Empires in the Sky, with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian & Rana Dasgupta | Triple Canopy

May 14, 2022
5:00 p.m. EDT
264 Canal Street, Suite 3W
New York, New York 10013
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How, in the past hundred years, did billions of people come to not only be subjects of nations but to define themselves as Kenyan, Iraqi, German, or Ukrainian? How might people govern and understand themselves if the nation-state proves to be a mismatch for the crises of the day, buckling under the pressure of ecological collapse, mass migration, and rampant inequality? Empires in the Sky will consider how nations have been invented through stories, symbols, and utopian tracts, and how to reinvent them so as to serve people and the planet-and prevent the future from being determined by cabals of financiers, tyrants, and tech bros.
As the writer Rana Dasgupta observes in his forthcoming book After Nations: A History of the Future (Viking, 2023), the nation had to be imagined in order to be realized. Yet nationalists have long worked to conceal this fact: they have traced racial and ethnic identities to ancient tribes and archaeological sites, mobilizing DNA samples and folklore. Dasgupta punctures the myth of the nation as fated in order to combat nihilism about the status quo and conjure alternatives that possess the potency to inspire struggles against neoliberalism and populism. While the dream of independent states animated popular campaigns against imperialism and colonialism, Dasgupta observes that today’s “post-national visions” too often “are the preserve of well-funded monomaniac priests who exhort the world’s most desperate people to destroy and desecrate this corrupt world of nations, to bring on the final destruction of all life and society, and to transmigrate, finally, to golden empires in the sky.”
Dasgupta will be joined by the writer Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, whose forthcoming book The Hidden Globe (Riverhead, 2024) examines the realms-from Swiss freeports to cryptocurrencies to tax havens-in which the rule of nations is suspended by diplomats, accountants, businesses associations, and tech companies. Abrahamian reveals the sovereignty of nations to be for sale, and the premise of the political system (“one land, one law, one people, and one government”) to be a fiction. Power is increasingly exercised beyond borders and by unaccountable actors, prompting nationalists to pledge to “take back control,” though mostly by harping on identity and demonizing outsiders. Abrahamian sees peril and possibility in this conflict between local sovereignty and predatory elites: scrutinizing the power and purpose of nations, she argues for reorienting them toward a “global commons.”
Empires in the Sky is part of a series that concludes Unknown States, an issue devoted to the fictions that make up nations and nationalities. The series also includes First World Order, with Ilana Harris-Babou and Yasmina Price, organized with Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI); Stopping Time, with Lou Cornum, Raven Chacon, and Audra Simpson; and Executive Fiction, with Richard Beck, Ari Brostoff, and Sean McCann.
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This public program was made possible through generous support from Jane Hait, a founding member of Triple Canopy Director’s Circle; the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts; and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. Research for Unknown States, Triple Canopy’s twenty-seventh issue, was made possible through a Craft Research Fund grant from the Center for Craft.

[@JashuChaudhary31]

Migrate.

[@yusasami]

Stupid answer. You clearly didn’t watch or understand the lecture if that’s your takeway