By J
by C.A. Bayly, Sven Beckert, Matthew Connelly, Isabel Hofmeyr, Wendy Kozol, and Patricia Seed
Transnational History is no longer new, but it is the latest incarnation of an approach that has been characterized as comparative, international, world, and global history. All want to break out of the nation-state or singular states as a category of analysis and eschew the ethnocentrism that characterizes the writing of history. It is the product of the time, as world history a reaction against ethnocentrism and global history seems to give purpose and process to globalization, just as transnational history for Europeans seems much more meaning to a sense of movement and interpretation for diaspora studies and what not.
Transnational history implies a comparison between the contemporary movement of groups, goods, technology, or people across national borders and the transit of similar or related objects in another time. It allows for examinations of migratory patterns under a common rubric. The key claim to any transnational approach is its central concern with movements, flows, and circulation, not simply as a theme or motif, but as an analytic set of methods which defines the endeavor itself. Historical movements are not only made in different places, but they are constructed in the movement between places, sites, and regions.
Transnational history part of a larger critique of the West and its culture. For the feminist, transnationalism allows one to examine how processes and institutions such as colonization, modernization, and feminist movements have sustained critical divisions that have differently privileged or harmed groups through gender, racial, or sexual frameworks. What constitutes the object of historical inquiry once you challenge the stability of the border to define the nation?
Many histories are projects aiming to reconstruct aspects of the human past that transcend any one nation-state, empire, or other politically defined territory. It can be global in scope, but also particular regional histories. How do historians keep an audience if they move away from national histories and why are so many pages devoted to finding a need for the methodology of transnational history in lieu of empirical research. It should avoid the post-colonial self-referentialism to the point of irrelevance. Transnationalism means little or nothing for most of world history, yet it is becoming indispensible to describe crucial trends in more recent times.
One must remember that nations are not to be transcended in the forces under discussion: they are the products, often the rather late products, of those processes. How does one model change over time for a readership of any level of sophistication? Diachronic concerns of historians are not so easily swept aside by privileging one cause over another, whether it the economy, state, or ideology.
On the one hand these comments illuminate the high aspirations of transnational history and reveal a sophisticated awareness of what is at stake, both practically and theoretically. There is also an implicit critique of teaching methdology, political engagement, and presentism that reveal a frustration with the recent preoccupations with theory and esoteric style of discourse among acacdemia.
It is difficult to track the movement of objects, people, ideas, and texts using the sources available. There is a grand narrative of domination and resistance in transnational history: imperialist reciveving a much more nuanced treatment than victim. Too often globalization and transnationalism are seen in a binary models where globalization as a powerful and oppressive force that compels marginalized groups to sustain cultures of resistence. The most effective transnational historical studies are those that examine how cultural practices and ideologies shape, constrain, or enable the economic, social, and political conditions in which people and goods circulate within local, regional, and global locales.
Cultrual studies sometimes have an effect of reifying culture or cultures in such a way as to makr them seem authentic and real as against the inauthenticity of Western rationalism. Economy transforms culture. For all the contributions of subaltern studies and cultural anthropolgy, it is still too easy to slip back into the habit of imagining global forces as transcending nations and not creating them. Working across conventinoal categories will make it more tempting to be satisfied with exploring representation and idenity, rather than actually explaining why wealth and war occur. Transnational studies with cultural fields need a firmer empircal and comparative background. Studying investment patterns, elite networks and institutions will make transnational history more vibrant than a narrow focus on ideology and ideas.
How does a transnational approach differ from other approaches like modernization theory, Marxism, dependency theory, socio-historical treatments of state-making, and the like: should transnationalism yield a new narrative on development or have something specific to tell us about the issue of modernity?
The process of colonialization should show interacting agents from both backgrounds. Ideas of modernization, development, and now globalization have provoked historians to provide better ways to explain how we got to where we are today: a world in which people continue to struggle over the meaning of modernity, development can take many different routes and the institution of state sovereignty is more contested and assertive. Old development models focus too closely on how the state caused all the change: it increases the number of external transnational actoes and multiplies the nature of the internal groups tied to transnational formations. Transnational forces also show how modernity is more than a Western process of progress and enlightenment and reveal modernity to be a multifaceted process whereby political, economic, and cultural exchanges appear in varied and often unpredictable ways. Dependency narrative at its core is about how the relations of various parts of the world to each other: the global spread of capitalism is important to Marxism, modernization theory postulates the possibility of the global spread of modernity as the product of interaction of various states with one another.
