The Lost Empires

2024

Published in Screenworks, Vol. 15.2: Copyright Law and Filmmaking Special Issue (ISSN 2514-3123)

screenworks.org.uk/archive/volume-15-2/the-lost-empires

Maps may now matter more than the terrain they represent. Archives, records, and the systems that organise them shape society as much as they document it, authorising what counts and determining what survives.

Empires have relied on records and maps as instruments of dominance alongside administration, and revolutions have frequently targeted those records: to destroy an archive is to contest the version of history it encodes. As empires collapse and new regimes take hold, new narratives tend to replace the old ones, and the archives that sustained the previous order do not always survive the transition.

Borges’s meditation on maps and territory, Derrida’s spectres, and Fisher’s capitalist realism converge on a culture of retromania: a condition in which nostalgia operates as political resource rather than private sentiment, repackaged and sold as comfort, and in which looking back has been made to feel like going forward. Populism, new nationalism, and Brexit may not have produced retromania, but they have drawn on it extensively.

On this reading, the past is resold as the present, and the present is experienced as somewhere already lost.