MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

At the suggestion of Dr. Banerjee and after thinking about my project more critically, I’ve decided to switch up my project to focus on translation. Given my lack of knowledge of Classical Chinese and the fact that this new project direction can offer some legitimately new insights into global intellectual history and translation, I’ve decided to focus my project not on Kang Youwei directly, but on the translation of Datong Shu I was going to use for my previous project.

Upon reading book reviews of the work, a translation of Datong Shu published in 1958 by sinologist Laurence G. Thompson, I realized there was more to pick apart than I originally imagined.[1] I read such conclusions by asking questions that Dr. Banerjee left me with: why was this work translated in the first place? What does this say about its author, its times? Most importantly, why does this matter?

Perhaps the most striking revelation that was made was Thompson’s choice to translate Kang’s vision as a unified world as a “One World.” Previously, I had thought nothing of the usage of this term, but a book review of the translation I read revealed that the term was borrowed from an influential 1943 work authored by Wendell Willkie, an American politician. It spoke of world federalism, an end to colonialism, equality for non-whites in the United States. It was appropriately titled One World.[2] One World has since been purchased as a library e-book, and I’m confident it may help to provide some context for the guiding question of this empirical essay. Namely, why does this translation matter? Why does Laurence translate Kang’s universalist idea of a datong community into the terms of a American concept, inevitably subtly changing its meaning?

Of course, I’m going to have to narrow down my focus, but there’s quite a lot to unpack with the concept of translation. Translation itself is a means of global connection and communication, bound to and problematized by power relations and differing worldviews. Lydia Liu’s Tokens of Exchange (also now available as a library e-book) raises a lot of important points and questions. It asks how translations, as products, represent the universalization of knowledge, and how they are created out of unequal relations of power and colonial, Western-centric contexts.[3] Owen in a previous post has already commented upon Pernau and Sachsenmeier’s Global Conceptual History, which I’m likely going to make use of; in short, the text considers the translation and circulation of concepts within history.[4]

There’s also plenty of potential for this work to go meta – its point of inquiry based in an academic text, after all. What might Laurence’s translation and its book reviews tell us about academic trends, how academia thought about Chinese history in the 1950s? An interesting point I picked up was that Laurence’s translation played an important role of boosting knowledge of Kang’s life and work in the West; one book review notes Laurence’s brief biography of the intellectual, included with his translation, is the most detailed English-language account of Kang’s life to exist at its time.[5] What does Laurence’s translation tell us about the circulation of knowledge? What can such an inquiry teach us about the method and drive of global intellectual history?

This project certainly isn’t going to be an easy one; as a history student, I’ve always struggled with complex jargon and argument, historical writing based more in theory than empirical fact. Lydia Liu, for instance, provides great insights, but I find myself having to read her words over and over again to understand their meaning. In pursuing this project, I hope to find something of value, and translate theories of translation and exchange into a more readable form.

[1] K’ang Yu-Wei and Laurence G. Thompson, trans., Ta T’ung Shu (New York, 1958).

[2] Wendell Willkie, One World (New York, 1943).

[3] Lydia Liu (ed.), Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations (Durham, 1999).

[4] Margit Pernau and Dominic Sachsenmeier, Global Conceptual History: A Reader (London, 2016).

[5] Richard C. Howard, “Ta t`ung shu. The One-World Philosophy of K`ang Yu-wei. by Laurence G. Thompson (Review),” The Journal of Asian Studies 19, no. 2, (1960): 206-208.

[Started 08/04/20] During an interview with BBC Radio Classics, composer Daniel Pemberton discussed how one track for his score to the motion picture Gold essentially operates as “the quintessential sound of capitalism”[1]. The track, ‘At the Sound of the Bell’, is first heard at – and incorporates the bell-chime of – the opening of the New York Stock Exchange when prospector turned-gold-mining maverick Kenny Wells’ (Matthew McConaughey) company gains 70 points on Initial Public Offering. In other words, it is the accompaniment to a change in wind, the realization of the promise of capitalism, an intoxicating noise, the materialization of fortune. Gold is a story about just that, the lust for success becomes all-consuming, Wells himself becomes so consumed by his success that he can’t see the wood for the trees (ironically since Wells’ success begins with upheaving an Indonesian Rainforest) nor who truly is friend or foe. The story is based on the rise and fall of Bre-X Minerals Ltd, a ludicrous venture exposed by the death of geologist Michael de Guzman and tests of gold samples from the Busang site in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, revealing “insignificant amounts of gold”[2] extant in Bre-X Minerals’ product. Share prices plummeted amidst a mass sell-off and, well, capitalism took its toll.

Gold provides a story of capitalism at its worst, there are lessons to be learnt but those are not so relevant to my Project as they are to a study of the resilience of stock markets to crises whether major fraud or global pandemic. Though the way Pemberton describes his soundtrack is oddly familiar to the feelings I experienced whilst listening to another film’s score, that of There Will Be Blood. The aforementioned film tells the story of Daniel Plainview’s (Daniel Day Lewis) rise to power and success through oil drilling in California and, eventually, across America. Plainview is himself a far smarter and more successful character than Wells, his fortune fully realized and absolute in depth, but he himself has become psychotic and obsessed with retaining that wealth, a mere shell of the person he was at the start of the film. Plainview’s relationships are key to his fall: his adoption of the orphaned child of one of his drilling colleagues; and the ‘adoption’ of religion for the sake of gaining access to the rich drilling sites he coveted in Little Boston, California. The film encourages an interesting cross-section analysis on capitalism’s isolating effect on the individual, as seen by the end of the film where Plainview is successful but alone in a barren mansion; and, “a biblical parable about America’s failure to square religion and greed”[3]. This is especially important because of the relationship between Daniel Plainview and Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), the pastor of the ‘Church of the Third Revelation’ who baptizes Daniel in exchange for rights to drill the land around his newly founded church, payed for by Plainview’s exploitation of the land and its people.

Both Gold and There Will Be Blood provide very interesting commentaries on the worst aspects of Capitalism’s toll on the individual, but do not necessarily show the processes and relationships that shape the fabric of a typically ‘modern’ capitalist society. ‘Abstractions’ of the capitalist economy are intricate and effervescent, and while I write my project, I have to consider why capitalism has this image in popular culture of being so corrupting and destructive in light of both classical theory (Marx, the Annales) and modern reappraisals (Piketty, Slater). Though I would stress this above all: an analysis of ‘capitalism’ is not what I want my Project to be, instead, I want to make this an analysis of people. Though I want to focus on ‘transnational transactions’ as a clear methodological and historiographical vice for my analysis, at the center of my study is the relationship between people, at first, a brief analysis of the relationship between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon; then a commentary on Cold-War communities. Transactions are both figurative and practical, what sort of ideological transactions occur between these communities through the exchange of goods and commodities like Pepsi Cola and Soviet Vodka? How has the Cold War Era fallen prey to historiography’s inherent factionalism, and has this distorted our ability to discern a true ‘Global History’ from the transnational consumer culture that developed between 1959 and 1986? These are just some of the questions that build the framework for my study at current.

