Transnational History Versus the Fort, Capital, and Empire

Abstract

In Andrew Zimmerman's view, the dialectic of "I" and "we" in Choi Chatterjee's "Manifesto" allows to speak of transnational history not just as an academic subspecialty but also as a particular vision of the future. This vision is simultaneously realizable and utopian, a real autobiography and a visionary project. The "I" in this text represents a decolonial position and hence perceives globality not as abstract cosmopolitanism but as myriad struggles, never complete, against multiple forms of oppression – colonial, postcolonial, and beyond. This "I–we" dialectic also informs the connection between teaching and research. Zimmerman interprets Chatterjee's research program as a decolonial reinterpretation of Voltaire's Candide – "cultivating one's garden" as the only meaningful response to a world of cruelty and misery around. Whereas Candide gardens to escape the world, Chatterjee and her students garden for the opposite purpose: to embrace the world, to seize the land. To write transnational history as Chatterjee suggests is to write history in, by, for, from, and about the "surround," – a history free from the ahistorical logic of the capital and domination.