MO3351 Doing and Practicing Transnational and Global History

Blog post number 8. This is it, final one. I’ve watched a couple of the presentations but will save my comments for our meeting next Tuesday. For now, since this is my last post, I’ll provide a few reflections on blog-writing itself. I thought it was a great way of providing us with a public platform for exploring topics we found interesting, expressing ideas, and practising the formulation of written arguments in an informal setting. The emphasis on regularity rather than quality took some pressure off my shoulders, allowing me to write more freely, in a manner less restrained by self-questioning. Interestingly, the informality didn’t necessarily draw away from the value of the thoughts and ideas that were expressed in this blog. OK, maybe they were a little less structured and analytically thorough, but there was a freshness to them born from the spontaneity of the exercise. I enjoyed this freshness in my writing, which is sometimes worn away by the liberties I (perhaps necessarily) deny myself in my academic writing.

I liked reading the posts of my peers, and wish I’d given myself more time to do so on a regular basis. As the weeks went by, I felt like people grew more willing to open themselves up in their posts, to give voice to their thoughts without fear of criticism. I found it interesting to discern patterns in the types of topics that different individuals chose to explore, which reflected their personal interests. Again, this semi-academic platform was a brilliant way to encourage us to engage with the various topics that interest us, and attempt to expand on them through the lens of transnational history. I’m aware, for example, that many of my posts ended up being related, in one way or another, to literature. The title of my first post, ‘Crossing disciplinary boundaries’, foregrounded what I have subsequently attempted, which has been to question the ways in which transnational themes appear in topics that I encountered in literature such as the fossil fuel industry and petro-cultures, Italo-American migrant experiences, or travel accounts of Eastern Europe. I didn’t set out to achieve this, but it’s where my writing led me.

I feel an unexpected nostalgia as I write these final lines. It’s probably the effect of the rain which I observe through my window as I marshal my thoughts. Or it could be an anticipatory nostalgia, imagining myself in 4th year gazing back in longing at this ripe 20, so painlessly achieved. It’s also the awareness that I’m contributing my last few words to this blog, which has been passed down, year after year, through generations of budding transnationalists, and will soon be inherited by a whole new cohort. They might scroll back through past posts, find this one, and laugh at its ridiculous sentimentality, unaware that a few months down the line they would be the ones trying to find the words for an adequate conclusion.

In my last blog post I introduced you all to Johann Reinhold Forster, a Prussian naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook on Cook’s second voyage into the Pacific. When Forster moved from Prussia to England, not only did he move himself, but also his entire family. When Forster was offered the job of sailing with Captain Cook, he accepted on the condition that his eldest son Georg could join him. Georg was sixteen at the time of Cook’s voyage but had already proven himself to his father. When the Forsters still lived in Prussia, Johann Reinhold was constantly attempting to secure academic positions to teach about science and botany. While he was searching for positions however, he was constantly spending money on books about ancient history and geography; so much so, that he was almost constantly in debt. His unfortunate habit of always falling into debt would remain a major hamper for the rest of his life, as his debts followed him everywhere he went. Georg’s reputation was much higher than his father’s, especially during and after Cook’s voyage. He was highly intelligent, observational, loyal, and thoughtful, but most importantly, even tempered and easy to get along with. Johann Reinhold was the exact opposite – though he was intelligent and knew what he was doing, his horrendously unlikable personality was perhaps the most crucial aspect that prevented him from getting further recognition and success in the field.

            Before the Forsters relocated to England, Johann Reinhold was commissioned for an expedition to Russia in 1765. He brought Georg, who was then 10 years old, on this expedition, where they studied the geography, ethnology, and natural history of the region. Georg himself focused primarily on the botanical aspects. Johann Reinhold had hoped that his reports following the expedition would result in an academic post of some nature, which did not happen, as one of his reports did not fit the expectations held – an event of a similar nature happened on his return from Cook’s voyage, after it was deemed what he had planned to write was deemed by the Royal Society as unreadable, and would thus require heavy editing from an outside hire by the Society’s choosing. However, it was this Russian expedition that helped Forster get his letters of recommendation help his reputation enough to get him to England.[1]