Obviously, I will imminently have to read further into 3 key texts that I consider to form a crucial understanding of transnational interpretative history: the newly acquired Consumer Culture & Modernity by Don Slater; Capital And Ideology by Thomas Piketty; and Global Interdependence: The World after 1945 by Akira Iriye. What I learnt from There Will Be Blood in particular though – apart from Daniel Day Lewis truly being one of the greatest actors of our time – is the ‘stickiness’ of capitalism on Daniel Plainview. This being appropriate as an analogy when seeing his lonesome being dirty and alone at the start of the film, and despite his enormous success through the film, dirty and alone at the very end. When placed in the context of the modernization theorist’s ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ societal frameworks, an interesting though not typically addressed question arises: what ‘sticks’ once a ‘traditional’ society transforms into a ‘modern’ society? Is it appropriate to frame transformative processes in the USSR between 1959 and 1986 in this context, and being mitigated through the transnational transactions with the West (externally)? Or, were the true transformative processes an internalized process of change merely instigated by the triumph of Pepsi Cola? Is the historiography around ANEM in 1959 reflective of a socially conscious move away from arbitrary adversarialism, if not then why? Why bother having America present it’s case for a consumer-centered capitalist economy to the USSR in the first place? I tried thinking of a quip comment on how this project is like laying an oil pipeline, but I think I should get to reading Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil! – the book which There Will be Blood was largely based on – before daring to do so.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0006fgl .

[2] Schneider, Howard (May 18, 1997). “A Lode of Lies: How Bre-X Fooled Everyone”. Washington Post Foreign Service. p. H01.

[3] “Nonesuch Records Times (UK), Evening Standard Give “There Will Be Blood” Five Stars”. Retrieved 11 January 2017

Fighting in the age of transnationalism: MMA through history

One of the documentaries I’ve found myself watching and rewatching during quarantine has been Fighting in the Age of Loneliness by Felix Biederman and Jon Bois. The documentary covers the emergence of Mixed Martial Arts, first as a combat form and then as a mass-media spectacle. This process mirrors the slow globalisation of the planet, and the strangulation of anything unique into a single homogenous mono-culture. It is with this in mind that I decided I would devote this weeks blogpost to discussing MMA as a transnational phenomenon.

MMA began in Japan, the creation of Kanō Jigorō. A small man, Jigorō modified the existing art of jiujitsu, the martial art of the Samurai, to suit his short frame. He achieved such success at this that what he created became an entirely separate school of martial arts, known as Judo. It is here that the story begins to become a transnational one. Even in Jigorō’s lifetime, his techniques spread outside of Japan. For example his fame was so great that during the visit of former United States President Ulysses S Grant, Jigorō was asked to put on an exhibition of Judo for the visiting dignitary and his entourage. But it was his students who played the greatest transnational role.

Mitsuyo Maeda was a student of Jigorō who embarked on a tour of the Americas, travelling from the USA down through Mexico, eventually ending up in Brazil. Here he became closely associated with the large Japanese immigrant community already residing in Japan, and became an advocate for increased immigration. He even became a naturalised Brazilian citizen. Clearly he was a key part of a transnational network. Maeda was contracted by the circus magnate Gastão Gracie to teach his hellion son, Carlos, Judo, in the hopes that learning this martial art would help keep him on the straight and narrow. In practice, Carlos and his brother Hélio would use Madea’s lessons to create their own martial arts school, which became known as Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. Prideful and relentless self-promoters, the Gracie family went on to push forward the Ultimate Fighter Championship, or UFC, in America, hoping to cement themselves as the undeniable first family of international martial arts.

However, the brash, young, and almost entirely unregulated UFC became a target of regulators almost immediately. Leading the charge was Senator John McCain, who compare it to human cockfighting. The fact that his wifes family had very close ties to a beer distribution chain which in turn was joined at the hip to boxing promotions probably helped that outrage along. MMA would languish for decades in the US. However it would flourish in Japan. The period known as the “Lost Decade” in Japan, when the dreams of one day supplanting the US as the premier economic power died a bitter death, saw an explosion in popularity for MMA, under the Pride promotion. Fighters from around the world, American ex-footballers, Croat special forces officers, and the experts in various martial arts all competed together, with little to no regulation. But the companies long rumoured ties to the Yakuza eventually brought it down, and it was bought out by the resurgent UFC. The UFC had its own alleged links to organised crime, but also what would go down in history as a more important associate. Donald Trump. The future president of the United States was an enthusiast for the sport, just as Grant had been all those years ago, and hosted the promotion in his casinos as it got back on its feet.

UFC, just like Pride before it, has become a home for misfits the world over, like the Irish Connor McGregor, the Russian Khabib Nurmagomedov, and the American Jon Jones. It is also a deeply abusive and exploitative industry built around sucking in talent, extracting the few years of high class performance out of them, then abandoning them to a lifetime of CTE and limited mobility. In this way the corporation has become a key part of, and example of, the transnational economy as we move fully into the 21^st century. What began as one man in 19^th century Japan has spread all over the globe, and been commodified beyond what anyone living at the time could have imagined.

Buried somewhere in the Greenwood Cemetery in Ruston, Lincoln Parish, Louisiana is a victim of the Spanish Flu—my great-great grand uncle Judge Newton McKay Smith.

After losing an arm for the Confederacy during the American Civil War in the 1860s, Smith found himself no longer suited for farm work. So, in the words of my aunt, “He studied law and became a judge”.

Smith continued to practice though the turn of the century and up until the Great War came to an end in 1918. Like many veterans and Southern Americans at the time, he was probably a major supporter of America’s involvement in the conflict and likely joined in the many war fundraisers and parades that took place in the busy port of New Orleans.

With the public eye fixed on the war, few took notice of a mysterious disease which swept across Europe and killed more soldiers than the conflict itself. And on September 16, 1918, a New Orleans newspaper published an article titled “No Danger of Spanish Influenza Epidemic Here”.

That same day, however, the Harold Walker oil tanker landed in the mouth of the Mississippi River after travelling from Boston to Mexico. According to journalist Drew Broch, “Among those on board, more than a dozen people — including the ship’s physician — were ill with what was suspected to be the flu. Two others had died on the first leg of the trip and were buried in Tampico [Mexico], and a third… expired on his way back home”.

