UC Berkeley

This project is an attempt to offer a genealogy of Empire from a different perspective, with different possibilities for resemblance and familiarity, to seek an order not in sequence in an effort to destabalize long-held causal narratives of empire(s). Beginning with

the Romans, I am interested in an “experiential” historicism that wants to articulate what historical subjects thought they were doing as empire as a social and political construct was coming into being. To such an end, I examine distinct imperial Roman building

practices—their devices to tell the time, their cities both at home

and abroad, their roads, and their maps—as well as the metaphorical language surrounding them. Jumping ahead to the British imperial novel, both early and late, I trace the evolution and devolution of these edifices and metaphors in order to show the ways in which empire abstracts and aestheticizes itself both conceptually and in practice. Finally, I use a combination of the concrete and metaphorized world of empire under the Romans, and its abstraction and aestheticization under the British, to argue for the current

manifestation of imperial “space” in the digital realm, which was envisioned early on through imperial metaphors and practices. In

this way, I argue against conceptions of the digital as a “new” space, free from the overarching logic of Empire, and eventually seek to find a road out towards political and imaginative alternatives.