Transnational Approach Research Articles

Children Crossing Borders: Latin American Migrant Children. Edited by Alejandra J. Josiowicz and Irasema Coronado

Children Crossing Borders: Latin American Migrant Children is an important and welcomed contribution to the expanding studies of child migration. Through conscientious fieldwork and content analysis, the authors present ten chapters that center migration and borders and how these two concepts destabilize the lives of migrant and refugee children. The chapters discuss the social and cultural borders and disruptions experienced by migrant and refugee children as well as the lack of policies and solutions on the part of federal and state agencies and administrators. In their conclusions, the authors offer unique strategies of resilience and adaptability that work to mitigate the displacement and trauma experienced by the children. The book weaves together interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational approaches and provides an important contribution to Migration, Border and Borderland Studies. Throughout the book, borders are approached as dynamic concepts, as central sites of political, social, and cultural power struggles (p. 11). Part I focuses on the educational experiences of both migrant children who are U.S. citizens repatriated to their parent’s home countries and children from Latin America now living in the United States. For many of these children, educational experiences are defined by linguistic borders that lead to social, cultural, and educational disruptions and which force the children to reimagine their identities along transnational lines. Part II focuses on how literature, art, and culture can be used to present and explain borders as physical and symbolic spaces that destabilize the lives of migrant and refugee children. Until recently, these children were invisible or erased by racist, xenophobic, or imperialistic stereotypes. Through resilient forms of children’s and young adult literature, art projects that center walls as obstacles to mobility, and teaching approaches using testimonials, the authors address ways to combat racism and xenophobia while helping the children confront and challenge the very borders they are crossing. Part III deals with the best interests of migrant and refugee children, or lack thereof, and provides analysis of legislation, policies, and the global labor markets that never consider the best interest of the child. The chapters describe the structural traumas inflicted on the children when their best interests are excluded. Subsequently, the authors provide policy recommendations that aim to correct these omissions.

Towards a Transnational Approach to Transboundary Haze Pollution: Governing Traditional Farming in Fire-Prone Regions of Indonesia

AbstractIn Indonesia, swidden practices have been part of traditional rice farming for centuries. Swidden agriculture is a fundamental part of all remaining large tropical forests and provides a critical form of biodiversity-friendly agriculture. Meanwhile, peatland degradation and land conversion for oil palm plantation and agriculture have created an annual transboundary environmental disaster in Southeast Asia. This article adopts a transnational lens to highlight the complex multi-scale interactions that perpetuate recurring transboundary air pollution in the region. Having examined the traditional practices of swidden agriculture in Central Kalimantan and South Sumatra (Indonesia), the article reveals that swidden agriculture has been misunderstood generally, and in particular in international and national law and policy. It argues that existing laws fail to identify the important role that swidden agriculture plays in sustainable ecosystem management and cultural expression. Nuanced understandings of fire use, alongside transnational multi-stakeholder and multi-scale approaches, are required.

Transnational Queer-Feminist Methodologies in Live Art: Issues of Translation and Representation in Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi’s Work

How to access, read, and interpret queer-feminist live art from a transnational perspective? And how to account for those subjects whose geopolitical positionalities do not subscribe to the most acknowledged Euro-American canons? In this article, I will address these questions by engaging with the limits of a queer theory (or practice) that does not acknowledge its feminist co-constitution or that it is anchored to Anglo-American perspectives and genealogies. I will then propose a transnational approach to enrich this field and counteract the reproduction of abstract queer equivalences across cultures. Adopting what I call a ‘transnational queer-feminist methodology’ will therefore be essential for working with and analysing queer and queer-feminist live art that is produced and circulated across and within diverse geopolitical locations. I will describe how the latter relies on an interdisciplinary weaving of social sciences, queer, and performance studies/practices. I will use this approach in analysing Ghanaian transgender artist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [crazinisT artisT], unpacking the issues of cultural and linguistic translation in her work. The artist (who asks to be called with the pronouns ’sHit’ or ‘she’) engages in endurance actions that, together with challenging her own physical boundaries, also expose the limits of Western identity markers. In applying a transnational queer-feminist methodology that expands from the regional (Ghana) towards transnational Pan-African perspectives, I will then argue that her work uses the aesthetics of abjection to counteract cultural and linguistic imperialisms and become ‘illegible’ to the neo-liberal global LGBT rights formulations whilst speaking for a transversal queer African subjectivity.

