Writing Transnational History

Description

Over the past two decades, transnational history has become an established term describing approaches to the writing of world or global history that emphasise movement, dynamism and diversity. This book investigates the emergence of the 'transnational' as an approach, its limits, and parameters. It focuses particular attention on the contributions of postcolonial and feminist studies in reformulating transnational historiography as a move beyond the national to one focusing on oceans, the movement of people, and the contributions of the margins. It ends with a consideration of developing approaches such as translocalism. The book considers the new kinds of history that need to be written now that the transnational perspective has become widespread. Providing an accessible and engaging chronology of the field, it will be key reading for students of historiography and world history.

Fiona Paisley is Professor of History at Griffith University, Australia. She is the author of The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and London (2012), Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women's Pan-Pacific (2009) and Across the World with the Johnsons: Visual Culture and American Empire in the Twentieth Century, co-authored with Prue Ahrens and Lamont Lindstrom (2013). Pamela Scully is Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Professor of African Studies, and Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Emory University, USA. She is the author of Liberating the Family?: Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853 (1997), the co-editor of Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (2005), with Diana Paton and co-author of Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (2009) with Clifton Crais. Her most recent book is Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (2016).

The stakes of doing critical transnational histories have arguably never been greater. In this highly readable and teachable volume, Fiona Paisley and Pamela Scully assemble a host of paradigms and best practices drawn from recent scholarship on anglophone imperial history and colonial settler studies. Their emphasis on gender and geopolitics, mobility and subaltern lives, and the multiple worlds cross-hatched by vertical and horizontal forces distinguishes their approach and guarantees a wide range of interlocutors for years to come. * Antoinette Burton, Professor of History and Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies at the University of Illinois, USA * This book provides an excellent sense of the current state of the field of transnational history. Far from being a bland overview, the book's particular value lies in the way it centres scholarship marginalised in many earlier surveys. The authors convincingly demonstrate how recent feminist scholarship, Black Atlantic histories and comparative studies of settler colonies have honed the radical tools of transnational analysis through their attention to the politics of knowledge, power relationships, and to the lived experiences of subaltern groups as well as cosmopolitan elites. * Clare Midgley, Professor of History, Sheffield Hallam University, UK *