This ship is likely what introduced the virus to Louisiana. Soon, ‘social distancing’ measures like isolating the sick and the forbidding public gatherings were introduced. But 78 days later, these measures were reversed even though New Orleans had recorded a higher rate of virus deaths than all U.S. cities except for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.

This decision to lift social distancing measures came just around the announcement of the armistice in Europe on the ‘eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month’. Celebrations erupted in the streets of New Orleans and elsewhere and would have been celebrated greatly by veterans and public servants like my great-great-grand uncle.

It is possible that Smith contracted the virus through these types of celebration or through some other sort of exposure to the public. It’s hard for me to imagine what would have been going through the mind of the then 81 year old judge as he was found himself confined to a hospital bed the following year.

I don’t know very much about my relative or his beliefs, but as a former confederate and public figure in Louisiana at the time, there is probably a good chance that he, like many others, racialized the virus and blamed the Germans, Spanish, or other European immigrants for the spread of the virus which would kill him. While blame was attached to Germany as the war’s aggressors and losers, it was also associated with Spain as the country’s lack of censorship in media had allowed the world to believe that the virus was worse there than anywhere else (not to mention that the Spanish king Alfonso XIII famously suffered from it).

This ‘blame game’ comes into direct conflict with the theories of contemporary historians like Alfred W. Crosby who argued that the virus originated in Kansas and Claude Hannon who believed it originated as a less deadly variant in China. Other popular theories also maintain that it originated in P.OW. camps in France or food markets in Austria.

Like how today’s Corona Virus has been labeled a ‘Chinese Virus’, the ‘Spanish Flu’ became a highly politicized weapon of blame in which governments could (metaphorically) wash their hands from and halt or rollback public health measures. This politicization has been witnessed countless more times in the modern era as the Marburg virus was attributed to Uganda, Ebola to Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Dengue to the Philippines and Thailand, SARS to China, and HIV to the homosexual community.

How we choose to label these infectious diseases is important and certainly intertwined with their mitigation and public image. Let us take a lesson from the city of New Orleans and the global history of infectious disease by practicing a healthy lifestyles and remaining in quarantine as long as appropriate.

Fossil fuels propelled mankind into modernity. To be modern is to depend on the capacities and abilities generated by energy. We are citizens and subjects of fossil fuels. The question I pose myself is the following: why is this crucial commodity, and the encounters and processes through which it is extracted and distributed, so absent from popular culture? In other words, how has oil managed to hide in plain sight?

One answer that I propose is that oil smells bad. It stinks of overseas entanglements, exploitation, dependency on foreign resources, and, increasingly importantly in recent times, of global warming and environmental degradation. This is where it differs from the Silk Road (another great transnational network of trade), which has received huge cultural attention. The Silk Road can be romanticised; it can become a setting for a novel, a framework for a journey, an enticing adventure. Oil wells on the Arabian peninsula offer less attractive artistic material. I would argue that most people would relegate fossil fuels to a necessary commodity on which they depend to maintain their leisurely lives, a dependency which they would rather not be reminded of. Oil is embarrassingly, scarily pervasive. We are its subjects, most of our achievements since the industrial revolution can be accredited to the energy it provides, and our helpless entanglement with it is set to go on.

Another reason for the cultural silence surrounding fossil fuels might be the nature of the places where they are extracted. Oil wells do not have a strong, definable identity; they are non-spaces, intrinsically displaced and heterogenous. This is reflected in their multilingual nature, since workers are often migrants from poorer countries, transitory migrants whose presence is solely justified by the the need for cheap labour. Such multilingual milieus are difficult to translate into cultural forms such as literature, which are most commonly monolingual. It can therefore be argued that fossil fuel production is unsuited to current popular cultural forms, and that new forms may have to be developed to help bring this topic to the public eye via artistic means.

It is impossible to talk about fossil fuels without discussing the power dynamics that have shaped their turbulent history. American companies exploiting the resources of the Persian Gulf (a one-sided relationship symbolically reflected by the ruthless thrust of their oil drills) exemplifies wider trends of the North’s progress and development happening at the expense of the global South in recent history. The messy wars waged by the US in Iraq and Afghanistan to secure its foothold on oil-rich soil is a case in point. Energy politics have provided unequal benefits, and, at their worst, have been steeped in hypocrisy and corruption. Not the most cheerful content for an evening of light reading…

And yet we must face up to modern society’s relationship with fossil fuels. It isn’t enough to abstractly acknowledge it, or to take it for granted, or even to moan about its destructive effects on the environment while continuing to use it. Oil, crude and smelly as it is, must be stared dead in the face. Our entanglement with it must be untangled, and artists of all kind must rise to the task.

The nation is an imagined thing, as Benedict Anderson concluded back in 1983 in his appropriately-named classic Imagined Communities.[1] Nations are fictions that weave themselves into the fabric of history. They are territories bounded and colored in on maps. They invoke feelings of belonging, loyalty, and love. Of course, the nation is not a perceptible, physical thing, but is made real to us through our identities, our loyalties, our upbringings.

The historians whose works we’ve read over the course of the semester have all tackled the idea of the nation in their own respective ways. Is it something to be transcended, considered, dismissed? Clavin has argued for the imagining of transnationalism as a honeycomb that gives shape and structure to nations, networks, and spaces.[2] More recently, our very own Dr. Banerjee has noted the importance of imagining concepts as transversals in order to mentally comprehend the ever-shifting, blending nature of ideas.[3]

Of course, nationalism is an idea in it of itself, and it has shifted and blended as it has traveled across the world, leaving behind nation-states in its wake. As a concept, it may have originated in Europe, but given its global spread, I think it is safe to say that it’s effectively transcended its Western origins.

What does all this talk of nations and nationalism have to do with Iran and Thailand? Both countries developed their own conceptions of nation in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, and thinking about their commonalities and differences can begin to lead us toward a global intellectual history of nationalism. Both states notably maintained their political independence throughout the era of high imperialism, and reoriented themselves around the idea of nation. Threatened by Western encroachment, the ruling parties of Qajar and later Pahlavi Iran and the Kingdom of Siam (as Thailand as then known) set forth agendas of nation-building that fundamentally defined their existences as states and as peoples.

Thongchai Winichakul’s brilliant 1994 work Siam Mapped illustrates how the Kingdom of Siam began conceiving itself as a nation, with a great focus on its territoriality.[4] Before the age of high imperialism, Southeast Asian kingdoms conceived of themselves not in terms of strict, demarcated borders nor centralized states, but as polities comprising loose territorial definitions and as part of hierarchies in a complicated tributary system. This changed as the West pushed into the region; Britain overtaking Burma and France Vietnam from the mid-19^th century onward. It became a necessity for Siam to adhere to Western conceptions of “border” and “sovereignty,” and its rulers entered crucial negotiations with the European powers as they rushed to assert Siam’s authority over its tributary states. An idea of Thai nationhood and territoriality developed, and would strengthen over the course of time. One example of this legacy is a Cold War map cited by Thongchai, imagining the country’s very territory as under threat by neighboring communist rule.

