Rethinking American History in a Global Age: Transnationalism and the Challenges to National Histories

Prasenjit Duara

Until recently, linear history was identified with the nation-state in a process of mutual formation: naturalizing the nation-state as the skin that contains the experience of the past has made history the major means of national identity formation. History has a special role in teaching: it teaches the moral value of the national community. Duara believes we should balance the identity-formation function of the teaching of history with a critical understanding of how that past is formed: historical education is about the production of our moral and knowing selves.

National histories focus on progress and a nation moving through time where traditional histories focus on mythic pasts and transcendent ideals. Why has the nation dominated the framing of modern historiography? History becomes a principal means of claiming sovereignty in the emerging system of nation-states: a discourse of rights involving a three-way relationship between a people, a territory, and a history. Written histories represented the ideal of a single people occupying since conception their right to a given land. Colonizing nation had to see their colonies as non-nations and those anti-colonialists had to reconstitute themselves as nations and enter history to join the narrative of progress and modernity.

Challenging Historical Boundaries:

Challenge the modes of making historical sense: periodization, causation, and the historical postulate of space. These practices, Duara contends, are techniques of binding the self to a national time-space. For instance, a scientific examination of causality that worked to prop up the logic of the nation-state is now contested by views that historical narratives are based on contemporary needs and how national narratives respond to contemporary national imperatives. Periodizaton leads to defintions of times moving back and forth is also a product of nationalist necessity in the twentieth century: it is one of the most fundamental means of symbolizing historical time and conferring meaning on individual identity and when this knowledge penetrates public historical consciousness, the consequences for individual identity and stae sovereignty can be quite meaningful. Think of eras as a hegemonic principles. Boundedness is as socially constructed as domination and subcject formation. Why is this paradigm shift occuring now?

The lessening importance of the state in Europe has undermined its claim to have an evolving primoridal essense: other developments have inclined thinkers to look at the movement of peoples, resources, and signs rather than stable entities. Ideally, according to Druary, we should have an ever-opening history that reveals how the object of our stust has been bounded and framed both subjectively and by objective powers that are also themselves partially produced by these framings.

Spaces of History:

Borsder zones represent relatively weak linkes in the ideological hegenomy of nationalism and are often highly militarized. Forces can create kinds of space they require: abstract, exchangable, and often deterritorialized that can serve as a factor of production as well as a commodity. National histories often represent transnational and global developments as national processes. Nation-states frequently puruse common goals of scientific modernity or adopt similar or related models to achieve these goals and encounter many of the same problems or solutions, but their histories are not the same as different histories emerge from the encounter between global models and preexisting and contingent formations. An event that is often portrayed as a natioanl encounter is really a dialogue between local and global groups.

A nation seeking progress must also possess a core of timeless authenticity, that is, the character, qualities, and values that an entity seeks to secure while pursuing the goal of modernization which provides identity in a world of change. Authenticity locates the source of authortiy in society and endows those who can speak for it with a power of cultural inviolability. Those who control it have the power to subordinate the individual to the collective in the name of that authenticity and externally provide an authoritative shield against charges made by other states or nations. The task of the historian, for Drura, more and more resemblses that of a literary critic: one must deconstruct the dominant ideological representations of poltical powers which have frequently marginalized, suppressed, and transformed histories. Modern territorial boundaries are illusionary means of keeping histories apart: a political space associated with the dominant discourse of time authorizes and naturalizes a social order foudned upon the erasure of the memory and representation of older spatial relationships.