Transnational History Research Articles

A Transnational History of Puerto Rico’s National Liberation Struggles

A Transnational History of Puerto Rico’s National Liberation Struggles

Introduction: Esperantists in the Twentieth Century: Making Connections in an Age of Division

The transcending of borders marked a large part of the political experience of the 20th century. This aspiration took shape in a century that strengthened and multiplied national barriers and that witnessed two world wars. In response to growing nationalism, many individuals, political movements and communities adopted an enlarged identity bound up with cosmopolitanism, internationalism, pan-Europeanism or, more recently, globalism. These categories, often part of a broader political frame of reference, established a connection between estranged nations but still referred to national divisions. Transnational history has shown how these tendencies were experienced not as a withdrawal of the border framework but as a link between nations-states. In this context, a particular and powerful way of abolishing national constraints has remained unnoticed by historians: the community of Esperanto speakers. They emerged at the end of the 19th century as an alternative to internationalizing models. With this aim, they developed a linguistic and cultural space that would not be marked by one specific culture to the detriment of the others. Nevertheless, the international language and the social movement created around it had to face the dominant ideological trends of the time. Through three case studies from the history of the Esperanto movement we propose to deepen the debate on the links between ideology and transnationalism. The first investigates the epistolary relationship between two communists, one Bulgarian and the other Japanese, discussing the trajectory of their political life and most notably their rejection of Stalinism. The second focuses on the link between Esperanto and anticolonial thinking in East Asia during the 1930s and early 1940s. Based on the study of literature and in particular of post-war Esperanto poetry, the third contribution examines the reasons that led a number of authors to choose the international language Esperanto to formulate their own account of WWII and to perpetuate the memory of the collective tragedy.

A Transnational History of the Modern Caribbean: Popular Resistance across Borders, by Kirwin Shaffer

A Transnational History of the Modern Caribbean: Popular Resistance across Borders, by Kirwin Shaffer

‘Where Liberty is Not, There is My Country’: Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionist Writings on India and its Legacies

ABSTRACT This article examines nineteenth century American abolitionist writings on India. My sources include abolitionist newspapers, primarily focusing on William Lloyd Garrison’s newspaper the Liberator, but also incorporating other abolitionist newspapers. These include the Friend of Man and publications of individual abolitionists like Lydia Maria Child’s The History of the Condition of Women, in Various Ages and Nations. By looking at their writings on Christian missionary activities in India, Indian women, and British rule in India, this article argues that although many abolitionists Orientalized India, they at the same time found many parallels between Indian society and the US. Although they did not develop a full criticism towards colonialism in the antebellum period, their criticism towards Empire matured by the early twentieth century. My scholarly intervention centres on acknowledging the hitherto unknown role of abolitionist writings on India in the intellectual history of American abolitionism and US-India transnational history. By not fully engaging with India, the scholarship on US-India relations and abolitionism misses a critical dimension of the abolitionist movement’s intimate relationship with related causes of feminism, anti-clericalism, and anti-imperialism. Most importantly, this article demonstrates that abolitionist writings on India far exceeded Orientalism as the only frame of understanding.

From Brazil to Brattle street: the transnational history of emperor Dom Pedro II’s dinner with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

ABSTRACT Through a transnational and microhistorical approach, this article seeks to interpret the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II’s 1876 visit to Boston, Massachusetts, with a focus on the June 10 dinner between Dom Pedro II, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and other famous literary guests. Personal and cultural factors created a bridge between the Brazilian monarch and the New England intellectual elite that resulted in a series of transnational intellectual encounters during the Emperor’s 1876 trip. The friendship between Dom Pedro II and Longfellow serves as a microcosm of the increasing cultural impact of American literature on the elite stratum of Brazilian society.