The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

<i>The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures</i> by Francesca Orsini, Neelam Srivastava, and Laetitia Zecchini, eds.

Investigating European Cities in the Modern Age through the Lens of the Global Urban History Approach

This review article focuses on two key developments in urban history. The first is that the new transnational approach to urban history is significantly advancing the field and the second is that within the European context an important new emphasis is being placed on Eastern and Southern Europe. As claimed by Claus Møller Jørgensen in his review of nineteenth-century transnational urban history: transnational urban history entails a measure of comparative work to find commonalities as hints of connections . . . The enlargement of scale and the search for connections does add new perspectives to urban history and produces new knowledge . . . Focusing on cities as the location of transnational processes of modernity brings urban place more centrally into discussions of national space and national histories.1

Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire By Laura Edmondson

Reviewed by: Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire by Laura Edmondson Sky Herington Performing Trauma in Central Africa: Shadows of Empire BY LAURA EDMONDSON Indiana UP, 2018. xii + 348 pp. ISBN 9780253032478 paper. In the context of an ever-expanding humanitarian sector, particularly active in Africa, scholarship interrogating the ethics and effects of arts-based therapeutic models in humanitarian interventions has increasingly turned to performance as both a fruitful object and an important tool of study. In Performing Trauma in Central Africa, Laura Edmondson develops this approach, drawing on performance theory in a compelling analysis of a variety of cultural responses to mass violence and trauma in the Great Lakes region over the last two decades. Borrowing from Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, Edmondson uses an "empire of trauma" (5) as a lens that reveals the limiting master-narratives of suffering and healing that are regularly perpetuated by Western-sponsored arts interventions. Scrutinizing neoliberal solutions to managing the aftermath of conflict, she investigates how Central African trauma is packaged to "obscure rather than to illuminate empire's complicity in a world order that sustains mass death and systemic violence" (9) and is made to soothe and satiate empire's appetites. If local artistic expression is prone to manipulation and co-option by both INGOs and African states, however, empire's trauma market is not a straightforward vampirization of African suffering by the imperial consumer. Performance is a site through which local actors might legitimate such narratives but also, simultaneously, reappropriate them for their own ends: in contexts of scarcity, trauma narratives can serve as vital resources. The historical overview of the region in the first chapter immediately reveals the advantages of Edmondson's geographical focus, which allows room for a detailed presentation of the specificities of each country's history while also establishing, through a transnational approach, the interconnectedness of conflicts across the region. Mapping the "roots and routes" (38) of mass violence and genocide, Edmondson analyzes the concept of "competitive memory" (59) and considers how a single mass trauma might overshadow others in the public imagination, creating a hierarchy of suffering. The following four chapters offer a wide range of case studies of the cultural production that has emerged from these intersecting histories of violence in Uganda, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Fieldwork in 2004 at a US-sponsored rehabilitation center for former child soldiers in northern Uganda, for example, informs Edmondson's reflections on the constructed linear narratives of these children's experiences, performed as spectacle for the benefit of foreign visitors. The exploration of the Western consumption of spectacle is then expanded in an examination of the performative strategies of the post-genocide Rwandan state, while in the Congolese context interventions by American humanitarian organizations are seen to shrink spaces of suffering and eclipse the trauma of those excluded from victim groups recognized on the world stage. Finally, Edmondson returns to a post-conflict northern Uganda in 2010 and reflects on the role of INGOs and American celebrities in the complex dynamics of trauma branding. Such branding projects are however sidestepped by many [End Page 193] northern Ugandans in their use of memorialization and demands on the state for "living memorials" (252) that respond to their material needs. A different approach is taken in the book's final chapter in which, drawing on her own experience running theater workshops in northern Uganda and Rwanda, Edmondson searches for new models of theater activism detached from its "humanitarian baggage" (287). Since, she argues, "neoliberal pressures are more easily negotiated than opposed" (271), staying at home is not an option. Instead she seeks to offer Western theater activists a guide to avoiding those pitfalls of empire discussed in the preceding chapters and tentatively concludes, borrowing from Emmanuel Lévinas, that a stance of "radical passivity" (276)—involving shared vulnerability, open-ended collaboration, and the acceptation of inaction—might be a useful, if sometimes elusive, point of departure from which to develop a more ethical approach to intercultural performance outside of the influence of empire. This explicit identification of an imagined reader in the closing pages echoes the emphasis on the perspectives of Western agents found...

