Imperical Data from Mandalay is my COVID-19 project. It blends my historical interests with art. It is my experiment in trying to feel, a little bit, another place and time. To imagine in a performative, embodied way the lives of people who lived there.

Before the lockdown, weekends were spent listening to live music, eating out, seeing friends, wandering, and standing next to people. I suddenly had time on my hands.

I had been reading memoirs about colonial and postcolonial Africa for a couple of years. And, beyond that, writing about religion, empire, and genocide. I found myself writing about colonialism by day and singing about it by night.

I thought about the British reign in Mandalay, a much-romanticized inland city in Burma (Myanmar). I imagined Emily and George as arrogant and reckless, selfish and dangerous. But also as frail searchers from modest backgrounds who had glimpsed their suffocated future in late nineteenth-century England. They wanted to fly. Their pathway to realizing that risked adding to suffering in the world. They took wealth, and health, and time from the people who lived in Burma. They brought to Asia their bibles and a system of education, as the British did throughout their extraordinary empire - an empire so vast that the sun never set on it as the world turned. They brought medicine and technology. They built hospitals, orphanages, and schools. They built roads and railroads. And they demeaned and suppressed local culture. They worked to dismantle Buddhist traditions. They despoiled the environment. They treated others as slaves. They consumed whatever lay in their path. They profited immensely at the expense of others. They behaved as did colonizers who likewise had set out for glory and profit and romance under the flags of other European powers. And similarly to white Americans who violently contended with indigenous peoples over claims to North American spaces, and who enslaved Africans to make new places of those spaces. In the end, Emily and George saw more of the world and of themselves. That came at a price.

In their contradictions and misadventures, Emily and George are us. And like them, we can arrive at a moment when we wonder what we are doing when we engage with people in other places. Are we helpers or thieves? Givers or takers? What are we doing when we claim as our own even just the recipes and stories and music of others? As we so effortlessly do. And, more consequentially, when we take for cheap the labor of those who live far away from us. Where is the line between being a bad actor and a good actor, and how do we negotiate its zig-zaggyness and its obscuration?

We live with what we take from others. Each of us curates a micro-world of seemingly exotic collected objects - some material, some ethereal - that we secure inside our safes. Because those haunting objects are beautiful but deadly. Because we both desire and fear artifacts saturated with the magic of unfamiliarity. Because that which is strange embodies power we wish to possess and control. So we bring it home and put it in our blue cabinet. Or, in the case of Emily and George, we aim to own it where we find it. At least for a while.