Iran, too, suffered great fear and humiliation when set against Britain and Russia. Forced to make great territorial and economic concessions to the two powers, it lost its provinces in the Caucasus and was plunged into financial and political disarray. Under the reign of Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941), the country aimed to reverse these trends and regain a self of national self-confidence. Educational textbooks linked the Iranian nation to the glorified pasts of the Achaemenid and Sassanian Empires; they taught their readers geography with a nationalist bent, imagining a greater Iran than the one they lived in that had been reduced due to corruption and cowardice. One textbook imagined Iran’s “natural borders” as stretching from India to the Caspian Sea.[5]

Both countries also positioned themselves as homelands for their peoples. In fact, Siam’s renaming of itself as “Thailand” was one part of its nationalist project. It was now a country for the Thai. Common conceptions of the country’s history selectively identify the present state’s past in a way best fitting a nationalist narrative. For instance, the country’s monarchy privileges an idealized idea of the historic Kingdom of Sukhothai for its spirituality and kingship, in contrast to the Kingdom of Ayutthaya, owing to its constant warring.[6] Iran may not have changed its name in its peoples’ own eyes, but it had been known to Europe as Persia until 1935, when it requested it be referred to as Persia. Iran under Reza Shah pursued a policy that marked Iran as a Persian homeland, a “Persianization” process that involved enforcement of the national faith, Twelver Shi’ism, and the national language, Farsi. Iran’s non-Persian, non-Shi’i ethnic groups were simply told to love the nation on the basis of their sharing of the land.[7]

I’ve attempted to cover much here, and have had to generalize quite a bit to keep this post coherent. My point is, nationalism itself may be understood better through the practice of global intellectual history, itself a subfield of transnational history. Through comparing case studies from across the world, even those that may have little explicit similarity to each other, we can trace the spread of ideas and the varying ways in which they were adapted and interpreted.

[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983).

[2] Patricia Clavin, “Defining Transnationalism,” Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005), 421-439.

[3] Milinda Banerjee, “Transversal Histories and Transcultural Afterlives: Indianized Renditions of Jean Bodin in Global Intellectual History” in Engaging Transculturality edited by Laila Abu-er-Rub et al., (Abingdon, 2019), 155-169.

[4] Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: The History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu, 1994).

[5] Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804-1946 (Princeton, 1999), 180-215.

[6] Paul Handley, The King Never Smiles (New Haven, 2006), 26.

[7] Ali Ansari, Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After, (London, 2005), 40-74.

My title might be slightly dramatic, but we live in an age of catchy New Yorker titles and Caroline Calloway’s instagram captions. But now that I have you here, I think (fingers crossed) I have made great strides this week. It sounds arbitrary but I started a new notebook. For some bizarre reason, this spurred me to finally tackle the stack of books I lugged back home at the bottom of my suitcase. Wednesday was largely spent thumbing through Michael Goebel’s Anti-Imperial Metropolis which I really wish I had read before writing my historiography essay (we’re still aiming for honesty and reflection). It focuses on Paris as a ‘marketplace for the exchange of ideas’ (p2) and draws links between the great minds who roamed at the city at the same time. There are great visuals depicting the proximity between Zhuo EnLai and Deng XiaoPing’s apartments, and how it served as a ‘hotbed of anti-imperialism with global reverberations (p5). These sweeping statements are further explored through how nationalism grew not in the ‘Third World’ where they were based, but in this inherently European capital, the centre for ideas beyond the political, where art, culture and wanderlust were all allowed to mingle, as were the unconventional elites of the time.

Goebel’s picks up on Chakrabarty’s primary argument within Provincializing Europe, the idea that the history of colonialism has shaped contemporary France. Yet Goebel believes that if one concept is taken to be too all-encompassing, it can lose precision within the argument. These nationalist figures who would later go on to establish the Kuomintang were brought together by their understanding of imperialism and Paris as a ‘generator of new anti-imperialist narratives through exchange’. Yet I’m not sure I completely agree. These men came to Paris for an education, an escape from the ‘Third World’ by which they came. They already had this nationalist sentiment, because of the imperial educations they had received. He is right to argue that Paris facilitated exchange, in something he quite cleverly defines as ‘contact-zones’. In the current context of social distancing it almost seems like sacrilege. Paris did not create this anticolonial nationalism, rather it united these men.

This forced me to consider the starting points of my own project, and the prevalence of Oxford as a centre for alternative knowledge production. After helpful comments and conversations with Bernhard and Milinda, I am slightly reassured that I do not have to figure out if a global black identity exists (phew) but rather consider if these ideas were facilitated through the Rhodes scholarship and institutions. In the cases of Stuart Hall and Alain Locke, their interest in race and identity was not cultivated at Oxford, rather this was a theme throughout their upbringings and their time in academia. Locke was barred from teaching it at Howard, despite being a HBC, which led to his editing of The New Negro. Hall was similar, his ideas of a cultural diaspora come from his position as a West-Indian growing up alongside the Windrush generation. Although he was experiencing it quite differently to most, it was still the context of his formative years. Oxford for both these scholars facilitated legitimacy, gave them the platform to share their ideas. It was a centre for knowledge production in that they learnt the way the core worked, and how to then present their ideas of the periphery to the general public. Within Culture, Politics Race and Diaspora he is continually praised for the way in which he made cultural studies accessible, through his extensive radio and television appearances, and work within the Open University. Brah points out in her chapter that he was able to shift what was considered the ‘classic postmodern experience’, as migration was the key historical event in late modernity and something he himself had experienced (p78). This shift in the periphery, and the claim that these identity politics were something worth evaluating because so many people were affected and would continue to be with trends of globalisation. This collection of essays praises Hall heavily, but discusses him as if he is almost a unicorn, and no one can quite figure out why he is so intelligent and yet so kind, so willing to listen to other scholars and their ideas. This seems to be a large part of his legacy and perhaps something he strove for that he did not experience in his own education.

