I have to admit, in all my time reading academic articles, I have yet to come across a phrase that has surprised me quite as much as this, the “fetishization of connections”. You could replace ‘connections’ with ‘mobility’ and have the same surprise – I’ve heard and read both, by the same historian, Sebastian Conrad.
I would say that the mark of a good article is when something sticks with me and makes me think – and I would say that this phrase has achieved that. It at least made me stop, and wonder if I’d been entirely wrong with my understanding of transnational history so far.
In our “postcard to Granny” exercise this week, I used the word ‘connections’ almost immediately, without much thought.
“Transnational History is seeking to make connections; crossing geographical boundaries and following people, goods and more wherever they went. It’s an approach to history that concerns itself with the journey, rather than focusing more on the destination. Many historians continue to debate its definition, and so you won’t be able to find one in the Oxford dictionary yet (or, at least not one that everyone agrees on…)”
Was I wrong to do so? Had I misunderstood what transnational history was all about?
All of these are possibilities. I feel as if I come away from each seminar with more questions, and slightly less of a complete picture of what this discipline is trying to do. The understanding I’d gained one week gets slowly broken down and re-built with each week’s readings and the discussion we have…
But that poses the question – if there is a tendency within the academy to get too focused on connections, to “fetishize” them, then are they inherently bad?
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In listening to the Global History Podcast with Sebastian Conrad himself, he clarified this phrase. His intention behind it was not to stop historians from seeking connections, but to correct their handling of them.
He argued that there is a tendency for historians to identify a connection, perhaps between places, or people; to state them, and then leave them there. The implication that just in identifying and finding the connection, the work and research has been completed.
Instead, Conrad suggests that there is a need for a ‘Culture of Explanation’, rather than assumption. Identifying the connection is not the final project, and instead historians need to dig more into explaining why the connection was there – how it came to be, and what it means for the analysis they are undertaking. He believes that the explanation is as much the aim of transnational and global history than the connection itself.
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The conversation I listened to between the host of the podcast and Sebastian Conrad was refreshing – in part because Conrad wasn’t afraid to be critical of the discipline. His observations and statements were not to tear apart the discipline, but instead to improve it.
One important clarification that I got out of the conversation was that “transnational” should be an approach to our study of history. It should be a framework of analysis that informs HOW we research, just like gender history is, rather than being set-apart from history in general.
This links nicely with the readings for our Week 4 seminar, which focus on the micro-historical approach, and how that can be tied into a transnational perspective. Again, there are so many terms, micro-history, spatial history, trans-local, micro-spatial (the list goes on)… Personally, I love the micro-historical approach. I’ve always loved looking for the personal, and digging deeper into the lives of individuals – and so these readings have been indicative of that interest.
My deeper question is though, how?
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I’m deeply aware of the potential for the “politicisation” of transnational history. There has been criticism that this has just turned into another western-centric, or Northern hemisphere focused discipline – solely because of the availability of budget and wealth distribution. But there is a large part of doing transnational history that is reliant on the historians’ own experience; background, context and environment, as well as the gift of other languages.
So, how does a white woman, who only speaks English, and has solely lived in the UK, even begin to take part in a transnational approach of history? Should she? Is there a place for someone like me within this field, when on paper, it looks like I have nothing to bring to this conversation?
These are the questions that are currently plaguing me – especially as I turn towards thinking about our long-term project. I don’t really have any idea of where to start, or how to take any potential ideas into something that is feasible. I want to escape the habits and tendencies of my very pro-Western education, and actually learn something new – but I don’t know how to do that yet.
I’m going to round this off with a quote that ended Tonio Andrade’s article, talking about the potential of what global historians could achieve. If, by the end of this module, I’m even one step closer to this, I’d call this semester a success.
‘We global historians can be proud of the work we do to understand the structures and processes of world history. Yet we should also use our unique position as custodians of the world’s past to be mediums, to bring alive, just for a few pages, some of the people who inhabited those structures and lived through those processes, using what Braudel called the most important tool of the historian: imagination. There are stories out there waiting to be told, traces in the archives that can provide individual perspectives on the great historiographical issues that are the core concern of our discipline. Perhaps as you read this, you’re thinking of one. Please tell it. Let’s bring the history of our interconnected world to life, one story at a time.’
Andrade, Tonio, ‘A Chinese Farmer, Two African Boys, and a Warlord: toward a global Microhistory’, Journal of World History, 21:4, (dec, 2010), p.591