Metamorphoses of superiority: German military missions in the interwar period as a (post)traumatic experience of expansion

Germany’s defeat in the Great War deformed the development of its armed forces, yet did not force it to abandon the idea of revising the Versailles Peace. The sharp reduction of the Reichswehr and the Reichsmarine, as well as political crises, exacerbated the problem of maintaining human resources. One of the tools for its preservation was the resumption of military missions in different forms and on different continents. Both official and unofficial missions, initiated earlier, formed future alliances and made it possible to circumvent many restrictions. Many of the sites of these activities – in the USSR, China, Japan, some Latin American countries – are well known, some remain virtually unknown and their significance is greatly underestimated, e.g. in Finland, Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. The circumstances of this activity were shaped by multiple factors and depended on the conjuncture of international relations, as well as on the traditions of co-operation established prior to 1914 and greatly affected by the Great War. The historiography of the problem continues to grow, but concentrates on bilateral relations and lacks comparative approaches. A holistic examination of these German military missions, which is necessary for a proper assessment of this phenomenon in the history of the interwar period, has not yet been undertaken. Despite a number of source-related and historiography-specific problems, the study of German military missions will allow for the development of a number of research directions, including a discussion of continuity in German foreign policy, further development of transnational history, and analysis of the transformation of ideas of superiority and self-identification of European elites.

Armenian interpretations of Kemalism: rethinking diaspora and soviet intellectual debates in the 1920s

ABSTRACT In the 1920s and 1930s, the world closely observed the evolution of the Kemalist system of ideological and political principles. In recent years, there has been a surge in scholarly interest towards the transnational history of Kemalism. Research on Soviet, Middle Eastern, and European perspectives has enriched the study of Kemalism and expanded its boundaries. This article examines the Armenian perspectives and interpretations of Kemalism. It also investigates the main differences between the Soviet and Diaspora Armenian interpretations of Kemalism and the sources influencing their diverging perspectives.

Delving the gastronomic identities and food memories among Indo-Fijians in diasporic conditions

ABSTRACT Food and foodways engage the social and cultural moments connoting the memory with the gustatory world, which illuminates the social structure, domesticity, identity, resilience, transnational histories of empire, and many more. This study focuses on food being an intangible cultural heritage, gastronomic identity, and culture, (dis)similarities in the preparation and consumption among Indo-Fijians and transmigrants. The exploratory qualitative method where open-ended questions and in-depth interviews were conducted to explore identity related to food with thirteen Indo-Fijian families and a reflexive narrative report using a narrative coding lens is prepared. Their personal reflective accounts were recorded. Food being a part of culture and identity, is found to be continuing the interaction between migrants and hosts, and makes an ambivalent relationship. Food and foodways are in flux and pass through a state of in-betweenness. The transmigrants show a sense of belonging to their ancestral home, (re)rootedness, acculturation, and hybridisation by (re)constructing the food identities.

The Sea and Underwater Transport in Imraan Coovadia’s The Institute for Taxi Poetry

ABSTRACT This article discusses the link between public transport and literary practices by analyzing Imraan Coovadia’s 2012 novel, The Institute for Taxi Poetry. In this novel, Coovadia comments on South Africa’s palimpsestic history from the precolonial to the postcolonial. One way in which Coovadia does this is through the motif of the taxi. The taxi refers to a mini-bus taxi which in South Africa is a form of public transport primarily used by people from working-class backgrounds. Another way concerns the proposal of a fictional genre that plays a prominent role in this novel: taxi poetry. The article explores the ways in which the novel uses the taxi and submarine vessels to open up the geography of the sea as a transport surface whose impact on the histories of the dispossessed is visible from both below and above the waterline. Through engagement with the humanities turn in mobility studies and with scholarship in the oceanic humanities from the Global South, the article argues that the national and terrestrial readings of public transport in African literature(s) undervalue the sea, a prominent transport arena in Coovadia’s novel, as both a space of transit as well as a public space with shared transnational histories. The article engages the novel’s imagined literary sub-genre to evaluate how the text’s subterranean extensions of the South African taxi industry, and public transport generally, unearth the layered narrative of South Africa as nation.

Queer mountains: Migrant drag performers reimagining sexual citizenship in Germany

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

How Do You Say "Entangled and Transnational Histories" in Arabic?

How Do You Say "Entangled and Transnational Histories" in Arabic?