Both Locke and Hall had the desire to study their own contexts, further understand race and issues of identity, and through Oxford and ironically the Rhodes scholarship they were able to articulate this academically which led to their ideas and thoughts to be taken seriously. It made me think of a more contemporary example, of Remi Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race (a millennial who also understands the importance of catchy titles). She writes in the beginning of her book that she always knew she was angry, and that she saw injustices and structural racism throughout her upbringing but it was not until she attended Bristol University and learnt about her own history that she was able to give those concepts names. Until the age of seven I was unaware that I was in fact, Asian. I understand this sounds ridiculous but it was never a discussion at my very liberal Californian public school. Only when I entered the international school system did I become aware of the fact I was not from single country, and had largely grown up in a completely different one. Perhaps it has led to my interest in national identity, concepts of race and hybridity. From these examples we can conclude that education has long been a great enabler in the understanding of the self and our own identity.

You might be wondering how this long-winded blog links back to Paris. I started this week reading about Paris within Goebel’s volume, and have finished it scrambling to compile sources for my dissertation proposal. Central to this would (hopefully) be to visit the colonial/postcolonial museums in the French capital. Sitting in lockdown it seems like a pipedream and a tad unrealistic, but having something to look forward to is important. Maybe in a few months’ time I won’t be sat at my desk but rather in the MQB surrounded by croissants and cappuccinos. I guess a girl can dream.

This is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while, and now that I’ve realised how many blog posts I still have to do, I figured now is a good time to do this! I would like to introduce you guys to the father and son team of Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster, who were Prussian naturalists in the 18^th century. Their most notable achievement was serving as the naturalists on James Cook’s second voyage into the South Pacific from 1772-1775. I wrote a long essay about the Forsters for Bernhard’s module on Travel Cultures last semester, where I compared the handwritten journals written by Johann Reinhold with the published account written by Georg. I believe the Forsters unique position as Prussians in the service of the British crown demonstrate how they can be seen as interesting transnational figures. Georg’s life took a further transnational turn afterwards, but I think I will write about him in a separate blog post.

            An ancestor of the Forsters hailed from Yorkshire and was a Royalist against Cromwell who later relocated to Prussia. This connection to Britain triggered a unique allegiance in Johann Reinhold Forster, who was in awe of the scientific might of the empire during this time. A firm believer in the role of science in voyages of discovery, the elder Forster relocated his entire family to Britain in order to establish himself in circles that held renowned scientists like Joseph Banks, who had served as the naturalist on Cook’s first voyage. His ultimate goal was to receive royal patronage that would enable him to further scientific discovery in the name of the British Empire.[1]

            What is most interesting is his loyalty to Britain over Prussia. Prior to his move to Britain, Forster was constantly plagued with debts and looking for academic positions. Though he achieved recognition during an expedition to Russia with Georg, where they documented and collected roughly 700 specimens, opportunities were scarce, and Forster envisioned better success abroad.[2] Though he struggled to hold down jobs in Britain, Forster was still able to elevate his reputation enough that he was chosen for Cook’s voyage. He believed that by participating in Cook’s voyage, he could demonstrate how important science was to these discovery expeditions in order to spread the influence of the British Empire.

In addition to scientific observations, Forster’s handwritten journals contain laments about the British Empire, fitting in many connections to the empire’s greatness, its achievements in science, and how grateful he was to be in service. However, in his entries towards the end of the voyage, there is a sense of disenchantment with the empire, perhaps due to the length of time spent at sea and his unpopularity amongst the crew.

            His miseries continued as the reputation as the leading scientist on Cook’s second voyage did not elevate him to the heroic status achieved previously by Joseph Banks. He was not well-liked by the other members on the voyage, with many of the crew favouring Georg over his father. There was a publishing controversy upon the voyage’s return to Britain, which only exacerbated Forster’s un-likable character and difficult nature, during which he basically destroyed any reputation he had in Britain. Three years after the voyage’s completion, after finally paying of his many debts, Forster moved his family back to Prussia, where Georg eventually found greater success than his father. However, despite having served on such a revolutionary and momentous journey with one of the most well-known figures of their time, Johann Reinhold’s transnational life ended quite quickly with the publishing controversy, as he remained in Prussia for the remainder of his life, plagued by financial problems and his difficult temperament, never attaining the influence in the scientific community he so desired.[3]

[1] John Dawson, ‘The Forsters, Father and Son, Naturalists on Cook’s Second Voyage’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1998), p. 99.

[2] Dawson, ‘The Forsters’, p. 101.

[3] Ibid., pp. 107-108.

As we enter the last four weeks of teaching, that means we’re slowly approaching the deadline for our final essays. As such, I’ve spent most of my week working on my 4000-word proposal, which will be centred on the Cuban-Chinese during either the 1945-49 Chinese Civil War, or the 1959 Cuban Revolution. Here’s an update on what I’ve been reading, and some ideas that I’m working with at the moment.

First off, I’ve been reading a lot of secondary sources. This has been the bulk of my research over the past few weeks. These sources are historiographies on Cuba, the Cuban-Chinese, or revolutions in China and Cuba that contextualise the Cuban, Chinese, and/or Cuban-Chinese settings in the 20th century. At the moment, I’m thinking a lot about their limitations and trying to structure these thoughts into a coherent argument. Tentatively, I think I will argue along one of the points Milinda made in our seminar this week, namely that it is insufficient to merely state that actors and networks operate transnationally. Indeed, this is what most of the literature on Chinese-Cubans have done; they’ve sought to deconstruct the idea of the ‘Chinese’ that sticks solely to their own racial group by discussing their involvement in Cuban affairs and, thus, the wider concepts of ‘revolution’ and ‘Communism’. Although these works are useful, I think we can do better by interrogating these transnational links. I want to incorporate theories, like racial triangulation, and the idea of semi-peripheries, and see how these ideas operated in Cuba vis-a-vis the Cubans and the Cuban-Chinese. Hopefully, by approaching it in this way, I can gain a deeper understanding of how power structures and hierarchies are still imbued in the transnational sphere.

In light of this objective, I’ve also been reading lots of methodological theory. I found last week’s readings on Global Intellectual History vital to my project; in fact, looking forward, I think I’ll want to write a Global Intellectual History of the Cuban-Chinese for my final dissertation. To that regard, Milinda’s paper, Kapila’s, and Hunter’s were all vital in informing how I, specifically, should incorporate anthropological and philosophical readings into my historical analysis. To that end, I’ve recently read Claire Jean Kim’s article on racial triangulation to understand how groups of people can be oppressed in one setting and then also be used as – or even become – oppressors in another. Various hierarchies operate in conjunction with each other, and it’s my job to explain which hierarchies are present in the context of the Chinese-Cubans, and also analyse how they impact each other. I also hope to expand on the work I’ve done on Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Southern Epistemologies to hopefully inform my approach and create a more ‘bottom-up history’ of concepts. It’s not about seeing how universal ideas of revolution and communism were taken into Cuba. It’s more about examining the way specific power structures unique to Cuba, and the Cuban-Chinese there, were transplanted into big concepts, like ‘revolution’ and ‘communism’. It’s through this approach that I hope to construct a more ‘bottom-up’ history that makes sense of global concepts from the perspective of ‘Southern’/non-Western epistemologies. .

