In his article ‘Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire’ S.J. Potter speaks of a ‘fruitful cross-fertilization’ that can be achieved between Imperial and Global histories in order to bring together Imperial histories ‘top-down’ approach and Global histories ‘bottom-up’ approach. He emphasizes that in order for this cross-fertilization to be successful historians need to employ new methods like ‘connected histories’ top get a complete picture. ‘Imperial historians should devote more attention to links within and between different Empires and within and between different colonies.’ Potter asserts this offers to associated benefits. It can help us correct the Anglophone bias that continues to mark much of supposedly ‘Global’ history—often, in fact, a dialogue among English-speaking historians, built on English-language parts of the world.
Chris Bayly points out that beginning in the late 1960s, shifts in historical discourse emerged in response to concerns about ethnocentrism. Wendy Kozol furthers this point noting that critiques of U.S. and European imperialism and racism, as well as challenges to gender inequalities and heteronormativity, have also been extremely influential in the development of transnational history. Anticolonial and nationalist movements, along with feminist, civil rights, and LGBT movements, have compelled reconsiderations of how historians understand migrations, state formations, and globalization.
Transnational histories rooting in breaking out of monolithic National or Imperial history and studying dialogues between a diverse set of factors is what most intrigues me about transnational history. It feels unbounded. Isabel Hofmeyr notes that ‘movements, flows, and circulations’ are defining characteristics of transnationalism. In my eyes, transnational history is studying inner intricacies, patterns, and seeming semantics on a global scale. By allowing ourselves to compare and learn from different entities around the world and how the work, or don’t, together seems like what history should be. We should be learning from each other and each others cultures, finding similarities or contrasting two countries, spaces, empires, or regions together give us an invaluable amount of educational wealth.
Like how transnational feminist activist confront the limitations of global feminism and articulate social justice claims through their understanding of the inequalities between First and Third World women’s experiences and resources, I would like to do the same with postcolonial studies. Transnational feminist historians reexamine how processes and institutions such as colonization, modernization, and feminist movements have sustained critical divisions that have differentially privileged or harmed groups through gender, racial and/or sexual frameworks. Much of these critiques are what lay at the heart of postcolonial theory.
The ‘Mestizaje Americano’ is one of the greatest cultural hybridizations that the world has ever seen and we can learn much from this through the lens transnational historians use. Why are people disinclined to identify as ‘Mestizo/a’? Are indigenous cultures being honored and protected? What racial frameworks evolved or were exploited out of the great mestizaje? How has Latin America accepted or rejected indigenous gender or sexual frameworks? Latin America is made up of some distinctly Spanish things, some distinctly Indigenous things, but most things present are an indivisible mixture of both. Looking at this from both a ‘top-down’ and a ‘bottom-down’ way, as Potter spoke of, and studying the movements of these people will shed light on the topic.