            Georg himself did not write journals during Cook’s voyage but took some notes instead. During the publication crisis at the voyage’s completion, after much negotiation and arguments, it was decided that Johann Reinhold was not allowed to publish anything related to the voyage. However, this decree did not apply to Georg, and so Georg set to work compiling his father’s journals along with his own notes, rushing to beat Cook in publishing. The Forsters succeeded in publishing their own account roughly six weeks before Cook’s official account. Under Georg’s name, it was called: A Voyage Round the World (1777). However, in England the Forsters’ account did not sell as well as Cook’s account. Among many things, Cook’s account was complete with illustrations and woodcuts. Johann Reinhold published his scientific-focused Observations in 1778, and though it was well received and generally well regarded, was not enough to cover his continuous debts. With his reputation thoroughly slashed in England, the Forsters relocated back to Prussia once Johann Reinhold had paid off his debts and gotten enough money to make the move, a mere 3 years after the voyage had returned. Johann Reinhold managed to get a teaching position at his old university at Halle, due to Georg’s efforts in getting a post for his father.[2] Johann Reinhold taught natural history, but his classes were not popular, despite his unique exposure to the South Pacific. Again, his unfavourable personality was what hampered his success. Eventually, his classes were better attended, and he remained there until his death.[3]

            Georg, on the other hand, was offered several positions on the Forsters’ return to Prussia. His A Voyage Round the World was extremely well-received in Europe and especially in his home country. He was extremely popular in Europe and found fame as a writer and philosopher. In Paris, he crossed paths with Benjamin Franklin, and was regarded as a teacher of Alexander von Humboldt, also influencing Hegel, Goethe, and Friedrich Schlegel.[4] He went through numerous academic positions following Cook’s voyage, and continuously tried to get these positions for his father instead of himself. After multiple teaching jobs, in 1788 he accepted a position as a librarian at Mainz, where soon his life would take a dramatic turn. His wife had relationship with another man who also lived with them, and because of the ongoing French Revolution, they soon found Mainz occupied by the French. As a leader in the local Jacobin Club, Georg was, “an unofficial but trusted adviser to the French commander, a popular and successful agitator in the rural districts outside the town, and eventually the dominant voice in the National Convention that met in Mainz at the beginning of 1793”.[5] Johann Reinhold did not like Georg’s involvement with the Revolution and his radical views, and neither did many of Georg’s old friends and associates. His involvement led to the loss of many friends as well as the breakdown of his marriage.[6] In 1793, Georg went to Paris as one of three commissioners to request some of his proposed resolutions and degrees before the French National Assembly. However, when he was there, Mainz was re-occupied by allied powers. Georg found himself stranded in Paris where he worked for the republican government, remaining there until his early death in 1794 at the age of 39, having been plagued with ill health for much of his adult life.[7] So, from Prussia, to Russia, to England, to the South Pacific, back to England, back to Prussia/Germany, and then to France, Georg Forster lived a truly transnational life, where he established himself as an intellectual, writer, and scientist, all at a relatively young age.

            Despite the Forsters unique transnational experience, not a lot of attention has been paid to them. Work on Johann Reinhold Forster, in particular, pales in comparison to his counterpart on Cook’s first Endeavour voyage, Joseph Banks. Though there has been a little more work done on Georg, most of it is in relation to his dealings with the French Revolution. It is rather unfortunate that the Forsters are relatively unknown by most, as they truly do have a transnational story to tell.

            Georg’s, A Voyage Round the World, is available in ebook form from the university library. If you are interested in Johann Reinhold Forster’s handwritten journals, you can find them here: https://digital.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/suche?results_on_page=20&current_page=1&sort_on=relevance&sort_direction=desc.

[1] John Dawson, ‘The Forsters, Father and Son, Naturalists on Cook’s Second Voyage’, New Zealand Slavonic Journal (1998), pp. 100-103.

[2] Dawson, ‘The Forsters, Father and Son’, p. 107.

[3] Ibid., p. 108.

[4] Gordon A. Craig, ‘Engagement and Neutrality in Germany: The Case of Georg Forster, 1754-94’, The Journal of Modern History 41:1 (1969), pp. 1-3.

[5] Craig, ‘Engagement and Neutrality’, p. 4.

[6] Ibid., p. 5. Dawson, ‘The Forsters, Father and Son’, p. 108.