So, in terms of context and methodology, I feel quite secure. However, I’m still trying to access primary sources. Inevitably, there are some primary sources that I can’t access at the moment, e.g. specific accounts written by Cuban-Chinese revolutionaries, which exist solely in paperbacks. I’m hoping to work around this small setback by using this time to engage deeply with Chinese and Cuban thinkers from the 19th and 20th centuries. E-copies of Fidel Castro’s speeches exist on the Cuban government website. José Martí was also a big inspiration for Cuban revolutionaries, and I’m sure that copies of his revolutionary poems exist on the internet. On the Chinese side, I hope to examine Sun Yat-Sen’s and Mao Zedong’s writings. After this point, my next step might be to turn to archives in the University of Miami, or any other places that have large Cuban immigrant populations in the US, for any sources written by Cuban and/or Cuban-Chinese revolutionaries.

Overall, then, my research seems to be going alright. I’ve started to flesh out my argument, but am still researching to make it more concrete, or at least as concrete as I possibly can given the inaccessibility of certain sources. Moreover, I think listing out the work that I’ve done in this blog post has helped calm my nerves. I’ll be honest – I didn’t get that much work done over Spring Break because I was struggling to find the motivation to work, and that really scared me. Nevertheless, as I’ve started to get used to the idea of working from home, my mood has picked up again, and so has my research. Despite all my anxieties, researching for my long essay has proven to be a great distraction from all the dangers outside, and its been nice to dedicate all of my energy towards a project that I feel passionate about.

Having read the interview with Frank Snowden in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history) I keep wondering: if something like Covid-19 or the Spanish flu 1918-19 affects millions of people in various ways (death, social life, family, unemployment, the economy, recession) why is it that these and other historical (what?) “episodes” struggle to find their way into (more mainstream) history books? 

I just went briefly back to two more recent books (past 5 years), much acclaimed books on 20^th-Century Europe: Konrad Jarausch, Out of Ashes (2015) and Ian Kershaw (2015), To Hell and Back. By and large silence on the Spanish Flu or similar themes (e.g. science, health, disease). This is not a “blame game”. Jarausch to me is the better, more original synthesis (starting not with 1914 but with and in colonies and colonialism…something different, with Europe yet geographically not set in Europe). Kershaw: well, solid to me, but there were few surprising moments to me reading it…moments where I thought: wow…never thought about it that way. Do not get me wrong: I learned a lot from the book.  

So, credit to both and to Kershaw and his work on Hitler, Germany, the Third Reich. But I strongly feel that a major survey monographs published in 2015 with the aim (publisher) to reach beyond a narrow academic audience…ought to be different. My sense is something else is needed.  

But back to my question (and again no blame game here…others could be named): Why is it that health, disease, contagion, Spanish flu, pandemics do not make the cut? Why is it that these topics get special or separated treatment in dedicated articles and monographs? It seems there is some “social” or “topical” distancing going on…the plague, the cholera in X,Y or Z (Hamburg, London), individual diseases or the technicalities or transfer of knowledge behind small pox vaccination in the later 18^th century get “special treatment” and separate treatment in journals and books. Why do major synthesis fall back to narrating history in the way we do? States, wars, economy, international affairs…states and nations in particular.  

My educated guess would be that the problem is narrative and time in our discipline. As historians we mainly think along temporal aspects. And in a way – another educated guess of mine – the most three popular ways of writing history would be: 1) The history of states, nations, nation-states. 2) The history of wars and international relations. 3) The history of a life (aka biography). All three share a commonality: start-end or birth-death are relatively easy to pin down. From A in time to B in time. The Wilhelmine Empire was born on day x out of treaty and war y and died on day z. Then we narrate the next life: Weimar…Nazi Germany…postwar Germany.  

From what we now about the history of diseases (and I am not an expert), in terms of temporality they are very different, they have very short life-spans (not sure if that is good news these days). Cholera outbreaks lasted from a few weeks to a few months maximum. Flu is mainly seasonal. The Spanish Flu in 1918-19 had a long life-span over a year in three waves, the second one starting in autumn 1918 was the deadliest. In all likelihood (and historically speaking) Covid-19 will be with us only for a very short period of time.  

Laura Spinney in her “Pale Rider” refers to the short life cycle of diseases: “The Spanish flu, in contrast, engulfed the entire globe in the blink of an eye. Most of the death occurred in the thirteen weeks between mid-September and mid-December 1918. It was broad in space and shallow in time, compare to a narrow, deep war.”  

So here we have the problem. We historians tend to wade or plunge into “narrow and deep” (war, Napoleonic wars, the depth yet narrow history of individuals or individual states…). We shy away from the “broad in space and shallow in time”? Ok, we could accept this and say: this is just the division of labor between neighbouring disciplines. Let the colleagues in Sociology, Social Sciences, Human Geography, IR go for the shallow time yet broad in space. But division of labor in times of crisis is not good. And we have to confront it: How do we react to it? What can we contribute (academically)? How do we conquer the shallow water and broad in space narrative? Personally, I would not accuse any transnational and global history of being shallow…yet I have heard those reflexes or accusations.  

Back to Spinney (a very good book). She writes: “A linear narrative won’t do; what’s needed is something closer to the way women in southern Africa discuss an important event in the life of their community.” It is interesting to see that Spinney goes to find help in the work of Terence Ranger (yes, the African historian if that is the right label). Ranger: “They describe it and then circle around it..constantly returning to it, widening out and bringing into it past memories and future anticipations.” A little later comes another nod to Ranger who proposed a “feminised history of the Spanish flu: it was generally women who nursed the ill.” “They were the ones who registered the sights and sounds of the sickroom, who laid out the dead and took the orphans. They were the link between the personal and the collective.”  

One final quote from Spinney’s introduction: “The pandemic in turn affects the price of bread, ideas about germs, white men and jinns – and sometimes even the weather. It is a social phenomenon as much as it is a biological one; it cannot be separated from its historical, geographical and cultural context. The way African mothers and grandmothers recount an event gives weight to that contextual richness, even if the event it impinges on lasts no longer than a historical heartbeat.”  

So, can we in the space of our MO3351 module contribute something to it? Or at large: How can History and our discipline respond to this more generally? Can we in MO3351 circle around the historical heartbeat of 1918-1919 from Dundee to Boston…to elsewhere? A short-term synchronous collaborative history between the now and then?  

