[Co-authored by Feng Bo and Yu Shi)<\/p>\n
Edward Said\u2019s text \u2018Orientalism\u2019 has become exceptionally famous in terms of promoting the negatives of colonial history. The ideas of the \u2018Self\u2019 and the \u2018Other,\u2019 have led to a lot of focus on the impact that colonial history has had on modern day thinking of racial hierarchy. Said\u2019s insight has opened our eyes to the biases that are implicit in any kinds of writing. With a focus on the colonised and the coloniser, the binary\u2019s of discourse are put into focus, and they are usually very static. Tagged on to that, is the idea that colonial history is all about \u2018oppression and resistance\u2019 – the coloniser is always the oppressor, and the colonised always suffer the brunt, or will eventually end up in revolt and being liberated. The pitfall of this is that historians will tend to construct a narrative which is rather homogenous. For instance, a lot of colonial history has been written about how the British empire exploited the resources in her colonies, shedding light on the ways that the colony is administered, or trading benefits that were resulted.<\/span><\/p>\n But colonial history cannot be so black or white, there are a lot more links that only through a transnational perspective can these be put into focus. With the concept of \u2018agency\u2019 that transnational history focuses on, the people living under the colony can perform so many more activities than simply \u2018resisting colonial rule\u2019 or \u2018plotting to overthrow the colonial overlords\u2019. As we see in Lindner\u2019s text, those within the colony can make their own identity through their movement. In Lindner\u2019s example, those within the British Cape Colony moved across colonial borders to the German colony Luderitzbucht, and utilising their affiliation with the British empire, were successful in negotiating with the German employers for a pay rise. This is an example that moves away from the concrete terms that Said uses of the \u2018colonised\u2019 or the \u2018coloniser\u2019 and shows that there is a fluidity to the terms, to emphasise that there are not set binaries. While not arguing against Said\u2019s ideology that there is a power discourse, as there will always be a power imbalance between peoples, merely making clear that within colonial history the colonised cannot always be linked together as the repressed. Lindner\u2019s text raises this point, for instance where migrant workers from the Cape town \u2018changed their racial status successfully\u2019, thus showing the instability of racial categories, and that strict demarcation lines were not available.<\/span><\/p>\n In significant ways, transnational history expands the horizons of imperial history, first by shifting the focus away from the power relations between the \u2018coloniser and the colonised\u2019, the \u2018oppressor and the oppressed\u2019 or the \u2018Self and the Other\u2019. The assumption of transnational history is that the stories and experiences of people who cannot be so easily categorised in one of these binaries also merit our attention – people who occupy the grey areas, possessing ambiguous identities (as in the case of \u2018coloured people\u2019 in Luderitzbucht) and more than one affiliation (German and British). These migrant workers\u2019 protests against German authorities had less to do with colonial politics (gaining autonomy from their colonial overlords) than with personal economic benefits (pay rise). Lindner\u2019s piece is a good example to show how transnational history can broaden the scope of imperial history by re-focusing on the diverse kinds of \u2018people\u2019 who make up colonial history, and in the process empowering them with a sense of agency.<\/span><\/p>\n Note from Clarence (Feng Bo):<\/span><\/p>\n Before coming back to edit this blog post, I browsed the course handbook to find any other relevant readings, and came across Anthony Hopkins\u2019 piece (see bibliography below) \u00a0which I also recommend. His discussion is relevant here for a couple of reasons: 1. He talks of the concepts of \u2018dominant centre\u2019 and \u2018centres of influence\u2019 as \u2018unacceptable anachronisms\u2019 because it perpetuates Eurocentrism and possibly covert racism. And from our discussion so far, reconceptualising the importance of the spatial dimension is key to transnational history. 2. Hopkins suggests that a re-cast of imperial history after postmodernism means a \u2018retreat from hard political and economic questions that were once central to imperial history\u2019 and that postmodernism has helped to enlarge the field of cultural history. I think this is a useful observation. The challenge would be to incorporate these macro-frameworks into other equally valid (macro or micro) frameworks. Lindner\u2019s piece does it quite well by using the case of migrant workforce to bring in discussions on aspects of culture, such as identity. 3. We mentioned Orientalism in our post, but Hopkins also warns of it as a \u2018totalising project\u2019 that \u2018generalises about Western views of the rest of the world by assembling a composite known as \u201cOrientalism\u201d,\u2019 which I find apt. So the kind of \u2018writing-back\u2019 to imperial history is not to commit the same errors that it is criticised for, but to pay close attention to variations due to regional, ethnic, political, and other such differences.<\/span><\/p>\n Bibliography:<\/span><\/p>\n Hopkins, Anthony, \u2018Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History\u2019, <\/span>Past and Present<\/span><\/i> 164 (1999), 198-243<\/span><\/p>\n Lindner, Ulrike. \u201cTransnational Movements between Colonial Empires: Migrant Workers from the British Cape Colony in the German Diamond Town of L\u00fcderitzbucht.\u201d <\/span>European Review of History: Revue Europeenne D\u2019histoire<\/span><\/i> 16, no. 5 (2009): 679\u201395<\/span><\/p>\n Said, Edward, <\/span>Orientalism, <\/span><\/i>(London, 2013)<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [Co-authored by Feng Bo and Yu Shi) Edward Said\u2019s text \u2018Orientalism\u2019 has become exceptionally famous in terms of promoting the negatives of colonial history. The ideas of the \u2018Self\u2019 and the \u2018Other,\u2019 have led to a lot of focus on<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-652","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5wNtZ-aw","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=652"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":655,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/652\/revisions\/655"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=652"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=652"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/transnationalhistory.net\/doing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=652"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}