart of this practice. Morieux reminds us that this was not a one-way imposition, and he explores the roles played by people who found themselves on lists and attempted to evade bureaucratic capture. Through the workings and contradictions of list-making, Morieux highlights how imperial processes of classification and racialization across multiple European empires in the Indian Ocean were often matters of deciding who belonged in a list and who did not.

Ground-level decisions also play a major role in Peng Hai’s article, “‘The Kimono and the Turban’ Revisited: Charting Turkestan in Imperial Japan’s Muslim Policy.” He investigates a series of Xinjiang maps created by order of Imperial Japan’s General Staff Headquarters in 1943. These maps were commissioned within a broader context of Japanese imperial geostrategy toward Xinjiang during World War II as Imperial Japan sought alternative routes for logistical provisioning. While the question of Xinjiang has often been understood through a lens of competing Sino-Japanese rivalry, Hai suggests widening the aperture to examine more broadly Japanese modes of incorporating populations, particularly Muslim populations within its empire. A focus on these maps, for Hai, reveals a multiplicity of toponyms and ethnonyms that expose traces of what he terms an “indigenous sovereignty” that was “onboarded” as a junior partner within the imperial imaginary of Japan. Mapping and maps here tell not just a story of erasure and an imperial vision of dominion from afar, but one of parallel and oftentimes contested temporalities and sovereignties that coexisted amid the violence of imperial incorporation.

DECOLONIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS Questions of decolonization have erupted with great urgency in recent years across several domains, inviting a renewed interrogation of colonial frameworks that continue to structure inter-polity relations as well as more everyday aspects of life across the globe. This “reckoning” has also sparked a visible and institutional backlash across the political spectrum. What does it mean to think of decolonization as more than just a metaphor or slogan? What are the possibilities and limits of this concept, and what do contests over decolonization tell us about the practice and politics of history? From two different disciplinary and theoretical backgrounds, the papers in this rubric explore decolonization and its discontents.

Andreja Siliunas and Cresa Pugh’s article, “Theorizing Moral Liminality: Historical Biography, Political Co-optation, and the Decolonization of Public Space,” compares memorialization practices in Scotland and Lithuania to analyze the contested nature of decolonizing public space. In recent years, debates over who to memorialize have been at the center of “culture wars” in many liberal nations, pitting progressives advocating for decolonization and transformation against conservatives defending “traditional” national narratives. The authors focus on controversies over the memorialization of David Livingstone and Jonas Noreika—figures that engaged in both anti-imperial resistance and collaboration in imperial structures of domination—to accentuate how biography becomes a central site of struggle to challenge or reproduce dualistic metanarratives of national history, and to consider possibilities of what decolonization of public spaces might look like and accomplish. In opposition to resolving the question of whether Livingstone or Noreika were resistors or collaborators, Siliunas and Pugh emphasize the importance of “moral liminality” as a question not simply of individual figures but of the broader political stakes of historical memory and possibilities for post-imperial futures.

The question of history, and specifically a critique of history as colonial “legacy” within the concept of decolonization, is at the heart of Frederick Cooper’s provocative examination of the possibilities and limits of the concept of decolonization, “Decolonizing Decolonization.” Cooper asks what happens when we unmoor decolonization from its historical context of ending colonial rule over territories that were once part of European empires with ever-expanding domains. Focusing on the history of decolonization in former French and British Africa (a historiography where Cooper has been a central figure) as well as connecting these histories to a wider world, including recent scholarship on the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, this article argues for a focus on trajectories over an often-teleological narrative of legacies. To understand the complexities of colonization and decolonization as historical processes, for Cooper, is to understand both the enduring forms of inequality and violence that shape relations within and among states as well as the opening and closure of alternatives that come from an engagement with these historical processes.

OTTOMAN DIFFERENCE The notion of Ottoman difference—of the Ottoman Empire as a distinctive imperial formation and the Ottoman Empire as a site for understanding the management of religious, ethnic, and social differences—has had a long and vexed history. Often framed in narrow and reductive terms, this story of difference is one that sees the Ottoman Empire as a perpetual “other” that deviated from more traditional tales of empire. The two articles in this rubric bring a renewed engagement to this question of “Ottoman difference” beyond such simplistic frameworks of anomaly and anachronism. Through a focus on histories of capitalism and empire, and the institution of the millet, they put forward engagement with Ottoman histories as a privileged site for understanding the construction and contestation of difference across multiple domains.

In “The Ottoman Sarraf, Public Debt, and Usury Laws: Rethinking Capitalism and Empire beyond Anomalies,” Aviv Derri critiques the relegation of “Asian” empires (Russian, Qing, and Ottoman) in the twentieth century as anomalies to the story of capitalism. As she argues, within the history of capitalism, Asian empires are often understood as anachronistic formations where the state was an archaic, predatory polity that failed to transform into a modern capitalist national economy. In this story of the great divergence, the Ottoman Empire has played an outsized role. Derri, by contrast, highlights financial intermediaries such as the sarraf (state financiers), and the key role played by local private credit in the Ottoman state’s system of public debt, to challenge the pictures of a predatory Ottoman state and a debt-ridden empire controlled by foreign interests. What she finds instead are extensive webs of credit and debt where domestic public debt as well as Ottoman economic policies played equally important roles in shaping political institutions, social relationships, and conceptions of political belonging and sovereignty.

The centrality of Ottoman policies in shaping conceptions of belonging and sovereignty is similarly articulated in Henry Clements’ “The ‘Millet’ Paradigm: On Difference in the Late Ottoman Empire.” He argues that over the course of the nineteenth century a novel concept of difference developed in the Ottoman Empire: the notion of millet. Appearing in the aftermath of the collapse of a prior distinction—between Muslim and dhimmi—that had been the basis of organizing the empire’s subjects, the millet was an acknowledgment of difference that emerged alongside the development of a nascent universalist “Ottoman” identity. As Clements notes, it was a recognition that Ottoman subjects remained divided in ways that had to be accounted for and mitigated. These included differences of “religion,” “ethnicity,” and “language” that all were covered under the umbrella of millets, and recognized millets were granted communal autonomies and freedoms, and representation within the government. While the modernity of the millet system has long been noted, Clements’ contribution extends beyond retelling the story of the millet system’s development; his article is also a theoretical intervention into how history itself became a mode of conceptualizing and organizing social difference in the late Ottoman Empire. Regarding the “Suryani” community’s efforts to gain recognition as a millet, he asks what happens when recognition and difference are grounded in nothing other than history itself.