Im finding it harder and harder to find something interesting to write about, or even speak about for that matter. As days start blending into weeks, I feel as though Im beginning to lack topics of conversation at the dinner table, that the silence between both the people I’m with and the people whom I speak with online has stretched and that no one can go for too long without mentioning the harsh reality of the world we are living in right now. See, i’ve done it myself, I’ve mentioned it without even saying its name. 

I have to say that I am glad I am a university student right now. I have no excuse to be bored because I have essays that need to get written, readings that need to get read and once i’m done with that there is always more that I can dive into. And yes, motivation is hard to find, but there is no excuse for boredom as there is always more to learn. This week I want to write about one of the readings that Bernhard put up, which reminded me of that exactly, there is always more to learn. 

‘Western Perversions’ at the Threshold of Felicity: The European Prostitutes of Gala Pera (1870-1915) by Malte Fuhrmann, was a reading about a topic that had never previously crossed my mind. It speaks about an international network of prostitution entered around Constantinople in the late 19th to early 20th centuries, otherwise known as ‘girl trafficking’ or ‘the white slave trade’. Now, I could have guesses that there were prostitution networks at the time (some of which we sadly still have today), but what had never crossed my mind where its relations to race, empire, nationhood and religion, as Fuhrmann eloquently illustrates. In this case, the trade of European girls in the Ottoman Empire was very much a question for the state, as several of these girls originated from the Habsburg Empire, Russia, Romania, and several other central and Eastern European countries. 

The demand for these European women lead to a vision of the European woman as being morally loose, or lacking female honour. Because of this, eve though Ottomans had made an effort into modernisation which included adopting certain ‘Western role models’ there grew a problem of othering in terms of European women and what they saw as ‘their women’. This in turn impacted the several European women who were living in the Ottoman Empire not as prostitutes, but as teachers, nurses and governesses for the upper class. But even the reputation of their chasity, and by large the reputation of European women was at stake, leading to a desperate attempt by the Austro-Hungarian empire to eradicate this trade and prostitution and thus restore the honour and reputation of the Empire in the eyes of the Ottomans. 

What I thought was particularly interesting about this is how prostitutes, which were considered to be the lowest of the lowest in regards to social standing (not only due to their economic conditions but because they were women, and more specifically morally loose women or women with no honour) could create a such an anxiety for the Austro-Hungarian empire in which they felt their reputation was being attacked too. This leads to the idea that a man’s honour was dependant upon a woman’s honour, and thus, in a bigger scale, a nations honour was dependant upon its women’s honour. 

We’ve talked a lot over the course of the semester about the establishment and maintenance of transnational and global connections, but recently during my research for my project I have come across cases of the opposite: the rejection, dismissal and manipulation of such connections. 

Indeed, in Northern Ireland, the most vocal loyalist community, led by Reverend Dr. Ian Paisley, actively denied any real connections between the discrimination against African Americans in the Deep South of the United States and that experienced by the Catholic population in Northern Ireland, instead suggesting that such comparisons were fabricated by the Northern Irish civil rights movement leaders ‘in order to dupe ordinary Catholics out onto the streets in a deep conspiracy concocted by the remnants of the IRA and agents of international communism’.[1] (Indeed, he was rejecting one transnational connection that supplied favourable connotations to the Northern Irish movement, given widespread public support for the US civil rights movement, in favour of another that instilled fear and doubt about their politics and motives.) Paisley and his followers, in what has subsequently been recognised as an exaggeration of the threat they posed to loyalist hegemony, recognised the Northern Irish civil rights movement as an overtly nationalist plot that was only employing nonviolence as a guise for their true militant republicanism, and thus Northern Ireland had to be protected from their actions. 

In this week’s reading by Katrin Steffen & Martin Kohlrausch, we can see another example of the detrimental effects and limits of transnational connections, largely as a result of politics. Jan Czochralski, in his work in both Poland and Germany, participated in a transnational network of experts that, when it became embroiled in the politics of the period, became unfeasible, and Czochralski’s specific circumstances of working across enemy lines resulted in accusations of aiding the enemy in their production of materials for warfare. Czochralski was criticised on account of his transnational connections with Germany, at a time when Germany were the political and military enemy of Poland, much like the Northern Irish civil rights movement was vilified by Paisley and his followers as a result of their supposed communist and republican motives, beliefs contrary to the contemporary political structure. 

[1] Brian Kelly, ‘Transatlantic Affinities: King, Non-Violent Civil Disobedience and the Failure of Civil Rights Agitation in Northern Ireland’, p. 12

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by the Italian-American author, Pietro di Donato. Its highly unusual language and foreign-sounding syntax, which seemed to blend multiple styles and registers into a composite narrative voice, intrigued me from the start. That, combined with the themes of migrant labour and diasporic identity made me want to read around the subject and learn about the history of this novel’s production, translation, circulation, and transnational significance.

Christ in Concrete was published in 1939 by Pietro di Donato – a second generation Italian-American whose experiences as a foreign worker on US soil informed the highly autobiographical content of his novel. It is both a testimony to the harsh lives led by migrants in twentieth-century America, and an ethnic narrative about ‘Italianness’ abroad. The surprising language of the novel wasn’t a stylistic choice, rather reflecting the multiple cultural influences the author was exposed to. Written in English, it nevertheless contains Italian expressions left untranslated, and has therefore been categorised by critics as a heterolingual work. As one critic put it, the language is what forms the bridge between the ‘lost and mythical Italy, and the real but never realised America.’ This novel is a curious case; translation was a part of its production, not just of its circulation. As a work of literature, it hangs somewhere in between the American and Italian canons, failing to fully qualify for either, occupying the niche category of ‘minor literature’ – a deterritorialised form of art. By relating the migrant experience of its author, both linguistically and content-wise, Christ in Concrete can be described as a transnational object that defines clear-cut cultural boundaries.

I was interested to note that the novel was subject to two different interpretations, both of which attempted to claim the work in service of a certain cause. The first of these interpretations labelled Christ in Concrete the ‘ultimate working-class novel’, focusing on the atrocious working conditions of manual labourers in 1930s America and adopting the novel for the proletarian cause. Unsurprisingly, early Italian translations of the novel, conducted under Mussolini’s fascist regime, were determined to downplay this socialist interpretation. Di Donatio’s labelling as a ‘bricklayer-writer’ and ‘worker-as-artist’ therefore did not travel across the Atlantic to the author’s ethnic homeland.

