Year: 2026
Type: editorial
Abstract: This issue brings together nine research articles grouped under four rubrics, spanning topics that range from imperial legacies in Spain and Iran to the politics of racialization across micro and macro scales, as well as frontier politics and the histories of possession and dispossession in the Ottoman world. IMPERIAL TRANSLATIONSIn "Epistemic Translation of Modernity: Negotiating Science and Technology under Semi-Colonial Conditions," Mina Khanlarzadeh turns to the vexed question of semi-colonial sovereignty and specifically how Iranian intellectuals negotiated Western science and technology through creative acts of translation.Translation was not simply linguistic transfer but a set of practices ranging from adoption to refusal that shaped this unequal encounter, whose legacies play themselves out in particularly visible and devastating fashion in this historical juncture.Yves Winter's essay is equally a study in imperial translations, violence, and erasures.In "Imperial Nostalgia as Patrimony: Shipwrecks and Treasures in the Colonial Museum," Winter highlights how two recent Spanish museum exhibitions on the frigate Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes convert recovered colonial treasure into objects of national patrimony.Through a reading of the exhibits and the media and academic discourse around them, the essay emphasizes the ways that these displays translate and transform imperial histories into national heritage while bracketing questions of extraction, coercion, and slavery. PALIMPSESTIC FRONTIERS Frontiers have been generativespaces to think about the nature and limits of state sovereignty.In his essay on contraband commerce and its role in shaping the Syria-Turkey border, Emrah Yıldız argues for a mode of territorialization that he terms Kaçak (contraband; literally "fugitive") to explain the relationship between value, territory, and political reason/treason."Kaçak Territorialization: The Syria-Turkey Border as a Palimpsest of Sovereignty" works across the practices of contraband merchants, investigative journalists, and state officials to show the historicity and dynamism of mobility (and arrested mobility) in the spatial production of borders and sovereignty.Moving from spatiality to temporality, Alessandro Rippa's essay "When is a frontier?Nostalgia and Aspirations at China's Borderlands with Burma and Laos" focuses on China's borderlands with Laos and Burma and the Chinese migrants who lived and worked in these spaces.Rippa emphasizes how nostalgia for a vibrant, though transient, form of sociality was both about the past and the future and importantly shapes the frontier as a frontier. SCALES OF RACIALIZATIONThe next three essays all foreground the work of race and racialization across scale and time.Sam Holley-Kline unearths the work of archaeological labor and the racialized ascription of that labor in early twentiethcentury Guatemala."How the United Fruit Company Racialized Archaeological
Language: English
Subfield: Religious studies
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,550
OpenAlex ID: W7165026971
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