Some thoughts on language use in transnational history (inspired by Chin’s introduction and readings from previous weeks.)

*Note: This is an attempt to express a thought that has been bothering me, by tomorrow I may completely disagree with everything I have just written.*

I’ve had this niggling idea since last week of this issue of language in transnational history more so than other branches of history that I have studied previously; the word choice and phraseology of transnational history feels much more self-conscious and deliberate.
Take Chin’s introduction, within a page she is already second guessing the use of the terms ‘foreigner’ and ‘guest worker.’ However, it was the description of the PR stunt (production of propaganda) at the train station in Cologne that got me thinking.
Maybe the language in transnational history feels more deliberate because for a history of connections to be possible people must be in some way differentiated or ‘othered’ from each other. In national history it’s less conscious we may all have our own narrative of our national (insert other aspect of identity where appropriate e.g. ethnic) history but because broadly speaking most of the other subjects of the history being studied have the same or a very similar narrative there’s less likely to be a need to mention it or label it. Also, with a central national narrative it is clear that other groupings are the ‘other’ and that the primary interest of the historian and therefore the narrative is the main national group being studied. Historians are guilty of marginalising some narratives simply because it’s not their primary focus at the time and so these become peripheral. For example, a historian specialising in British history whilst writing about the Second World War would be expected to approach from a British perspective, it’s not bias as such but a known slant; we will always favour what we know most about and to an extent will feel defensive of our specialisation but in transnational history this isn’t supposed to exist.
Chin is attempting to write a transnational history of guest workers in West Germany not a German national history about guest workers. She is not expected to favour either side of the narrative and in order to write about at least two distinct groups or categories; guest workers and Germans; she has to use clear labels which like all labels applied to human beings become more blurred the closer you look; at what point do you cease to be a ‘guest’ and become permanent, are second generation ‘guest workers’ still ‘guest workers’?
Transnational history pans out to the bigger picture but then wants to zoom in on the detail so keeping labels and divisions clear enough to see individual, distinct connections is difficult. And in this case, and others, there is deliberate language used at the time to form rhetoric. ‘Guest worker’ implies welcome but temporarily, there is the capacity to out stay one’s welcome and this is further emphasised in the staging of that famous photo of Armando Rodrigues (which Chin analyses very well so I see no need to repeat see page 5.)
Transnational history has been reminding me of issues in Social Anthropology because there is a major common concern; how to categorise human beings into distinct enough groups to allow for analysis without creating bias, without causing offense, whether or not to impose groupings that would not have been evident to the subjects but are evident to the observer, which facets of identity are relevant to a given study. We can not simply use self-description from subjects as there may not always be one or one person’s definition of what it means to be x identifier will differ from another’s.
This issue contributes to transnational history being very aware of language and artificial categorisation in other instances such as the name of the discipline, periodisation, the nature of nations and more. The discipline is self-conscious because it has to be. To show connections and discourse there needs to be separation and differentiation; even a Venn diagram needs distinct circles to show the overlap. In order to show how artificial some of the specialisms and divisions that have been created in historical study are we must first attempt to define the boundaries in between.

I was picturing this kind of thing whilst I was trying to get my head around what I was trying to express.  For the record there is an arrow within the ‘rectangle’ roughly the same size as the one between the squares, you just can’t see it clearly because I removed the boundary between the squares.

Sources:

Chin, Rita. The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2007), intro

Christopher A. Bayly et al., ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review
111/5 (2006), 1441-1464

Clavin, Patricia, ‘Defining Transnationalism’, Contemporary European History 14/4 (2005), 421-439.

Rüger, Jan, ‘OXO: Or, the Challenges of Transnational History’, European History Quarterly 40, no. 4
(October 1, 2010): 656–68.