If the readings of the previous weeks had highlighted some of the problems faced by scholars in defining and practicing transnational history as a method, I found myself particularly interested by this week’s reading as they offered a new perspective and challenged the ideal and political project of doing transnational and global history. Indeed they all highlighted the limits currently faced by scholars and individuals in achieving such ideals of overcoming eurocentrism, deconstructing hierarchies and highlighting the creation of a global form of citizenship which exceeded national borders.
Green’s article emphasized the importance of the state apparatus and especially national legal systems which constrain and limit how migrants navigate their everyday lives. Although she focuses on the case of “Americans abroad” in France who represented an elite and privileged social group and were often not even referred to as migrants, her case studies highlight the awkward state of being in between countries and jurisdictions. One can easily imagine how the difficulties faced by such actors, who were sometimes well-connected to important state actors but still unable to make their case heard, are exacerbated in the case of individuals more socially discriminated against.
However, what I found most interesting was the point made in both Adelman’s article and by the researchers of the European University Institution in their seminar on global history. They both focused on how global history, although it aims at decentralizing history from a western perspective, offering a history of the margins and even deconstructing this dichotomy of the center and the margins, actually reproduced the same hierarchies in its practice. Adelman mentions the globalization of English in the academic field as a way of again integrating the “Other” in western terms rather than their own terms. The EUI researchers highlighted the contradiction of global history as a social project of connecting people and shedding light on “the margins”, and the reality of the field as the object of an economy in which access to scholarly work on global history often necessitates a subscription and financial means which not all institutions can necessarily afford.
Still, the authors are not entirely pessimistic about the future and transformative potential of global and transnational history and they rather highlight their limits in order to move forward in this field. In that sense, the EUI researchers recommendations were particularly helpful in imagining a future in which transnational and global history would remain necessary and relevant.