This _Essay is a link in a chain of works I have written over a number of years that have brought forth and developed a novel theoretical and methodological apparatus, centered on the concepts of ‘ruler visibility’ and ‘popular belonging,’ for studying the origin, nature, and evolution of the modern mindset on a mass scale. The essence of it…
Celebration is mostly considered in terms of that which is celebrated. We think by way of identifying objects (what is being celebrated?) rather than considering the practices and agency involved (how are we celebrating?). Nonetheless, both dimensions are written into the notion of celebration itself: celeber, in Latin, translates…
In 2022, six months into the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, gov-ernmental authorities announced that there would be no public celebrations on Ukraine’s National Day. Celebrated since 1991 on 24 August, Ukraine’s national day marks the country’s declaration of independence in the context of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Until the Russian Federation’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, however, the holiday struggled to capture…
Robert Harris’s dystopian novel, The Second Sleep (2019), follows Father Christopher Fairfax to a remote village in England to conduct the funeral of an elderly clergyman. Initially on a simple mission, soon the young priest finds clues that suggest the deceased priest had been conducting forbidden research into the past. As the investigation evolves, Fairfax finds evidence of a lost civilization, which we discover is our current digital era.
In a recent scholarly forum, I was invited to respond to a manuscript that explored the use of the prefix ‘post’ as a heuristic device, specifically in the context of post-apartheid South Africa. This exercise prompted me to pause and reflect on my own deployment of the term ‘post’ across multiple registers in my research, particularly as it relates to my positionality in (post)colonial Australia and (post)war/(post)socialist Poland. The exercise was catalytic: it opened a space to interrogate the ‘post’ not merely as a temporal marker, but as a powerful discursive tool that shapes our understanding of memory, place, and identity…