[7] Craig, ‘Engagement and Neutrality’, pp. 4-5.

These past few weeks, I focused on working on a part of my project that I had yet to fully explore. As I mentioned before, most of my work had been focused on exploring transnational feminist first wave movements in Latin America. through my research for the short essay I began exploring the idea that the reason as to why Latin American feminists aimed to create a movement alongside Iberian women, and how this idea of a shared experience could have been influenced by the experience of colonisation of Latin America by Spain and Portugal.

I began by reading a book by Susan Midgen Scolow titled ‘The Women of Colonial Latin America”. This text focuses on exploring gendered relations in Colonial Latin America and the idea of the patriarchal family unit. Nonetheless, it also explores how the arrival of Iberian Women, who had begun to arrive as settlers in the 1560s fundamentally changed the experience of womanhood in the Americas. These women brought with them a culture deep rooted in Roman Catholicism, a culture in which both womanhood and masculinity were heavily tied to concepts of honour, and a deep attachment to the family unit, all values which I still see are very much interwoven in Latin American and Iberian culture today, even more so than I had when studying other Early Modern Gender histories. (Sidenote: the fact that I can form links with gendered attitude taking place in mid 16th century demonstrates that there is something fundamentally flawed with gender in Latin America in the 21st century… a bit concerning to be honest.) 

However, what was particularly interesting to me was how the author explored the experiences of Indigenous and African women who were also present during the colonisation. Although growing up I knew of the atrocities which Indigenous women in particular had suffered, from mass rape to their subjugation into prostitution, concubinage and even slavery by male Iberian colonisers had never been a secret. Yet, this chapter sort of made me question the history education which I had received in Spain – which in taking Spain’s role as the ‘Colonisers’ had failed to truly explore the atrocities suffered by Indigenous and African Women.

Although these gender-race interactions are not the main focus of my Project, I am almost angry at myself for failing to ‘keep it in mind’ even as I was doing most of my research. At the end of the day, although they experienced racist attitudes from North American women (and also the fact that the literature regarding early Latin American feminists is very scarce), the women with participated in Transnational feminist movements in the early 20th century were all white, and most if not all were a part of the upper and middle-upper classes. They are by no means the subaltern within Latin America, and I am starting to believe that it is a deserve on my part to write a gender history which fails to consider, or even keep in mind, Indigenous and African women in Latin America.

Although I do not want to expand the scope of my project project too much (we all know where that spiral leads to and I have deadlines to meet!) I am very glad that I came across this book. I hope that reading more about the colonial experiences of Latin American women will help me formulate better links between the roles of race and gender in defining these first wave transnational movements, and that I will develop and piece of work which is more conscious regarding these disparities even if they are not the main focus of my work. Perhaps this could be an interesting direction from which to take this work later on. This is after all, a work in progress. 

I am not sure if anyone else has found it tricky to find new topics of conversations with the people around them. We tend to gain our news from the same sources, leaving little for discussion at our collective mealtimes. My parents and I were discussing normality, and the potential return to it when this is all over. It further raised the question of whether it really come to an end as soon as we hope or can predict and plan for. It is difficult to imagine returning to life before in exactly the same way. My dad compared this to travelling in the United States, or anywhere in the world for that matter, before 9/11. Moving through an airport and the precautions taken would have been a very different experience, and one we have little to no recollection of. Yet these measures are just assumed, they are no longer questioned and taken to be the norm. What will we have to adapt in our lives over the next six months to a year that will be soon considered commonplace? It might be itchy and uncomfortable at first, like a new haircut you’re not quite used to (all the girls who have cut their own fringes or boys shaving their heads in isolation) but soon you get used to it.

There was an article in the New York Times a few weeks ago, titled “Celebrity Culture is Burning” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/arts/virus-celebrities.html. There has been much criticism of certain celebrities as of late, almost preaching for people to stay home and donate despite themselves being in quite privileged situations. From Gal Gadot to Vanessa Hudgens, this has only reinforced the ‘cancelled culture’ we continue to live in and Owen rightly pointed out in his blog this week. Celebrities no longer have the same stature in our global society right now. They are not swanning around fashion weeks or award shows, on luxury island vacations, or getting ready to attend the Met Gala next Monday. They are stuck at home, much like everyone else who can afford to be, and the article highlights that this does not make them very interesting (One of the funniest things to come out of this celebrity push for solidarity is John Mayer singing the wrong version of Imagine for Gal Gadot’s rendition, I think you can find it on TikTok). This further reinforces the idea of the new normal. What new role will celebrities play, how will they fill new parameters?

