"The heyday of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani is over"

The heyday of the  Prosopographia Imperii Romani  is over

by Marietta Horster

[From https://www.academia.edu/8653152/The_Prosopographia_Imperii_Romani_and_New_trends_and_Projects_in_Roman_Prosopography. Documentation:  Horster, Marietta, The Prosopographia Imperii Romani (PIR) and NewTrends and Projects in Roman Prosopography Prosopography Approaches and Applications in A Handbook (Prosopographia et Genealogica, Band 13), edited by K. Keats-Rohan, University of Oxford Linacre College Unit for Prosopographical Research, Oxford 2007]

Conclusion

The heyday of the Prosopographia Imperii Romani is over, not only due to the lack of money for a third edition, but also because of the necessity for a different organization and presentation of the information in the future – be it a book or be it in combination with a database on CD-ROM or on the internet and in any language whatsoever.We all hope that a time will come when someone will be able to finance a new way to present and update a prosopography of the Roman Empire.In the meantime many interesting projects of prosopographical studies of the Roman Empire will be published. Revised lists and prosopographies of offices and duties will emerge; the lower ranks of offices and of the army will be the subject of studies similar to the 800-page volume on the centurions of the legions of the Roman Rhine army,which was published by Olivier Richier in 2004.

In present-day Spain and Greece as well as in other countries, there are counter-movements to the domination of Classics by the former great powers Great Britain,France, Germany and Italy, and there is also a nationalist trend against the European Union. Furthermore, and connected with the just mentioned phenomena, there is a general movement towards smaller units and regionalism as subjects for studies in ancient history studies as a backlash against the dominating imperialism/Romanism debate of recent decades. This quest for strong regional and national identities in contemporary society will ensure that prosopographical studies with regional foci will continue to be pursued in the years to come.

Shaden M. Tageldin, Disarming Words Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt, UCP 2011

Disarming Words

Empire and the Seductions of Translation in Egypt
Shaden M. Tageldin 

Univesity of California Press 2011

[Thanks to Mohammed Lafi for the reference]

In a book that radically challenges conventional understandings of the dynamics of cultural imperialism, Shaden M. Tageldin unravels the complex relationship between translation and seduction in the colonial context. She examines the afterlives of two occupations of Egypt—by the French in 1798 and by the British in 1882—in a rich comparative analysis of acts, fictions, and theories that translated the European into the Egyptian, the Arab, or the Muslim. Tageldin finds that the encounter with European Orientalism often invited colonized Egyptians to imagine themselves “equal” to or even “masters” of their colonizers, and thus, paradoxically, to translate themselves toward—virtually into—the European. Moving beyond the domination/resistance binary that continues to govern understandings of colonial history, Tageldin redefines cultural imperialism as a politics of translational seduction, a politics that lures the colonized to seek power through empire rather than against it, thereby repressing its inherent inequalities. She considers, among others, the interplays of Napoleon and Hasan al-'Attar; Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, Silvestre de Sacy, and Joseph Agoub; Cromer, 'Ali Mubarak, Muhammad al-Siba'i, and Thomas Carlyle; Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, and Ahmad Hasan al-Zayyat; and Salama Musa, G. Elliot Smith, Naguib Mahfouz, and Lawrence Durrell. In conversation with new work on translation, comparative literature, imperialism, and nationalism, Tageldin engages postcolonial and poststructuralist theorists from Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak to Jean Baudrillard, Walter Benjamin, Emile Benveniste, and Jacques Derrida.

Contents 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Note on Translation and Transliteration

Overture | Cultural Imperialism Revisited: Translation, Seduction, Power
1. The Irresistible Lure of Recognition
2. The Dismantling I: Al-'Attar's Antihistory of the French in Egypt, 1798–1799
3. Suspect Kinships: Al-Tahtawi and the Theory of French-Arabic "Equivalence," 1827–1834
4. Surrogate Seed, World-Tree: Mubarak, al-Siba'i, and the Translations of "Islam" in British Egypt, 1882–1912
5. Order, Origin, and the Elusive Sovereign: Post-1919 Nation Formation and the Imperial Urge toward Translatability
6. English Lessons: The Illicit Copulations of Egypt at Empire's End
Coda | History, Affect, and the Problem of the Universal

Notes
Index

More about the book from the publisher's website: http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520265523 .