The other interpretation focused on the ethnic origins of the novel, celebrating it as a mediation of Italian cultural heritage: a homage to ‘Italian greatness in distress’. It is also interesting to appraise Italian translations of the novel from this perspective, since they reflect an effort to limit the American references and experimental language, foregrounding instead the ‘Italianness’ at its heart. In the 1990s, a new wave of translations and a growth in Italian American studies gave credit to the regional specificities of the novel. Christ in Concrete became seen as neither Italian nor American, but a masterpiece born from the collision of these two cultural spheres.

This time spent in isolation has made me reflective. I’ve considered starting a podcast, writing a novel, embarking on a cooking journey that I meticulously document (if you are looking for some light evening entertainment, the Making Perfect series on the Bon Appétit YouTube channel is delightfully bingeable, and has left me wondering if it be possible to make the entire Thanksgiving dinner by myself) . It proves that I am no closer to achieving the goals we set out at the beginning of the semester. I still procrastinate. Like the sticker on the back of Bernhard’s iPad, I have a word document that is full of eight things I have started with great intentions, but have very little motivation to continue or indeed finish. Therefore, I believe is no time like the present to address and break this habit (as in I have literally nothing else to do or more fruitfully occupy my days, as time and deadlines still march on). My point being, I have to write about my long project in this week’s blog. A Covid-19 rant or queries into the semantics of online dating will not cut it today, if I am to achieve my goal of staying on top of goals, and not leaving things to the last minute. I am also trialling honesty. I have not spent enough time trying to flesh out the strands of this project. I have not pulled the at the dough to see what sticks and what breaks (more cooking references!), so indulge me for a few moments.

I have found the starting point of my project, the Rhodes scholarship as a transnational connector, facilitator even, difficult to relate back to. This is because I have attempted to link the Rhodes scholarship to a creation of a black cultural identity, through the case studies of Alain Locke and Stuart Hall, both celebrated academics, both Rhodes scholars although separate by about half a century. They were both heavily influential in creating social movements in the US and UK respectively, that served to develop ‘blackness’ in their contemporary contexts. The Rhodes link was of particular interest therefore, both with its inherent colonial links and that of empire, but also because within both men’s biographies and summaries, the fact they were Rhodes scholars is constantly mentioned. Locke is famously the first African-American Rhodes scholar, and spent three years at Oxford from 1907-1910. He was turned away from many colleges, and was shunned by other Rhodes scholars who refused to live with him. When he passed away, his tombstone was funded by a group of Rhodes scholars who believed that he paved the way for future generations, was a pioneer. There wasn’t another African American chosen until 1960.

This narrative clearly places Locke as someone extraordinary, and while there were not many black men walking the streets of Oxford at that time, it is not clear he was the only one. The establishment of the Rhodes scholarship was initially under a different name while Cecil Rhodes was still alive. It was called the Empire scholarship, and was aimed at colonies. Jamaica has produced one scholar every year since 1903, and although there were black scholars chosen before 1960. The one of interest to me being Stuart Hall. He took up the scholarship in 1951, which interestingly coincides with the Windrush generation. This heavily influenced his work and conversations around a cultural diaspora and hybridity within the black identity. I guess what I hope to explore is which of these factors was more significant in influencing his/their work. Was Alain Locke spurred to edit The New Negro because of the prejudice he faced at Oxford and his home institution Harvard? Or was it because he found like-minded intellectuals and wanted to expose their voices? Was Hall influenced by the work of those before him, like Locke (who he has cited, which I thought was pretty cool but am unsure of how to work this in, bear with me), or rather the cultural context he found himself in? Many of his fellow West-Indians were raised to be British, but suddenly found themselves isolated in a country they thought would welcome them? Does his status as an academic raise him above, and allow the establishment to take his voice more seriously? Would the New Left Review have succeeded otherwise? These are open ended questions, and ones I think will be difficult to answer. But through this blog post, at least I’ve made them known to myself.

Additionally, I am aware my project still looks like I’ve thrown paint at a wall and am hoping it will stick. There are issues. How am I to prove that there is a global black cultural identity? Is this important for the project, and will I be able to cover this within my word count? Does their position as Rhodes scholars really provide them with legitimacy, or is this an outdated imperial lens I have just enforced on these concepts? I have presented myself with questions, and you with an evening’s distractions (perhaps a good reward for reaching a milestone or word count). I guess I’ll see you pixelated kids on Tuesday.

Reading the news this morning, I (unsurprisingly) found that almost every article on the home page was about the coronavirus pandemic, ranging from a governmental crackdown on fake news to its potential impact on university admissions to a limited though important attempt at providing some positive spin on the crisis through an article entitled ‘Coronavirus: People making a difference’. However, there was one article on this page not about the coronavirus, featuring (again, unsurprisingly for the British media) the Royal Family, specifically Prince Harry & Meghan’s move to California, President Trump’s tweet refusing to pay for their security and their response that they had never intended to make such a request. Despite not having a particular interest in the activity of the Royal Family, but fatigued by the domination of the coronavirus across the internet, I found myself reading this article, and it had me thinking about the couple as transnational actors and their experiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

As we observed earlier in this semester in the cases of historical actors such as Eunice Connolly, one’s experiences of self can change quite significantly when moved across geographical borders. While, due to a more culturally contiguous relationship between the UK and the USA than, for example, Connolly experienced in her move from the USA to the West Indies in the 19th century, Meghan & Harry’s experiences of their gender, race and social class are unlikely to be as seismically impacted, their transnational movement could instead represent a more symbolic transformation. In the UK, as ‘senior royals’ within the British monarchy, the couple were entitled to certain luxuries as complete economic support from the British government and (limited) privacy from media and press intrusion, as generally exercised by the British media towards the Royal Family (although, particularly in Harry & Meghan’s case, this is becoming less respected and increasingly intrusive). However, their residence in the USA brings no such support and protection, as now formally confirmed by President Trump, and so financial independence is required to support both their lifestyle and their safety. Their transnational movement has facilitated this process of total emancipation, financial and otherwise, from the British Royal Family, and while they are unlikely to be stuck for opportunities to generate revenue in the USA, the move will likely mark a significant transition in Harry and Meghan’s lived experiences and an important event in the history of the institution of the British monarchy.

As their ‘Independence Day’ (as termed by the tabloid British media) approaches – the day where they officially no longer formally represent the Queen or act as senior royals – the Duke & Duchess of Sussex’s relocation to California and promise to divide their time between the UK and the USA becomes another cultural bridge connecting the UK and the USA; politically (and perhaps naively) interpreted as strengthening the ’special relationship’. Their hope, however, is that life in America will bring safety and security to them and their family, away from the spotlight of the British press. However, although they will not be performing public royal duties while they are in the UK, as once-senior royals, the British press, and thus the British public, will always remain interested in their activities. Therefore, the extent to which this transnational movement will mark a permanent change to their lives remains to be seen.