Andrea Levy, in Memoriam ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect

Reviewed by: Andrea Levy, in Memoriam ed. by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect Corrine Collins ANDREA LEVY, IN MEMORIAM, edited by Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect. A special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 53, No. 1–2, 2022. 330 pp. This special issue of ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature commemorates the life and work of Black British writer Andrea Levy and is the inaugural issue of what editors call “Levy studies” (p. 11). Henghameh Saroukhani, Sarah Lawson Welsh, and Michael Perfect dedicate the issue and Levy studies to the “significance of [Levy’s] aesthetic and political legacy” (p. 9). The editors state that their desired focus for subsequent scholarship is to take more seriously Levy’s transnational and outer-national significance, and they selected the Canadian journal ARIEL to highlight the ways Levy’s work is also connected to places outside of the Caribbean that have been shaped by the British empire (p. 11). While Levy’s work has become increasingly prominent and celebrated in Britain, marked by not only the popularity of her novels but also their adaptations for screen and theater, the editors are invested in critiques and analyses that also challenge the ways her work has been taken up. The special issue [End Page 178] is a blueprint for the kinds of scholarship the editors hope will occupy the space of Levy studies, and it includes a range of contributions that examine Levy’s multimodal work. The issue includes scholarly critiques, essays on pedagogy, reflections on Levy’s life, and previously unpublished works, all grounded in the study of Levy as a writer invested in the violent entanglements of empire. In the foreword, Black British presenter and journalist Gary Younge recalls a conversation he had with Levy about the importance of place. Levy frequently wrote about North London and the places and cultures that influence it and Britain; her work is invested in the Caribbean as a firm, central, and important part of British history through legacies of colonization, enslavement, and migration. Despite the geographic terrain that Levy’s work traverses, she herself lived all her life in North London. During their conversation, Younge suggested that writers who stay in place are burdened with insularity, to which Levy challenged, “What is so inherently great about moving around and living in different places?” (p. 1). Younge concludes that Levy’s relationship to place should cause us all to rethink the ways that places are connected across time and space, and the special issue urges readers to take the transnational nature of Levy’s work more seriously than ever before. Levy’s transnational approach threads through the issue, providing the context for her later work on television and many of the scholarly essays included in the collection. Challenging Britain’s narrative of empire is central to Levy studies, and in “July’s People: Adoption and Kinship in Andrea Levy’s Fiction,” John McLeod argues that Levy’s work is continually engaged in the genealogical work of empire, in particular understanding its impact on private and public institutions. The editors advocate a renewed focus on Levy’s resistance to narratives of transformation to assert that her work is polemical, even as it has been used in the British national imaginary to create a sense of national identity and belonging. Fiona Tolan and Vedrana Veličković read some of Levy’s novels as narratives of imperial and post-colonial melancholia and argue that these novels do not present hopes for a racially and culturally integrated Britain but rather a Britain that should remain under scrutiny for its treatment of British Caribbean subjects, a key point that is overlooked in mainstream uptakes of Levy’s work. Deirdre Osborne makes similar observations in “Sites and Sightlines: Staging Andrea Levy’s Small Island,” which examines the cross-genre interplay between the novel Small Island (2004), its adaptation for theater, and Levy’s self-narrated audiobook. These essays examine the ways that Levy is taken up and understood by British audiences and builds on previous scholarship on Levy’s public reception as a Black writer, challenging her reputation as someone who is not...