A new narrative seems to focus on now at the end of the nineteenth century away from how Europeans felt change but on the movement of capital, goods, people, and ideas. Writing a narrative forces us to explain change and identify who is driving it. The interconnectedness of history is a starting point, but pays attention to networks, processes, beleifs, and instituions that trranscend politically defined spaces. Transnationalism must focus on building an idea on why the world became more eocnomically, socially, poltically, and culturally connected in the past 500 years. Capitalism and state formation remain the two master processes of the modern era.
Directions in transnational history:
Diasporas are a worthwhile way of approaching transnational history, provided these studies grappple closely with the reception and domestication of such people and modes of life in the host society. Look at how Western ideas were transformed rather than deepened or generalized in the third world. A transnational lens will yield insights on many issues. Continuities and changes in communication technology.
Showing posts with label Historiography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Historiography. Show all posts
Monday, October 6, 2008
Sunday, October 5, 2008
Provincilizing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Chakrabary argues Europe still influences and produces the master narratives of its former colonies. Europe and India are "hyperreal" terms whose geographical referent are somewhat indeterminate. Third world historians feel the need to refer to works in European history, their counterparts do not. The dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is reproduced in the third world.
Western social science theories concocted in ignorance of the colonial areas that many writers in those areas today apply incorrectly to their societies. Only Europe, as the most advanced society, can flesh out the intracies of others.
HISTORICISIM AS A TRANSITION NARRATIVE:
Marx, as a critic of liberalism and capitalism, reamins central to any postcolonial or postmodern project of writing history. Most modern third world histories are written with the themes of development, modernization, and capitalism animating throughout, and for the most part, looking at the failures of various classes to succeed in achieving a national purpose.
At first these "transition narratives," were unabashed celebrations of imperialism. Those living through the period were consciously aware of the fact that something was always lacking in the Indian. Citizenship and nationhood represented the end goals of history and the British were necessary to teach it to the Indian. The working class were told by the elite that they were the ones bearing the inadequacies.
At first, to be a modern individual was to be a European. Later nationalists scraped this idea because the central tenent of nationalism because individual rights and abstract equalities were univerals that could find succor anywhere in the world: one could be both Indian and a citizen. As the state and economy modernized, Indians began thinking that the acme of human activity was this state, whose theoretical subject was Europe.
Yet the autobiographies coming out of India were not traditionally bourgeois in that their topics were public rather than private. Bourgeois desire to split the figure into the public and private in contestation, alliance, and miscegenation with other narratives of the self and community. These will never get treatment, according to Chakrabarty because they undermine the modern, that is "European" sense of history.
HISTORY AND DIFFERENCE IN INDIAN MODERNITY:
Struggle against old system of marriage now represented in new one. The voices opposing it are subordinated to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal march of citizenship, of the nation state, and of themes of human emanciation spelled out in the course of the Enlightenment. Citizens speak through these stories. The modern will always be understood as that which already happened elsewhere and is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content. And many nationalist movements have used "nonmodern" reactions to spur their independence. Indians arrogated time and again during the colonial period a subjecthood which was not theirs. Anti-historical constructions played a part in the anti-colonial movement.
On the one hand, there is an Indian elite who seek to modernize the Indian peasant for the sake of creating an Indian state that emulates the Europe they saw. Socialist or nationalist, both seek to emulate Europe. On the other hand, maneuvers are made within the narrative to represent the distinctnes of Indian history and the difference and origniality of Indian ideas. But these people lack the resources to transmit their narratives on the same volume as the transition narrative writers. Universities prejudice in favor of modernizing narratives. It is because European imperialism and third-world nationalists achievced together: universalizing the nation-state as the most desirable form of government. States possess self-justifying narratives of citzenship and modernity that harken back to European political philosophy.
PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE?
Chakrabarty proposes a project of alliance between subaltern studies and metropolitian histories grounded in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism. He is not calling for a simplistic out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, etc. The struggle to understand history is comprehending how coercion in physical, institutional, and symbolic forms establihes truths and meanings and goes a long way in deciding whose "universal" wins. This is not about cultural relativism either.
