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On Ambivalent Legacies: Political Cultures of Memory and Amnesia in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Lands, special issue of History &#38; Anthropology, Volume 30, No. 4, October 2019.By Jeremy F. WaltonThe current special exhibition at the Zagreb Ethnographic Museum, “Hats Off! The Story of (Un)Covered Heads” (Kapa dolje! Priča o (ne)pokrivanju glave), presents a cornucopia of headgear to the curious visitor, ranging from haute couture millinery to pancaked fishermen’s chapeaus. Bridal headdresses, which often doubled as dowries, are especially prominent in the display. As was traditionally the case in much of the Balkans, many of these headdresses consist of coins affixed to a delicate mesh of silver-chain thread. They are bewitching objects, even when admired from several metres away. A closer inspection reveals an enigma, a clue to the curious past in which these relics took shape: The money that they contain is politically promiscuous. Side-by-side, these matrimonial ornaments feature both Habsburg thalers embossed with the profile of Empress Maria Theresa and Ottoman lira displaying the Sultan’s tughra.A 19th-century Bosnian bridal headdress, featuring Habsburg and Ottoman coins, on display at the Zagreb Ethnographic Museum (photograph by author, 2020).Bridal headdresses such as these are a lustrous metaphor for the themes and research that inspired Ambivalent Legacies: Political Cultures of Memory and Amnesia in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Lands, a recent special issue of the journal History and Anthropology (Volume 30, Number 4, October 2019). Across the variegated political geography of central and eastern Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, and the Levant, collective memories of bygone empires are not only vividly present today, they also intersect and reconfigure one another. Habsburgs and Ottomans—not to mention Romans and Romanovs, Macedonians and Byzantines, French and British—provide a lexicon and a repository of images for thinking through vexed contemporary questions of identity and difference, selfhood and otherness. Like the bulky busts of Count Zrínyi Miklós (Nikola Šubić Zrinski) and Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent that stand side-by-side in the Hungarian-Turkish Friendship Park of Szigetvár, Hungary—an image of which graces the cover of Ambivalent Legacies—former empires are especially impactful when their legacies and memories achieve juxtaposition in the present.Antagonists in the 16th century, Zrínyi Miklós (Nikola Šubić Zrinski) and Süleyman the Magnificent now stand beside each other in the Hungarian-Turkish Friendship Park in Szigetvár, Hungary (photo by author, 2016).&#160;“Inter-imperiality”—to borrow a concept from LauraDoyle (2014)—and its articulation in post-imperial legacies are the directfocus of several of the contributions to AmbivalentLegacies.Gruia Bădescu’sintervention, “Traces of Empire:Architectural Heritage, Imperial Memory and Post-War Reconstruction in Sarajevoand Beirut,” conveys the stirringcontinuities between two cities where both multiple imperial projects and morerecent histories of wartime violence have reshaped the urban built environment.In Sarajevo, Habsburg and Ottoman heritage has attained new visibility in thewake of the war of the 1990s, while in Beirut, the revival of Ottoman-era architecturalstyles—most notably, the Neo-OttomanMohammed al-Amin Mosque—contrasts sharply with nostalgia for “belle époque” French Mandate heritage. Inhis essay, “ImperialInventories, ‘Illegal Mosques,’ and Institutionalized Islam: Coloniality andthe Islamic Community of Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Piro Rexhepi also meditates on inter-imperial forms in Bosnia. Ashe shows, the Islamic Community (IslamskaZajednica), the official body responsible for governing Islam throughoutBosnia-Herzegovina, is “a site at which the tensions of postcolonial and(post)socialist histories are continuously contested” (p. 486) in relation tothe precedents and pressures of the Ottomans, the Habsburgs and the EuropeanUnion. Finally, my own addition to the volume, “SanitizingSzigetvár: On the Post-Imperial Fashioning of Nationalist Memory,” examines how one episode from the inter-imperial, borderlandrivalry of the Habsburgs and Ottomans—the Battle of Szigetvár (1566)—has stokednationalist historiographies and mythologies in Hungary, Croatia, and Turkeyalike. Thecontinuities, contradictions, and transmogrifications that define therelationship between empires and nation-states occupy many of the articles in Ambivalent Legacies. In “From Three Ottoman Gates to ThreeSerbian Sites of Memory: The Performative Rewriting of Belgrade from 1878 to Today,” Dunja Resanovic traces the gradualrefashioning of the Ottoman-era city to express the imperatives