A transnational amendment to assimilation theory: country of origin’s racial status versus transnational Whiteness

ABSTRACT In the twentieth century, European migrants’ ethnic and racial status changed as they joined the mainstream. Assimilation theory identified socioeconomic mobility as the driver of this outcome. More recently, non-European migrants have also achieved socioeconomic parity with the mainstream. Yet, a puzzle has emerged: unlike earlier European migrants these non-Europeans remain “racialized”. They are both a part of, and excluded from, the majority group. This paper proffers a transnational amendment to assimilation theory. While socioeconomic parity matters so too does the similarity between the imagined racial status of the origin and host country. Groups originating from geographies that are imagined as outside of transnational Whiteness remain a “racial minority”. Groups originating from geographies that are imagined as within transnational Whiteness are already White and, thereby, assimilated. To delineate this transnational approach to assimilation and inclusion, we provide examples from Europeans’ and non-Europeans’ assimilation trajectories.

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction

Natural Partners

AbstractThis article examines how Chilean nitrate fertilizer producers and their international marketing agents persuaded farmers in the US South to use nitrogen-rich mineral fertilizers mined from the Atacama Desert, even as cheaper synthetic fertilizers flooded agricultural markets in the early decades of the twentieth century. At the same time, it explores how agricultural experts working in the United States on behalf of Chile's nitrate industry (and increasingly the Chilean government itself) articulated not just connections between nitrogen and soil vitality but also underscored the importance of other mineral “impurities” to healthy plant development. Working in the US Cotton Belt in particular, many of these agents promoted a vision of pan-American ecological and economic interdependence, and through their racialized depictions of agricultural knowledge, they sought to convince US farmers of the unique “all-natural” attributes of Chilean nitrates. In reconstructing this history, the article reveals the far-reaching impact that Chilean fertilizers had on the modernization of US agriculture and advocates for a transnational approach to understanding that process in the early twentieth century. It also traces how the exchange of agricultural commodities and knowledge between Chile and the United States contributed to the emergence of intensive agriculture and what observers would later call the “green revolution.”

Wasana Wongsurawat. The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation.

Wasana Wongsurawat’s The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation reexamines Thai narratives of modernization, the process by which a feudal kingdom was transformed into a nation-state. Conventional histories of Thailand credit the monarchy for the country’s development, depicting the king either as an astute diplomat fending of Western intervention or an internal colonizer imitating European models of state building. Cold War historiography explains Thai history as a journey, in fits and starts, toward the elusive goal of liberal democracy. The Crown and the Capitalists makes an important contribution to this scholarship by adopting a transnational approach, focusing on both the country’s long-standing relationship with China and the sizable Chinese diaspora within its borders. As the title suggests, the book is centered on the uneasy partnership between royal elites and the immigrant community of Chinese businessmen, which Wasana argues is the key to understanding the historical trajectory of the Thai nation-state. In so doing, the author seeks to create space for Chinese immigrant voices within the story of Thai modernization.

Mixing Different Traditions and Picking What’s Best’: Characteristics and Migration Experiences of Polish High-Tech Professionals in Silicon Valley

Growing demand for a highly skilled workforce in a knowledge- and technology-based economy stimulates the recruitment of international professionals, resulting in their increased participation in the total volume of international migrants. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to their integration strategies and migration trajectories. Drawing on 46 interviews with Polish high-tech professionals, this article explores their characteristics and migration experiences in Silicon Valley. Grounded theory, a biographical method, a transnational approach and the concept of social anchoring guided my data collection, analysis and interpretation. The study results indicated that high-tech professionals were well prepared for immigration to the United States and were able to integrate effectively into the multicultural environment of Silicon Valley by adopting the rules of the host society ‘only as much as necessary’ without rejecting their previous cultural affiliations. Working at the level of competence and professional experience from the moment of arriving in the United States facilitated their structural adaptation to American society. The study contributes to the existing body of literature in migration research by offering a nuanced insight into motivations, identities and values of modern highly skilled migrants and providing new ways of understanding their decision-making processes on migration and settlement.

Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach. By Choi Chatterjee. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. x, 226 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95, paper.

