Jan Surman
Jan Surman is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Leibniz Graduate School “History, Knowledge, Media in East Central Europe” at the Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe in Marburg. He concentrates in his research on scientific transfer, academic mobility and scientific internationalism and works currently on a book on history of scientific languages in Central Europe 1780-1930.
Surman received his PhD in History from the University of Vienna in 2012. He studied in the PhD program “The Sciences in Historical Context” at the University of Vienna. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin; the Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota; the Institute for the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw; the Centre for the History of Sciences and Humanities, Prague; and the Department of History, Princeton University. His publications include: ed. with Mitchell G. Ash, The Nationalization of Scientific Knowledge in the Habsburg Empire, 1848–1918 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); eds. with Klemens Kaps, Galicja postkolonialna: możliwości i granice, (thematic issue of “Historyka. Studia Metodologiczne“, vol. 42), 2012 [Online in Polish version: http://historyka.edu.pl/artykul/art/historyka-2012-28/ in English version: http://historyka.edu.pl/en/article/art/historica-2012-29/ ]. “The Circulation of Scientific Knowledge in the Late Habsburg Monarchy: Multicultural Perspectives on Imperial Scholarship”, Austrian History Yearbook 46 (2015): 163–182.
Habsburg Postcolonial? Postcolonial Perspectives on Entangled Spaces
Abstract:
It has long been established that Central Europe was not a classic colonial space but deserves to be analyzed using tools developed by postcolonial thinkers. In this paper I will continue deliberations started in 2012 with Postcolonial Galicia as to which postcolonialism is suitable for Habsburg and post-Habsburg space. I argue that postcolonial tools and categories do more harm than good when used uncritically for entangled spaces such as continental empires, where categories of othering were fluid and mostly still composed in the nationalist discourse. Furthermore, discourse of othering was consciously applied by national activists to achieve their particularist aims such as reduction of multilinguality and nationalist civilizing missions. This process was not (only) anti-imperial, but at the same time imperial since it created new dependencies and internal colonialisms. Moreover, categories developed during the imperial period continued to haunt Central Europe long after, presenting themselves in cultural paternalism through “civilizing missions” (e.g. in Interwar Eastern Poland) up to post-1989 cultural cleavages.
Fluid transitions between hegemonic and subaltern and the consequences thereof are but one of several aspects which can be highlighted through application of postcolonial approach. In my talk I will sketch out several of them, with emphasis on the production of “us” and “them” categories around 1900 and the ways they outlived the empire. I will look at both the West and the East of the Empire trying to overcome the post-imperial national narrative and argue that albeit multilingual, Habsburg period much less multicultural than post-imperial writings made it.