What I think this time has highlighted is the power of community action, and looking within for inspiration. The power of single campaigns has captured the popular imagination. Tom Moore, the nearly 100 year-old man who has walked 100 laps of his garden for the NHS reached £1 million in donations just under a week ago. At the time of writing this blog, he has raised over £26.5 million for the NHS staff and volunteers. At a time when many charitable events have been cancelled, and conventional fundraising does not fit with social distancing, we are seeing how people adapt. Similarly, Olivia Strong’s Run for Heroes campaign which sees people run 5k and donate £5 has such a simple premise, but she has seen her initial goal of £5000 grow to over £3m. This time has not stopped people raising money, much the opposite. ‘Ordinary’ people have championed change, we have seen how local action has spread globally.   

While we could this period as one where countries are becoming increasingly insular, as borders close and politicians throw ugly comparisons to convince their critics they are doing a good job. It has also showcased empathetic leadership in many cases, it has brought local communities together, made people actually get to know their neighbours and forced a reconsideration of priorities. This will only continue, and further contribute to the new normal. How will this time be remembered? Will it be the frequent face-offs and name calling between Cuomo and Trump? Jacinda Ardern’s declaration that the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny are essential workers? Or will people like Tom Moore and the weekly 8pm clapping be written as triumphs through hardship, indicative of this British Keep Calm and Carry On mentality? It will be easy to write this pandemic through national histories, but when it is such a global issue, it will be so important to encapsulate the wider experience.  

I woke up yesterday morning to see ‘Rosa Parks’ trending on Twitter. When someone trends on Twitter these days, it is usually for one of four reasons: they’re dead (not possible in Parks’ case, since she passed away in 2005); they’ve been ‘cancelled’ (very very unlikely in Parks’ case); they’ve released new material: books, music, film etc. (again, not possible for Parks); or someone else has said something about them and sparked debate.

Indeed, Parks was trending as a result of this final category. Stephen Moore, an economic advisor to the White House, had suggested that those Americans protesting against the lockdown were ‘the modern day Rosa Parks’ because ‘they are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties’.

Putting the context of the coronavirus aside (and trying to remain apolitical), I want to consider these remarks within the context of my project, considering the advent of the civil rights movement that Parks played such an influential role in and its global impact, particularly in the subsequent civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland.

Michael Farrell, one of the leaders of People’s Democracy, an organisation central to the Northern Irish civil rights movement, gave a speech at Queen’s University, Belfast in 2018 to commemorate 50 years since the first civil rights march in Northern Ireland in 1968. In this speech, he addressed the world in which Northern Ireland found itself in 2018 and sought to suggest a relationship, or lack thereof, between it and the world that fostered the civil rights movement. He suggested that the transnational movement of ideas from the US to Northern Ireland on civil rights brought a ‘strong current of anti-racism and international solidarity that permeated the movement [in Northern Ireland]. However, as he continues, ‘fifty years later, the situation is almost reversed. Today there is a growing threat from right wing populism, xenophobia, homophobia and downright racism that has been sweeping across Europe… while anti-immigrant hostility has been a leading factor in the pro-Brexit campaign in the UK’.

This reversal can also be seen as a transnational process and (irrespective of its origins) has been present in the US in recent years, and, through Moore’s hostile comments on the nature of the injustice fought by African Americans in their civil rights movement, it has been directly expressed and exposed. The fundamental difference between Parks and her ‘modern day contemporaries’ is that Parks was fighting for the liberties she and other African Americans had never had, and the injustice that had irreparably damaged and cost lives; these ‘modern day versions’ are fighting an ‘injustice’ designed to save them.

Perhaps back in 1968, if Twitter had existed, Rosa Parks might have been trending in Northern Ireland, but, by Michael Farrell’s word, it would have been for a very different reason to the ones that exist in today’s world.

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?