Russia in World History: A Transnational Approach. By Choi Chatterjee. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. x, 226 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $29.95, paper.

Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art ed. by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding

Reviewed by: Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art ed. by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding Hugo Silveira Pereira (bio) Transnational Railway Cultures: Trains in Music, Literature, Film, and Visual Art Edited by Benjamin Fraser and Steven Spalding. New York: Berghahn Books, 2022. Pp. viii + 244. Transnational Railway Cultures analyzes representations of railways and the experience of traveling by train across borders (in both the strict and broad sense of the term) in several arts (literature, cinema, music, painting), timeframes, and geographies, spanning five continents. It encompasses different topics associated with railway traveling, such as progress/backwardness, the persistence of colonial depictions, and the construction of memories, among others. Railways are one of the most debated technologies in the community of historians of technology. Therefore, it is not easy to come up with something new. Transnational Railway Cultures offers a fresh approach to the subject by exploring how railway travel is represented in different movies, books, or artistic productions from a transnational perspective. I welcomed both the return to the classics, namely Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden and Wolfgang Schivelbusch's The Railway Journey, and the engagement with more recent studies (especially those on mobility studies). Often, the use of classical works tends to be looked down upon as dated literature, but I believe that books such as those by Marx and Schivelbusch are still useful for historians today. The chapters fit well together, although there is no clear train of thought between them, which makes drawing comparisons difficult. This justifies the want of an overarching thesis that glues the chapters together. The editors clarify in the final remarks that the book was never meant to be comprehensive and that its gaps should be regarded as opportunities for further studies, but I believe that an attempt at finding common ground, even if at the cost of some speculation, would be useful for readers and for future iterations. [End Page 271] My main concern about the book is that readers may not always see the "border crossing" promised by the transnational approach. On some occasions, this is due to the texts being too hermetic (ch. 4) or too descriptive and heavily reliant on quotations from the work that was analyzed (ch. 7). In other instances, the transnationalism seems forced and supported by speculative reflections or personal opinions. For example, it is claimed that music or poetry replicate the sound of trains, thus evoking the travels of commuters to work or Jews toward concentration camps (chs. 1 and 2). In chapter 4, "gothic" is used to describe conflict between races (nationalities, at best). Other assertions are made that capitalism will violently undo itself (ch. 3) or that today's traveling is pedantic tourism (ch. 8). This becomes more visible when the authors do not engage with the theoretical framework of those fields (e.g., cartoons in chapter 5 or travel writing in chapter 8). I was left wondering how much one can draw from a movie or a poem, or if any conclusion could be considered valid. On a similar note, in some chapters I wondered whether the main conclusions would be drastically different had the authors chosen a different piece of literature, cinema, or art. Regardless, the edited volume will be of interest to historians of technology as it engages with concepts usually analyzed by the discipline. The notion of techno-scientific progress (and its persistence) is the most visible (with trains assuming the role of icon of modernity, contrasting with the backwardness embodied in characters and landscapes surrounding them). But the notion of borders (chs. 6 and 9), postcolonial policies and stereotypes (chs. 5 and 8), critical infrastructure (ch. 3), and deconstruction of geographical dimensions (ch. 5) are also addressed. Chapter 2 clearly resonates with Kranzberg's First Law, reflecting on how railways are not good nor bad nor neutral. While perusing the volume (especially chs. 2, 3, 8, and 10), I frequently thought of Matthias Middell and Katja Naumann's "portals of globalisation"—those sites that are centers of international trade and communications and promote cultural transfer and the development of global connectedness. I think that this concept may foster a productive dialogue...

