Post-Imperial Possibilities. Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia

HUM:Global Semester Lecture with Jane Burbank (NYU) and Frederick Cooper (NYU).

Based on a recent book, this lecture examines three transcontinental projects aimed at finding alternatives to both empire and nation-state: Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia. The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into a project to include France’s African territories in plans for European integration.

The Afroasian movement sought to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds. Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of Russian imperial power. Although both the system of purportedly sovereign states and the concentrated might of large economic and political institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in welfare and power, Post-Imperial Possibilities explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike destinies.

About the book

“After the dissolution of empires, was the nation-state the only way to unite people politically, culturally, and economically? In Post-Imperial Possibilities, historians Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper examine three large-scale, transcontinental projects aimed at bringing together peoples of different regions to mitigate imperial legacies of inequality. Eurasia, Eurafrica, and Afroasia—in theory if not in practice—offered alternative routes out of empire.

The theory of Eurasianism was developed after the collapse of imperial Russia by exiled intellectuals alienated by both Western imperialism and communism. Eurafrica began as a design for collaborative European exploitation of Africa but was transformed in the 1940s and 1950s into a project to include France’s African territories in plans for European integration. The Afroasian movement wanted to replace the vertical relationship of colonizer and colonized with a horizontal relationship among former colonial territories that could challenge both the communist and capitalist worlds.

Both Eurafrica and Afroasia floundered, victims of old and new vested interests. But Eurasia revived in the 1990s, when Russian intellectuals turned the theory’s attack on Western hegemony into a recipe for the restoration of Russian imperial power. While both the system of purportedly sovereign states and the concentrated might of large economic and political institutions continue to frustrate projects to overcome inequities in welfare and power, Burbank and Cooper’s study of political imagination explores wide-ranging concepts of social affiliation and obligation that emerged after empire and the reasons for their unlike destinies.” Princeton University Press.

About the speakers/authors

Jane Burbank is Professor Emerita, History and Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University. Her areas of research are Russian political culture, law, and empire.  Her books include Intelligentsia and Revolution: Russian Views of Bolshevism, 1917-1922 (1986); Imperial Russia:  New Histories for the Empire, edited with David L. Ransel (1998); Russian Peasants Go to Court: Legal Culture in the Countryside, 1905-1917 (2004); Russian Empire: Space, People, Power, 1700-1930, edited with Mark von Hagen and Anatolyi Remnev (2007).  She and Frederick Cooper are the authors of Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (2010) and Post-Imperial Possibilities: Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (2023).  At present she is working on Russian sovereignty and a monograph on practices and perceptions of state power, based in the Kazan judicial district in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Frederick Cooper is Professor of History Emeritus at New York University. His research has focused on African history, labor history, and the history of empire, colonialism, and decolonization.  His earliest books were on slavery and labor history in 19th- and 20th-century East Africa.  He went on to publish Decolonization and African Society: The Labor Question in French and British Africa (1996), Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (edited with Ann Stoler, 1997),  Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History (2005), Empires in World History:  Power and the Politics of Difference (with Jane Burbank, 2010), Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (2014), Africa in the World:  Capitalism, Empire, Nation-State (2014), Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference: Historical Perspectives (2018), Africa since 1940:  The Past of the Present (2nd ed., 2019), and Post-imperial Possibilities:  Eurasia, Eurafrica, Afroasia (with Jane Burbank, 2023).

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