Week 2 Blog

As I read through this article and chapter, I became simultaneously clear yet more confused about what transnational history is; and maybe that’s a good thing, or not. The debates concerning transnational history seem to encourage a flexibility of methodologies and focus that I found both liberating and a bit overwhelming. Both readings seemed to suggest that rather than being a rigid sub-discipline, transnational history is really a “way of seeing” or a relational approach that emphasizes what works “between and through” collective units rather than just looking at what happens inside them as if they were isolated monads.

Hofmeyr’s fluid description of this history as one that looks at movements and how they flow and circulate over tame and space particularly spoke to me. This worked well with Saunier’s discussion about the spatiality of this discipline. Within the introduction, he advocates for a subnational and supranational approach to history, to follow migrants, groups, and individuals rather than abstract states. It’s fascinating how he argues that a transnational perspective actually “brings to the surface subnational histories,” showing that migrants don’t just “start” from a country but from a specific village or kin group. At the same time, it opens these huge supranational formations like oceanic basins (like the “Black Atlantic”) or forgotten zones like the Sahara that traditional “area studies” maps usually miss. It was when reading this I wished I had given myself more time to delve into more of Saunier’s book, especially since he views it more as a “vade mecum”, a guidebook to arouse curiosity rather than a strict set of rules.

The “when” of it all is also where it gets a little tricky for me to understand. Saunier and others like Kiran Patel suggest we should probably stick to the last 200 to 250 years, what they call the “age of territoriality,” because that’s when the nation-state really formed as a bounded unit. However, someone like Patricia Seed argues that the rubric is still useful for earlier stuff, like following mobile populations (like the Sephardim after 1492) across different kingdoms and sultanates. As I am hoping to do my student project in this module on indigenous populations and their relationship with their environment and colonisers. Could this be through their displacement, forced migration? Furthermore, Hofmeryre once again caught my interest, talking about how historians can track how “publics” came to be by tracking and studying the cultural movements across time can allow s to better understand how “publics” came to be and allow us to better understand transnational history. Overall, these readings opened so many new questions for me concerning the methodologies, scope and focus of translational history. Giving me a lot of hope and excitement about the rest of this module.