“They paved the Atlantic with books”: William and Jenny Bradley, literary agents and cultural passeurs across borders

The William A. Bradley Literary Agency Records help trace the careers of William and Jenny Bradley, two intermediaries in the cultural exchanges between France and the United States in the twentieth century. The archive offers privileged access to an array of transatlantic negotiations in the interwar period and post-Second World War era. This article first aims at including the two agents into the communications circuit relevant to book history that unfolds from writer to editor and on to reader, at a time when the book industry became more international. The article then unveils the sociability rooted in the agents’ participation in the world of Parisian salons and in the building of literary and intellectual relationships in the transnational space of Paris. Ultimately, the article argues that the Bradleys’ lifework articulates cultures in ways that defy the simplified vision of a unidirectional flux in what has been suggested to be an “American Century” of influence and cultural domination. In sum, an interest in intermediation and a transnational approach bring together considerations over the professional contributions of the French-American literary agents and observations about little-known makers of cultural processes. This article draws from the manuscript of Deux agents littéraires dans le siècle américain : William et Jenny Bradley, passeurs culturels transatlantiques (Cossu-Beaumont, 2023) and hopefully serves to shed light on the journeys of William and Jenny Bradley as Atlantic passeurs.

Informing the Global Data Future: Benchmarking Data Governance Frameworks

Abstract Data has become a critical trans-national and cross-border resource. Yet, the lack of a well-defined approach to using it poses challenges to harnessing its value. This article explores the increasing importance of global data governance due to the rapid growth of data, and the need for responsible data practices. The purpose of this paper is to compare approaches and identify patterns in the emergent data governance ecosystem within sectors close to the international development field, ultimately presenting key takeaways and reflections on when and why a global data governance framework may be needed. Overall, the paper provides information about the conditions when a more holistic, coordinated transnational approach to data governance may be needed to responsibly manage the global flow of data. The report does this by (a) considering conditions specified by the literature that may be conducive to global data governance, and (b) analyzing and comparing existing frameworks, specifically investigating six key elements: purpose, principles, anchoring documents, data description and lifecycle, processes, and practices. The article closes with a series of final recommendations, which include adopting a broader concept of data stewardship to reconcile data protection and promotion, focusing on responsible reuse of data to unlock socioeconomic value, harmonizing meanings to operationalize principles, incorporating global human rights frameworks to provide common North Stars, unifying key definitions of data, adopting a data lifecycle approach, incorporating participatory processes and collective agency, investing in new professions with specific roles, improving accountability through oversight and compliance mechanisms, and translating recommendations into practical tools.

The Aspects and Problems of Musicology in the 21th Century in the Republic of Moldova

The author of the article highlights as the main issue the development of musicology in the former Soviet Republic of Moldova in the context of “cultural transfer” between Russia, Moldova and Romania. The solution to this is based on methods of historical comparative analysis, taking into consideration the transnational approach to the close-knit historical ties of Moldova, Russia and Romania. The analysis of inter-ethnical connections has conditioned the principle behind the drafting of this article, which combines a historical, chronological and geopolitical perspective. It is divided into two parts. The first part describes the development of professional musical culture in Moldova prior to its gaining independence in 1991, and consists of three time periods, including Moldova (Bessarabia) as part of the Russian Empire, Moldova as part of the Kingdom of Romania and the MSSR (the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic) as part of the USSR. The necessity for such an introduction is explained by the fact that prior to gaining independence Moldova experienced several waves of “cultural transfer,” which have anticipated the pressure points and aspects of musicology of the 21th century. The second part focuses on the development of musical scholarship in independent Moldova, which has had the opportunity to establish transnational ties with other countries. After the dissolution of the USSR, the radical metamorphosis of the country’s social and geopolitical structure was accentuated by issues caused by poverty and the change of the official language. At the same time, this part of the article provides an overview of music scholarship, covering the development of the musical education in higher educational institutions, on the example of the Academy of Music, Theater and Fine Arts, and its impact on the evolutionary process of musical scholarship through the activity of the graduates of the leading Russian higher education establishments — the Moscow State P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory and the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music, as well as a brief description of the founders of these schools of musicology. Concurrently, a process of “cultural transfer” with Romanian musicology experts and composers has taken place, and the beneficial influence of the latter on the development of professional education and musicology in Moldova is also examined.

Transnationalism as theory and practice

The article examines transnationalism as a new approach to the study of migration processes. Globalization has led to the political and economic changes and required the creating of a new approach to the study of migration, capable of analyzing its impact on both receiving and sending states. The transnational approach to migration studies considers migration as a model in which migrants create transnational social spaces and influence political, social and economic processes in both sending and receiving countries.

