Abstract: The article analyzes how maps of the Northern Black Sea region of the Catherine II epoch were used to express Russia's imperial ambitions. Special attention is paid to the decorative elements of maps—cartouches, which have a deep symbolic meaning. The author shows that cartouches were not just decorations but a powerful propaganda tool. Using symbolic visual language and ancient mythology, the authors of the maps propagandized the idea of the inevitability of Russian domination in the region. Allegorical images reflect not only geographical realities but also political ambitions, cultural values, and ideological attitudes of the time. The article also explores how cartography contributed to the legitimization of Russia's territorial acquisitions and the formation of a positive image of Catherine II as a wise and far-sighted ruler. The author concludes that maps and their cartouches were not just geographical documents containing decorative cartouches but important propaganda tools.
Abstract: This article explores how performative events around communist monuments in Bulgaria function as spatial practices that reshape collective memory and reconfigure urban space. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's concept of transcendence, it analyzes three case studies—the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov, the Banner of Peace Monument, and the Monument to the Soviet Army—a s sites where individual and collective memory intersect in moments of rhetorical and material transformation. The analysis distinguishes between individual and group transcendence and examines how memory unfolds across temporal and spatial dimensions. While some acts of civic engagement contest hegemonic narratives and articulate alternative visions of the past and future, they often encounter resistance from state authorities, revealing the ongoing struggle over memory in postcommunist urban landscapes. Ultimately, the article highlights the rhetorical significance of individual participation in organized monument events, showing how such performative practices can reshape collective memory and offer a means of reconciling ideological divisions. It contributes to historical geography and memory studies by demonstrating how monuments function not only as symbolic artifacts but also as dynamic agents in the spatial politics of remembrance.
Abstract: This article explores the interplay between legibility and administrative restructuring in an authoritarian context where a modernizing bureaucracy struggled with indirect rule through revolution and civil war in Russia, 1917–20. Prior to World War I the state's bureaucratic decentralization was seen as essential to overcome backwardness in both rural productivity and administration. The aftermath of the February Revolution unleashed bottom-up forces, eroded bureaucratic control, and urged township officials to address state legibility concerns. Instead, they used their authority to protect local subsistence amidst the 1917–18 food distribution crisis. This research illustrates how state authority was reconsolidated territorially using a case study from Penza province in the Middle Volga region. Authoritarian control was established by creating a subcounty administrative strata in 1919–20. This new form of decentralization provided closer oversight of township officials, enforced compliance with central demands, and limited the local autonomy that had stymied state legibility and grain redistribution efforts during 1917–18.
Abstract: The Boston-based United Fruit Company (UFCo) was one of the twentieth century's most notorious corporations. Many have characterized it as imperialist. Accordingly, UFCo enjoys a sizable literature examining its activities abroad. However, much of it does not mention Boston or UFCo's ties with its home city. Meanwhile, no obvious signs of UFCo exist in contemporary Boston. Such invisibility limits understanding of the making of empire and imperial places of a dominant sort. It also constrains our ability to grapple with historic injustices. This article helps remedy these limitations by illuminating how, in part, invisibility developed. It does so via a critical analysis of the work and words of Victor Cutter, UFCo president from 1924 to 1933, and contemporaneous articles about him. In scrutinizing his career, writings, speeches, and interviews, the article demonstrates how Cutter discursively produced Boston as a place of imperial innocence while furthering its making as a city of global rule.
Abstract: Hungary's Memorial of National Unity was inaugurated in August 2020 as part of the hundredth anniversary of Hungary's signing of the Treaty of Trianon. The monument is a hundred-meter-long trench made of dark stone that stands directly east of the famous Parliament Building. The walls of the trench contain the names of all towns from the 1913 Hungarian census, including those "lost" after the signing of Trianon. This event is remembered bitterly by Hungarians both within as well as outside the country's current borders because the treaty resulted in significant losses in terms of economy, population, and especially territory. The harshness of Trianon's terms has often been blamed for pushing Hungary toward a World War II alliance with Nazi Germany to reclaim former lands, which briefly occurred. Despite these ephemeral territorial gains, the post-WWII status quo ante and the eventual return of nationalist politics in Eastern Europe in the post–Cold War era have resurrected the memory of Trianon, as well as its usefulness for political purposes. This paper provides a qualitative analysis of Budapest's Memorial of National Unity, colloquially called the "Trianon Memorial," as well as the approximately 120 other minor Trianon memorials in Budapest and throughout Hungary. The ultimate intention of this paper is to answer two questions: What has brought about a proliferation of neo-Trianon monuments over one hundred years after the end of World War I, and how do such monuments function as spatial proxies for the contemporary illiberal Hungarian political project?
Abstract: In the postsocialist context, museums confront questions of authority and relevance amid shifting ideological, geographical, and national frameworks. The Museum of Yugoslavia in Belgrade—a tribute to a vanished state—embodies this tension as a site of dissonant heritage and contested memory. By resisting the homogenizing tendencies of post-Yugoslav nationalisms, the museum both offers provisional answers and poses difficult questions about how to represent a shared yet contested past. Rather than reproducing a singular narrative of geopolitical collapse, the museum foregrounds "little narratives" of personal experience and everyday life, offering a more inclusive mode of remembrance. In doing so, the museum gestures toward a new museological model—one capable of engaging dissonant pasts while imagining restorative, plural futures.
Abstract: Through a mapped exploration of Borislav Pekić's Houses , this article repositions official urban plans of interwar and socialist Yugoslavia as fantastical documents. Houses ' protagonist, Arsenie, enables an examination of the spatial rationale of modernity that undergirded Belgrade's twentieth-century urban planning and drove increasingly interventionist and high modernist approaches for fabricating an ideal city. Drawing on Arsenie's perspective, the article traces how Belgrade's existing material conditions prompted ever more visionary and idealized elite prescriptions for urban space. It analyzes the first General Urban Plans of both regimes, contemporary news reporting, and Arsenie's journey through Belgrade, urging a critical reassessment of the "reason" so readily attributed to elite modernizing projects—projects that crystallized around elite perceptions of Belgrade's disorder, chaos, and peripherality.
