Peripheral Visions of Empire: Zagreb, Belgrade, Sarajevo (Homage to Calvino)

One of the central propositions of Invisible Cities is that empires are opaque to themselves from the center. Kublai Khan grapples with the frustration of his own centrality, acutely aware of his ignorance of the cities that occupy the spatial and temporal peripheries of his empire. Marco Polo, by contrast, harnesses imagination from itinerancy to forge urban portraits in words for the emperor. This essay harnesses Calvino’s conceptual and stylistic interventions to pioneer a new mode of interpretation and writing about post-imperial cities. It consists of three sections and a coda. The first section acts as a scaffolding, elaborating the scholarly terrain upon which my engagement with Calvino takes place, with an emphasis on the concepts of inter-imperiality and peripheral visions of empire. The core of the essay is comprised by three vignettes focused on three cities that once occupied the peripheries of empires—Zagreb, Croatia; Belgrade, Serbia; and Sarajevo Bosnia-Hercegovina essay. These vignettes purposefully ventriloquize Calvino’s and Marco Polo’s mode of description in Invisible Cities. The conclusion reiterates the motif of peripheral vision with an emphasis on the genres of urban writing that Calvino adumbrated, but that remain under-explored. As a coda, Kublai Khan and Marco Polo share a brief colloquy on the lessons of peripheral, post-imperial cities.