Operation STARVATION, 1945: A Transnational History of Blockades and the Defeat of Japan

Going beyond the conventional focus on the British blockade of Germany in the First World War, this essay situates blockades in a broader transnational history of waging war on civil populations. From the early twentieth century through the Second World War, blockade strategies evolved as part of a global circulation of ideas and practices on how wars might be won by starving, bombing, and demoralizing the enemy’s urban masses. The Allied blockade and German U-boat campaigns were connected, as each side learned from the other’s attacks on the civilian food supply. Moreover, the ‘lessons’ of 1914–18 shaped blockade strategies for the next war not only among Europeans, but also among the Japanese and Americans in the Pacific. For Japanese planners, who investigated European home fronts in the First World War, the transnational lessons were largely defensive. The island nation adopted dynamic programs of imperial food self-sufficiency. Yet in the Second World War, Japan experienced a devastating collapse in food supply, precipitated by perhaps the most successful blockade in history—the Allied blockades of Japan’s food and raw material supplies from Asia that culminated in Operation STARVATION. The prospect of mass starvation, I argue, helped persuade Japanese leaders to surrender.

Trespassing Limits

This article examines the links between a political rebellion that occurred in Coahuila in 1893 and the activism that was carried out by some members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano (PLM) in the early 1900s in Southern California. It builds upon connected and transnational history to study continuities between the conflicts in the early 1890s in the Mexican countryside and the growth of discontent against the government of Porfirio Díaz. It argues that the support gained by the PLM in parts of the U.S. Southwest cannot be separated from the political experience that many of its sympathizers had in Mexico. Furthermore, it argues that to better understand the PLM’s mobilization north of the border, it is necessary to study the social and economic conditions in which they lived and moved in both countries.

Socialist Sex Education and Its Transnational Entanglements: Monika Krause and the Effort to “Teach Tenderness” to the People

AbstractThis article traces the transnational circulation of socialist reforms in the field of sex education through the work of Monika Krause, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who migrated to Cuba and became the “Cuban Queen of Condoms.” For Krause, the overarching goal of sex education was to “teach tenderness” to the people. The socialist state’s mission to prepare the population for love, marriage, partnership, and family in Cuba and the GDR involved using complex measures. This paper describes these, contextualizes them in transnational debates, and explains some of the internal reasoning behind their institutionalization. It also explains why looking at state-level efforts to “teach tenderness to the people” matters for a transnational history of sex education.

‘A New Prague Spring, but from Below?’ Socialist Dissent in the Last Soviet Generation and the Emergence of Solidarność in Poland, 1980–1981

This article examines the Young Socialists, a left-wing dissident circle of intellectuals from the last Soviet generation, and focuses on their contacts with Solidarność during 1980–81. These dissidents, located in Moscow and Minsk, interpreted the Polish strikes as the possible beginnings of a wider move to socialist reform in the Eastern Bloc. Using oral history and samizdat materials from the Russian and Polish archives and the former archives of Radio Free Europe, the article demonstrates how the Young Socialists’ interactions with Poland developed in the wider context of the transnational history of dissent in the Eastern Bloc at the turn of the 1980s. It argues that a combination of internationalist values and bloc-wide dissident solidarities caused socialist dissidents to view nationalist movements on the Soviet periphery and Eastern Europe as potential drivers of socialist reform on the eve of Perestroika.

How the United States learned to commodify the transnational atom

ABSTRACT In consultation with The Department of State and the USAEC, and other state and non-state actors – including the Atomic Industrial Forum Inc. and the Fund for Peaceful Atomic Development – organized the first international missions to investigate if and how nuclear technologies could be mobilized as commodities and symbols of possible futures to the rest of the world, with a special focus on underdeveloped countries. Nevertheless, they soon realized that selling atomic development required a set of skills, tools, and knowledge not found in the usual and tested aid programs for agriculture and public health. Based on John Krige’s reflections on the co-production of knowledge and the writing of transnational history, we will explore how knowledge for nuclear development was co-produced in countries like Egypt, Turkey, Mexico, and the United States.

Mr. Gilbert's World Tour: Rethinking Disabled Veterans Across British Imperial Spaces.

