Beyond compare: Comparative method after the transnational turn

Radical History Review

Volumn 91, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 62-90

  Seigel, Micol ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77449087492     PISSN: 01636545     EISSN: 15341453     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01636545-2005-91-62     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. More traditional forums hosting such calls include Eric Foner, "American Freedom in a Global Age," American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1-16;
2. Thomas Bender, La Pietra Report: Project on Internationalizing the Study of American History (New York: Organization of American Historians, 2000);
3. Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002);
4. several Journal of American History special issues in 1999;
5. and the American Historical Review 96 (1991).
6. On the problems posed by the terms colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial, see Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 9-17;
7. and Ann Laura Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies," Journal of American History 88 (2001), Www.historycooperative.org/ journals/jah/88.3/stoIer.html, par. 2. For purposes of this essay,
8. I use anticolonial and postcolonial as rough equivalents to identify thinkers who have resisted North Atlantic colonialism throughout the twentieth century.
9. Thanks to Ian Fletcher for a wonderful reformulation of this point.
10. David Thelen, "The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History," Journal of American History 86 (1999): 965.
11. See also Federico Neiburg and Marcio Goldman, "Anthropology and Politics in Studies of National Character," Cultural Anthropology, no. 13 (1998): 56-81,
12. citing Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1942);
13. and Dante Moreira Leite, ? caráter nacional brasileiro: História de uma idcologia (Brazilian National Character: History of an Ideology), 5th ed. (Sao Paulo: Editora Atica, 1992).
14. Thelen writes to soothe concerns that transnational methods will overlook nations' potency. Such concerns are articulated by Michael McGerr, "The Price of the New Transnational History," American Historical Review 96 (1991): 1056-67;
15. and George M. Frederickson, "From Exceptionalism to Variability: Recent Developments in Cross-National Comparative History," Journal of American History 82 (1995): 587-604.
16. Robin D. G. Kelley, '"But a Local Phase of a World Problem': Black History's Global Vision, 1883-1950," Journal of American History 86 (1999): 1045-77;
17. Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties," par. 48;
18. Sidney Mintz, "The Localization of Anthropological Practice: From Area Studies to Transnationalism," Critique of Anthropology 18 (1998): 117-33;
19. And Michelle A. Stephens, "Black Transnationalism and the Politics of National Identity: West Indian Intellectuals in Harlem in the Age of War and Revolution," American Quarterly 50 (1998): 592-608.
20. Frederick Cooper, "Race, Ideology, and the Perils of Comparative History," American Historical Review (1996): 1135.
21. Here Cooper is discussing "the history of white supremacy and black liberation," a significant branch of anticolonial struggle, and a more than metonymic gesture toward the whole.
22. See also Cooper, "What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian's Perspective," African Affairs 100 (2001): 189-213.
23. In the Americas, this literature is deeply indebted to the work of scholars of the African diaspora. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935);
24. Eric Eustace Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994);
25. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Dial, 1938).
26. See also Robin D.G. Kelley, "A Poetics of Anticolonialism," Monthly Review 51 (1999), 1-21;
27. Kelley, "But a Local Phase"; Kelley and Tiffany Ruby Patterson, "Unfinished Migrations: Reflections on the African Diaspora and the Making of the Modem World," African Studies Review, no. 43 (2000): 11-45; And Stephens, "Black Transnationalism."
28. Diaspora studies remains a site of some of the most imaginative and innovative transnational work. I have recently found especially delightful Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2000);
29. Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003);
30. and Edwards, "Rendez-Vous in Rhythm," Connect 1 (2000): 182-90.
31. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove, 1967).
32. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 44;
33. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Critical Fanonism," Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 457-70.