Transnational History Research Articles

William Cecil Slingsby and Elizabeth Le Blond in Norway: transnational mountaineering, modernity and temporality, 1870–1910

ABSTRACT In both William Cecil Slingsby’s Norway. The Northern Playground (1904) and Elizabeth Le Blond’s Mountaineering in the Land of the Midnight Sun (1908), Norway is presented as an alternative destination for British mountaineers at the beginning of the twentieth century. Reflecting the increasing popularity of Norway with travellers, both Slingsby and Le Blond saw their journeys as temporal. For Slingsby, this was searching for an Old Norse past which connected to Britain; for Le Blond, it was as an escape from modernity. Yet both depicted the tensions of modern travel; mountaineering in particular was an activity dependent on modern infrastructure and technology. Moreover, both, and especially Slingsby, were part of transnational networks of mountaineers, constructing Norway as a tourist landscape. The texts of Le Blond and Slingsby offer important insights into British imperial travel culture at the time, as well as the transnational histories of mountaineering and modernity.

Revisiting Transnational Garden City Histories: From the North-West to the South-East

Embracing a critical retrospective view, this article examines the ideological and actual developments of Garden City concepts in the northern (North-West) and southern (South-East) hemispheres. It elaborates on the transnational histories and contemporary manifestations of the Garden City phenomenon in a variety of urban planning cultures, with a particular emphasis on Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa. In an effort to de-Eurocentrize the research literature through a wide extra-European historiographic emphasis, the article broadly characterizes stylistic implementations on a regional basis. It also explores the dissemination of Garden City terminology within the current urban discourse of social and environmental sustainability.

Sick Houses: Towards a Transnational History of Housing Hygiene Surveys, 1889–1913

Summary Between 1889 and 1913, housing took centre stage in hygiene enquiries. Countless surveys across Europe sought to identify specific housing problems as health hazards. This paper explores the art of housing hygiene surveys in Belgium, France and Germany. Scrutinising surveys from Berlin, Liège and Paris, I characterise two contesting survey methods. On one hand, large-scale statistical surveys such as the sanitary register of houses in Paris aimed to establish robust epidemiological evidence on the connection between structural elements (like lighting and ventilation) and tuberculosis. On the other hand, monographic surveys adopted more idiosyncratic approaches, probing the relationship of housing and health from architectural, economic, hygienic and social angles, without insisting on a single vector of explanation. Although the era of monographic housing surveys was short-lived, it illuminates the complexity of housing as an epistemic object, which even today proves challenging to assess from a public health standpoint.

Transnationalizing Reception: Racial Scripts, Institutional Logics, and Congolese Refugee Processing in the United States and Brazil

While national reception contexts formatively shape immigration possibilities and experiences, we argue that transnational racial dynamics play an underappreciated role. Juxtaposing two independent ethnographies of the U.S. resettlement program and Brazilian asylum system, we show that Congolese refugees encounter strikingly similar racialized logics of reception as they move through these formerly distinct national institutions. Bridging transnational perspectives in immigration research and critical race theory, we argue that frontline practitioners tasked with implementing credibility and vulnerability assessments diffuse across the global refugee regime draw on shared racial scripts to interpret, process, and receive Congolese refugees. Although manifest within local contexts, these scripts stem from ongoing global and transnational histories that undergird common views about Blackness and African migrants across the Americas. Our findings have three implications. First, we demonstrate the importance of transnational analytics in understanding dynamics of immigrant reception. Second, we show how racial notions permeate these dynamics through the entanglement of globalized racial orders and institutional logics across disconnected national contexts. Finally, we identify the cultural work of policy administrators as a mechanism through which transnational dynamics of racial domination are instantiated in everyday life.

Costa-Gavras's Latin American Films and The Formation of Transnational Cold War Imaginaries, Networks, and Audiences

Despite his surprisingly sustained and vital film production, Costa-Gavras’s oeuvre will be inevitably remembered for the films he made during the Cold War period. Costa-Gavras’s “Latin American” films, State of Siege (1972) and Missing (1982), enjoyed wide popularity at the box office, but received negative reviews from film critics and scholars, who didn't approve of Costa-Gavras’s reliance on the thriller genre. Based on archival research of printed press articles from Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Mexico, France, and the United States, along with historical research, biographies, and testimonies published during the last four decades, the present article assembles a transnational history of Costa-Gavras’s “Latin American” film production and reception in the region. The main hypothesis is that both films operated as cultural artefacts for filmmakers, political and social activists, and engaged audiences. By watching those movies, the aforementioned actors could process, learn about, and reflect upon the traumatic national, regional, and global events that occurred across the Southern Cone during the late Cold War period.