This article provides a comparative analysis of the treatment of disabled First World War veterans in 1920s Britain and the simultaneous care of Imperial Pensioners residing in Australia and South Africa via the detailed administrative reports of a British civil servant, G.F. Gilbert. Imperial Pensioners were disabled veteran migrants of the British Army residing overseas. A study of these veteran populations in Australia and South Africa provides two primary insights into the broader historiography of disabled veterans. Firstly, a comparative case study helps to show the way in which cultural notions of disability were part of broader ideas of nation-building overseas. Secondly, the specific disability diagnosis category chosen as a more in-depth case study can further complicate and contradict broader assessments of national responses. This article attempts to build upon recent transnational histories of veterans by transcending national boundaries and homogenous veteran profiles with an extension in methodological scope by providing an intra-national case study via the Imperial Pensioner.

‘Work locally but think globally’: The Alliance Against Women's Oppression and transnational multiracial grassroots activism in the 1980s

AbstractThis article examines the transnational history of the Alliance Against Women's Oppression (AAWO), a multiracial and Marxist US women's organisation founded in California in 1979. By focusing on the political connection between the AAWO, the so‐called ‘Third World’ and other international organisations such as the Women International Democratic Federation, the article intends to delve into the relationship between global far‐left, non‐White women's organisations in the United States and the Global South. Using extensive archival sources internal to the organisation, this work highlights the 1980s as a central period for anti‐imperialist women's activism against the Reagan administration and for the formation of international grassroots connections.

Thinking with Paul Kramer's “Power and Connection”

I am delighted to have an opportunity to reflect on Paul Kramer's rich and highly influential “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World.” Since its publication in 2011, “Power and Connection” has been a cornerstone of my graduate U.S. in the World classes and has been invoked in every graduate qualifying exam. The essay has had a direct and indirect influence on the wave of innovative scholarship that has been produced in the past decade. I first want to note some of the essay's important interventions. Then, rather than attempting to extend or update Kramer's extensive historiographical review, I want to think with “Power and Connection” by taking up two of Kramer's suggestions and discussions. First, I take up his suggestion to think about imperial power through a Gramscian frame of domination and consent, arguing that the concept of hegemonic struggle is critical for thinking about power within empires and shifts in global imperial formations. Second, I engage Kramer's discussion of the relationship between imperial and transnational histories, arguing that scholars need to consider transnationalism as a highly specific and contingent political formation, as well as an analytic category and sometimes actors' category.

Internationalizing the Revolution: Veterans and Transnational Cultures of Memory and Solidarity between Yugoslavia and Algeria

AbstractThe article examines the role of memory in Yugoslav exchanges with the postcolonial world, focusing on the agency of Yugoslav war veterans and their involvement with Algeria. During decolonization, Yugoslav institutions and associations stood in solidarity with anti-colonial liberation movements. Former Partisans were critical agents of Yugoslav internationalism, and the memory of the People's Liberation War (Narodnooslobodilački rat, NOR), which dominated the Yugoslav memory culture, played a connecting role in this context. The article focuses on the transnational aspect of the Yugoslav war memory, an intrinsically everyday phenomenon, exploring its exportation and internationalization. Applying the transnational memory framework to relations between Yugoslav Partisans and Algerian mujahideen, the article illuminates the twofold role of memory: as narratives of the shared past, and as the transfer of knowledge in war commemoration. Firstly, Yugoslav veterans identified with the anti-colonial struggle as comparable to their own. This was not only an official political discourse, but was also shared by Yugoslav society at large. Secondly, they engaged in transfers of knowledge in memory work, providing expertise and training to Algerian veterans. The People's Liberation War memory constituted a key aspect of everyday life in Yugoslav state socialism and veterans internationalized it, adding the dimension of personal war memory. The exchanges of knowledge illuminate the transfer from the discursive level of the shared past to the sphere of commemorative policies and practices that reshaped cultures of war remembrance. The article represents a starting point of a global history of the Yugoslav revolution and a transnational history of memory from the perspective of anti-colonial solidarities.