National pedagogical museums in Brazil and France in the 19th century

This article analyzes the creation and the first years of the Pedagogical Museum in France and the Pedagogium of Brazil. Both experiences took part in the international foundation movement of national pedagogical museums which were conceived as a tool to improve public schools at the end of the 19th century. A transnational approach of this museum project and the Brazilian and French practices allowed to analyze similarities and differences of both institutions. One of their main goals was to collect national and foreign materials in a library and in a permanent exhibition to present what was expected to improve teachers’ and the government personnel’s work.

Crossing Space and Transporting Methods: The Moving Image at the Turn of the Century and Beyond

Crossing Space and Transporting MethodsThe Moving Image at the Turn of the Century and Beyond Kaveh Askari (bio) If you work in transnational cinema history, you come to appreciate the hospitality of colleagues in neighboring fields. Dealing with circulation and comparative contexts, it is common to find oneself at a conference or in a collection built around someone else's community. You hope that such relations of traveler and host will be generative, and you appreciate initiatives that take certain crossings as part of their founding tenets. The global itinerary of the moving image presents itself best to methods that, like Cusp, cross established periodizations, national frameworks, and the boundaries of medium. This is the case for media history of the 1890s as it is for later generations, but there is something about emergent cinemas that can serve as a guide for future crossings of discipline and territory. In preparation for moving into under-researched areas of transnational media history, I take a few cues from the intellectual history of the study of early cinema. Emergent in the 1880s and taking shape before the institutionalization of the narrative feature film in the mid-1910s, early cinema's standard period boundaries fit tidily within the long turn of the century. As a field of study, however, the curiosity about the films from this period has always been marked by asynchronies. The earliest films were some of the last to be acknowledged and understood within film studies. Early cinema scholars, from the start, have valued traditions that might seem too early or too late: Symbolist traditions in performance from Edison's "Annabelle Serpentine Dance" (1895) to Maurice Tourneur's The Blue Bird (1918); traces of the Incohérent movement in [End Page 25] the trick films of Georges Méliès; or proto-modernist inflections of color design in the manual application of color to early celluloid.1 The field expanded in the 1980s (or in one founding myth, at a 1978 conference in Brighton) and intermingled interpretive frames borrowed from Victorianists and modernists alike.2 Modernist theories of spectatorship, particularly a conception of attraction indebted to Sergei Eisenstein's interwar modernism, came to be used in cinema studies as shorthand for the moving images of the 1890s.3 To write about cinema in its first years as a "cinema of attractions" was already to be writing on the cusp of Victorian and modern.4 Setting claims of heroic invention aside, the study of early moving pictures has emphasized the way cinema established itself in the first place by assisting other art forms. It emerged only gradually as a medium with its own institutional identity.5 This intermedial work, tracing the ways the moving image served as a technical aid appended to the magic lantern show, to the vaudeville program, or to the scientist's imaging toolkit, complicates periodizations that might mark a decisive grand entrance for a medium subsequently celebrated as a vehicle for modern experience. In the early 1920s, when pictorialist composition found its way into cinema composition, or notions of modeling from architectural sculpture found their way into staging and shot scale, the vanguard of early art films aligned itself with an assortment of old-guard aesthetic traditions.6 Cross-media histories have provided a complement to the efforts to consider cinema's role in the modern transformations of subjective experience (distraction, astonishment) and temporality (acceleration, the new). In each case, cross-media history interlaces aesthetic strands from multiple periods and thus complicates the moving image's role as a driver of the new. Such asynchronies already characterized the field in its first generation, when it primarily focused on a handful of national traditions in Europe and North America. Transnational approaches to early cinema, which grew after the field had established itself in the academy, have amplified these asynchronies. Engaging the complexity of cinema's geographies necessarily complicates its chronologies.7 The physical realities of films moving across trade borders and through intermediary institutions, such as international exchanges and government censorship [End Page 26] bureaus, stretch time frames. The life of cinema artifacts in transit subverts the typical trajectory of film genres and imaging devices toward obsolescence. As...