He proposes this:
1. Recognizing that one Europe got a hold of the adjective modern for itself, it animated its global imperialist history 2. and the equating a certain version of Europe with modernity is not the work of Europeans alone as thirdworld nationalisms have been equal partners in the process. History, a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory with grand narratives of rights, citizenships, and nation-states, as well as public and private spheres, one can't see India as having a problem while dismantling Europe. The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalence, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it. Modernization cannot occur without repression and violence. Chartabarky wants the politics of despair written into the narrative and why this is unescapable.
Chakrabary argues Europe still influences and produces the master narratives of its former colonies. Europe and India are "hyperreal" terms whose geographical referent are somewhat indeterminate. Third world historians feel the need to refer to works in European history, their counterparts do not. The dominance of Europe as the subject of all histories is a part of a much more profound theoretical condition under which historical knowledge is reproduced in the third world.
Western social science theories concocted in ignorance of the colonial areas that many writers in those areas today apply incorrectly to their societies. Only Europe, as the most advanced society, can flesh out the intracies of others.
HISTORICISIM AS A TRANSITION NARRATIVE:
Marx, as a critic of liberalism and capitalism, reamins central to any postcolonial or postmodern project of writing history. Most modern third world histories are written with the themes of development, modernization, and capitalism animating throughout, and for the most part, looking at the failures of various classes to succeed in achieving a national purpose.
At first these "transition narratives," were unabashed celebrations of imperialism. Those living through the period were consciously aware of the fact that something was always lacking in the Indian. Citizenship and nationhood represented the end goals of history and the British were necessary to teach it to the Indian. The working class were told by the elite that they were the ones bearing the inadequacies.
At first, to be a modern individual was to be a European. Later nationalists scraped this idea because the central tenent of nationalism because individual rights and abstract equalities were univerals that could find succor anywhere in the world: one could be both Indian and a citizen. As the state and economy modernized, Indians began thinking that the acme of human activity was this state, whose theoretical subject was Europe.
Yet the autobiographies coming out of India were not traditionally bourgeois in that their topics were public rather than private. Bourgeois desire to split the figure into the public and private in contestation, alliance, and miscegenation with other narratives of the self and community. These will never get treatment, according to Chakrabarty because they undermine the modern, that is "European" sense of history.
HISTORY AND DIFFERENCE IN INDIAN MODERNITY:
Struggle against old system of marriage now represented in new one. The voices opposing it are subordinated to the supposedly higher purpose of making Indian history look like yet another episode in the universal march of citizenship, of the nation state, and of themes of human emanciation spelled out in the course of the Enlightenment. Citizens speak through these stories. The modern will always be understood as that which already happened elsewhere and is to be reproduced, mechanically or otherwise, with a local content. And many nationalist movements have used "nonmodern" reactions to spur their independence. Indians arrogated time and again during the colonial period a subjecthood which was not theirs. Anti-historical constructions played a part in the anti-colonial movement.
On the one hand, there is an Indian elite who seek to modernize the Indian peasant for the sake of creating an Indian state that emulates the Europe they saw. Socialist or nationalist, both seek to emulate Europe. On the other hand, maneuvers are made within the narrative to represent the distinctnes of Indian history and the difference and origniality of Indian ideas. But these people lack the resources to transmit their narratives on the same volume as the transition narrative writers. Universities prejudice in favor of modernizing narratives. It is because European imperialism and third-world nationalists achievced together: universalizing the nation-state as the most desirable form of government. States possess self-justifying narratives of citzenship and modernity that harken back to European political philosophy.
PROVINCIALIZING EUROPE?
Chakrabarty proposes a project of alliance between subaltern studies and metropolitian histories grounded in a radical critique and transcendence of liberalism. He is not calling for a simplistic out-of-hand rejection of modernity, liberal values, universals, science, reason, grand narratives, etc. The struggle to understand history is comprehending how coercion in physical, institutional, and symbolic forms establihes truths and meanings and goes a long way in deciding whose "universal" wins. This is not about cultural relativism either.
He proposes this:
1. Recognizing that one Europe got a hold of the adjective modern for itself, it animated its global imperialist history 2. and the equating a certain version of Europe with modernity is not the work of Europeans alone as thirdworld nationalisms have been equal partners in the process. History, a disciplined and institutionally regulated form of collective memory with grand narratives of rights, citizenships, and nation-states, as well as public and private spheres, one can't see India as having a problem while dismantling Europe. The idea is to write into the history of modernity the ambivalence, contradictions, the use of force, and the tragedies and ironies that attend it. Modernization cannot occur without repression and violence. Chartabarky wants the politics of despair written into the narrative and why this is unescapable.
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