This week’s readings highlighted important potential limitations and advantages of transnational and global history, beyond defining these terms. Nancy Green brings our attention to the nuances underlying migration studies, employing case studies of specific individuals to showcase the occasionally negative impact of transnationalism that the transnational history field often dismisses. These instances of complex international legal cases, gendered citizenship rules, and financial upheaval display how cross-border lives of elite individuals, in these cases in the early twentieth century, were often made worse by global mobility, thus causing Green to caution against an overly celebratory view of transnationalism. Jeremy Adelman, on the other hand, addresses global history and grapples with its potential for forming cosmopolitan, trans-national identities, in the same way that national histories shaped citizens’ nation-oriented identities during a time of rapidly developing nation-states. The (aptly) online article For a Fair(er) Global History points out the irony of these scholars connecting digitally, with inevitable technical issues, from their domestic spaces during the Covid lockdown to discuss global history and global historiographical issues and methods.
Returning to Nancy Green, upon reading her text I quickly found myself relating her ideas to my other academic work, something I recognize is quickly becoming a theme in my blog posts. Green writes about the ‘a-national citizen’ who is ‘attached everywhere and nowhere’ as a figure whose exposure and exploration is often credited to transnationalism. My current Art History dissertation centers around the 1960s South African photographer Ernest Cole who, upon gaining a passport, exiled himself from South Africa to New York City in 1966. Although this mobility allowed him to escape the violent apartheid state regime in his home country, Cole soon ended up addicted to substances and homeless in New York. This, I argue, could provide another case study that applies to Green’s cautioning of recognizing the negatives that sometimes came from global mobility that we can now study in more depth under a transnational lens. It is also an example of a non-elite, someone who did not grow up with the same privilege and advantages that people like Clara Smith did, whose life was hindered by their cross-border existence. This is a factor which I was hoping Green would explore. Although the demographic she has chosen to use to exemplify her argument may be the most suitable, the article would have been potentially more well-rounded with a preface to this or an attempt to use other demographics as case studies could have been tried. This also relates back to the issues presented by the online article aforementioned, arguing that transnational and global history warrants methodological adjustments.