Of Axolotls, Vulnerable Bodies and Transnational History Politics: Neobaroque Representation of the Mexican-American Borderland Identity in the Film Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths by Alejandro González Iñárritu

This article examines Alejandro González Iñárritu’s skillful employment of neobaroque representation strategies in his metacinematic emography Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths, to present the complexities of the borderland identity of Mexican-American emigrants, and its entanglement in the legacy of the myth of the Mexican character with its axolotl symbolism. The inquiry focuses in particular on the director’s porte-parole Silverio Gama and his family. The film’s mise-en-abyme, a para-documentary False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths made by Silverio, a filmmaker of transnational reputation like Iñárritu, is considered a meta-commentary on Iñárritu’s own filmmaking and the political consequences of immersion in the mediatized reality. The para-documentary is also analysed as an example of Iñárritu’s manipulation of the tension between the major and minor strategies of neobaroque representation in order to interrogate the transnational Mexican-American history politics as well as the dreams, aspirations, and vulnerability of Mexican emigrants traversing deserts on their way to the U.S. border. The article concludes with a claim that Silverio’s identity can only be comprehended if the canon of the axolotl is considered to reflect the condition of Bardo, an intermediate state between life and death.

German migration to Brazil in global perspective: trends & new directions

This essay elaborates the historiographical reasons to take stock of German migration to Brazil in this bicentennial year: It examines how global and transnational history have broken new ground in our understanding of these two nations and their interconnection. It suggests comparisons and contrasts with larger geographic subfields. And it draws out the themes that historians of far different times and spaces may find familiar in the history of Germans in Brazil, from race and empire to class, confession, and commerce. Recent research confirms that Germans abroad were overwhelmingly “unbound” from the dramas of nationalist politics. Yet the story of “unbound” Germans must be understood in light of changing schemes for binding national communities together. The history of Germans in Brazil thus provides an illuminating vista onto the tripartite problematic of nation, market, and state at local, regional, national and global scales – a problematic central to new directions in global and transnational history generally.

Transnational media and English spread in the Expanding Circle: Hollywood’s predominance, language accommodation, and English as an additional language in cinema, television, and video on demand

Abstract This paper explores the relationship between transnational media and the dramatic increase in English language users and uses within Kachru’s (1990. World Englishes and applied linguistics. World Englishes 9(1). 3–20) Expanding Circle. Traditionally, English has been considered a Foreign Language in the third and demographically largest sphere of Kachru’s (1990. World Englishes and applied linguistics. World Englishes 9(1). 3–20) World Englishes framework. Yet in recent decades, the language has spread significantly within speech communities in e.g., continental Europe, South America, and the Middle East. In contemporary Expanding Circle contexts, English has gained international and local uses, for interactions with individuals from abroad and fellow speech community members. Thus, English has evolved beyond its single, traditional role to acquire the added functions of Lingua Franca and Additional Language. This study examines these changing roles in connection with transnational media’s development over the last century, given the leading industry position of L1-English Hollywood. The paper reviews the transnational history of cinematic film, television programming, and video streaming on-demand, with their evolving top-down language policies and bottom-up viewer practices. The European context of Germany illustrates how English use within these domains over time reflects changing proficiencies and roles for the language.

Book Review: Sesame Street: A Transnational History

Book Review: Sesame Street: A Transnational History

The island of Brazil: A baroque travelogue

“The Island of Brazil” offers a critique of nationalist historical and spatial mythologies by drawing on the agility and flexibility of creativecritical methods. Operating at the intersection of fictocriticism, memoir and travel writing, the essay is both an extension of the author’s previous writing on South America and a journey into the unknown. This entangled mixture is not [just] an aesthetic exercise; rather, the interwoven analysis, description and narration reflect the author’s concern with transnational histories of colonisation – specifically, those analogous forms and metaphorical resonances which have otherwise been separated by modern, nationalist histories and their restricted vistas of representation. “The Island of Brazil” proposes an antithesis of Australian conquest by recalling a neglected lineage of Australian poetics – here represented by Patrick White’s Voss, a novel that is emblematic of colonialist literature but, in its complexity, contradictions and expressionism, powerfully subverts many colonialist tropes. Like Voss, “The Island of Brazil” revives baroque, counter-modern strategies by constructing a series of coincidentia oppositorum (coincidence of opposites) and discordia concors (a combination of dissimilar images, or even the discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike). Accordingly, vast distances and times are collapsed or overlaid.

Book review: Joanna Simonow, Ending Famine in India: A Transnational History of Food Aid and Development, ca. 1890–950

Joanna Simonow, Ending Famine in India: A Transnational History of Food Aid and Development, ca. 1890–950 (Global Connections: Routes and Roots-7) (Leiden University Press), 2023, 283 pp., Price: N.A.

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.

The Novel and the Ottoman Institution of Slavery: Domesticity and Slave Labor in Namık Kemal's İntibah

Abstract This article makes a case for a critical engagement with the Ottoman institution of slavery and slave trade in its globalist rethinking of the rise of the novel. It argues that production of late Ottoman Turkish novelistic writing hinged on a domestic imagination to which the labor of enslaved women was indispensable. Placing Namık Kemal's İntibah in conversation with other novels contemporaneous with it, the article underscores the interlacement between the genre-conscious crafting of novelistic writing in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire and the ubiquitous presence of enslaved women in the fictions from the period. As such, it highlights the necessity of reframing the transnational history of the novel by expanding the interrogation of its gendered and racialized economy to hitherto neglected Ottoman contexts of enslavement.

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.