andpresuppositions of Serbian collective memory. Similar concerns animate “Mediating Legacies of Empire in the Post-Imperial Museum,” Emily Neumeier’s visual ethnography of twomuseums in Greece: Athens’ National Historic Museum and the Museumof Ali Pasha and the Period of Revolution in Ioannina. While nationalisthistoriography subtends both museums, it does so in strikingly different ways,taking on eccentric, less hegemonic forms in the peripheral museum space ofIoannina. Peripheries may also serve as the platforms for dominant nationalistappropriations of imperial pasts, as Behar Sadriu shows in “Shrine Diplomacy: Turkey’s Quest for a Post-Kemalist Identity.” Sadriu argues that the Murad I tomb complexoutside of Pristina, Kosovo, which commemorates the death of the Ottoman sultanat the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, dovetails with contemporary Turkishnationalism by allowing Turkish state actors to present Turkey as “a defenderof communities left behind with theretreat of empire” (p. 424).Finally, Ambivalent Legacies resolutely interrogatesthe silences, erasures, and effects of amnesia that accompany and constituteimperial legacies across the erstwhile lands of the Habsburg and OttomanEmpires. Giulia Carabelli’s cartography of cafés in Trieste, “Habsburg Coffeehouses in the Shadow of the Empire: Revisiting Nostalgiain Trieste,” reads nostalgic discourse for theostensible cosmopolitanism of Mitteleuropa against the grain. As she argues,there is a latent contradiction between the Habsburg aesthetics of Triestinecafes and “their history (which) often suggests their incompatibility withrepressive imperial rules” (p. 390). In “Whitewashed Empire: Historical Narrative and Place Marketing in Vienna,” Miloš Jovanović forwards a stirring critiqueof the politically-vested silencing of violent Habsburg pasts that hasaccompanied urban transformation in the city. He theorizes this “whitewashing”of the Austro-Hungarian past as a “redeployment of imperial structures throughpreservation, renovation and assemblage of material heritage” (p. 472). For herpart, Kimberly Hart illuminates an underappreciated Ottoman legacy. In “Istanbul’s Intangible Cultural Heritage as Embodied by Street Animals,” she illustrates how the forms of caregivingthat Istanbul’s human residents proffer to their non-human counterparts draw ongenealogies of long-standing Ottoman practices, which, in certain respects, aremore durable than the brick and mortar of monumental architecture.Throughoutour peregrinations and meditations, a common sensibility and shared commitmentunite our particular projects and perspectives. In our confrontation with whatAnn Laura Stoler calls “imperial duress” (2016), we take on the role ofstewards for the effects of imperial pasts that continue to reverberate in thepresent, and will continue to do so in the future. This stewardship is necessarilycritical: We refuse to allow nostalgia or amnesia to acquit or indemnify theempires of the past and their inheritors. With our focus on inter-imperialhistories and memories, our stewardship is equally committed to a transregional,comparative vantage. Finally, it relies on the capacious method of what I call,in the introduction to the volume, “textured historicity”: “thedistinctive, embodied encountere between the subject in the present and theobjects that convey the past in the present” (p. 357). Our essays dramaticallyattest to power of textured historicity in relation to post-imperial subjectsand objects today. The project of enunciating the cacophonous voices with whichthese post-imperial formations might speak, and that might speak to them, hasonly just begun.Works CitedDoyle, Laura. 2014. “Inter-imperiality.Dialectics in a Post-Colonial World History.” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies.Volume 16, Issue 2: 159-196.Stoler, Ann Laura. 2016. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Jeremy F. Walton is leader of the research group, “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities,” at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen, Germany. “Empires of Memory” is an interdisciplinary, multi-sited project on the cultural politics of  post-imperial memory in eight former Habsburg and Ottoman cities: Vienna, Istanbul, Budapest, Sarajevo, Zagreb, Belgrade, Trieste, and Thessaloniki. Prior to his current position, he held  research and teaching fellowships at the Center for Advanced Studies of Southeastern Europe at the University of Rijeka (2015-2016), the CETREN Transregional Research Network at Georg August University of Göttingen (2013-2015), Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (2012-2013), and New York University’s Religious Studies Program (2009-2012). Citation: Jeremy F. Walton, To Steward Unruly Imperial Pasts, in: TRAFO –  Blog for Transregional Research, 04.03.2020,  https://trafo.hypotheses.org/23098. 