Ramón Gutiérrez has remarked that the fundamental problem of historiography is the persistent devotion to telling history in contiguity with the rise and progress of the nation-state (“What's Love Got to Do With It?” Journal of American History 88:3 [December 2001]: 868). This is no accident. Virtually all of us have been trained since grammar school to think about the past as the story of a particular nation, usually our own. We are taught to study the formation of “citizen-subjects” of the state in hope of becoming the same. National boundaries and nationalist frameworks shape the plot and determine the cast of characters (American history must be about American citizens). The nation-state, consequently, functions as the default mode for examining “what has happened.”
In the past decade, however, transnational methods have emerged in departure from this approach, opting instead to recognize that invented geopolitical borders are by no means impermeable boundaries, and that societies are networks, first and foremost, marked by constant movements, exchanges, intricate relations and interests of power, and intersubjectivities that transcend the nation-state. Recent examples include Thomas Bender's edited Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and John Carlos Rowe's edited Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The editors of Race, Nation, and Empire in American History “tilt their hats” to the revisionist imperative of these new approaches in order to craft an astute volume whose fifteen selections “rechart the historical mainstream” (7) to examine the confluence of race, the nation-state, and imperialism as a historical and ongoing phenomenon. In so doing, they prudently eschew any naive euphoria over the “global village,” soberly emphasizing instead that the crossing of boundaries has involved the making of new boundaries.
Part 1, “Who's Who: American Encounters with Race,” examines scientific and popular conceptions of racial taxonomy. The essay by Vernon Williams, Jr., maps the complicated shifts in the ideas of renowned anthropologist Franz Boaz concerning racial difference and black inferiority. Contrary to popular assumption, Williams explains, Boaz spent most of his career convinced that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. But Williams shows how Boaz's bold emphasis on the importance of variation within racial groups became a means of dislodging easy assumptions about the usefulness of race as a predictor of individual capacity. He situates Boaz's racist yet revisionist scholarship as a progressive influence within the context of other social scientists' generally unwavering devotion to eugenics and suppression of black participation in U.S. society.
The essays in part 2, “Ironies of Empire,” critically examine histories of U.S. imperialism, demonstrating how foreign policy, travel, consumerism, and expansionism have been central to imagining and constituting America. Eric Love delivers richly in this section in a revisionist study of the relationship between whiteness and imperialism. Departing from the dominant assumption that white supremacy always functions to promote expansionism, he examines the history of U.S. imperialism in Hawaii to elucidate a far more complicated and deeply troubling reality.
The contributors to part 3, “Engendering Race, Nation, and Empire,” finely examine how gender has shaped ideas about racial essence and has motivated American imperial domination. Louise Newman's essay compellingly discusses how fierce contention over the proper role of women was integral to debates over the proper place of “inferior” races, characterized as “feminine” and childlike. And Matt Garcia's essay on Mexican American immigrants in California during the mid-1900s proffers a fresh perspective on American masculinities, shaped by race and imperialism.
In part 4, “Crossings,” the essays render in brilliant terms the transnational networks of American subjects. The rich linkages between the American South and the Caribbean are front and center in Matthew Guterl's fascinating study of Eliza McHatton, who fled a crumbling Confederacy with her slaves to Mexico and subsequently to Cuba (where slavery remained legal after its demise in the United States). Like many other white Southerners of the era, McHatton established a hyper-privileged life within the racial aristocracy of the Caribbean, brutally employing both Chinese laborers and African slaves. Guterl vividly portrays the deeply international aura of Southern states and, in a provocative and innovative purview, assesses with nuance the complex nature of Southern whiteness in a transnational domain that surely promises to resituate radically how the South is studied.
Melani McAlister's is one of the very fine essays in part 5, “End Times.” McAlister crafts an insightful study of Samuel Huntington's thesis of the clash of civilizations and its many reincarnations. She explains how easy assumptions about the immiscibility of Western civilization and the “Islamic world” fail to account for the complicated, sometimes contradictory ideas of the varieties of U.S. evangelicals. Some portray Islamic society as fundamentally different from “the West” while others insist that the “Arab world” both needs and desires U.S. intervention through democratization. Through carefully interpreting pivotal developments and shifts in secular and religious responses to 9/11 and the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, McAlister achieves a brilliant assessment of a prevailing trend: the recent history of global evangelicalism, although often U.S.-inspired, transcends devotion to nation-states per se to advance often disturbing strategies for a global Christian civilization.
All of the essays offer innovative, deeply informed approaches to themes of race and the nation-state as derived through historical and ongoing imperialism. It is no accident that the theme of empire is ubiquitous in this work, for colonialisms past and ongoing have most intensively provoked migrations and the spiraling impositions of powerful polities over stateless peoples within borders and over territories beyond. The result is a keen volume that will inform and provoke readers to think anew about what has been taken as familiar. To the extent that anthologies can potentially point up the avant-garde purview of scholarship, this one is especially successful. Graduate seminars in American historiography certainly cannot afford to miss the methodological intervention achieved by this volume. The essays' interdisciplinarity runs deep, and the balanced, thoughtful selection of topics promises to be nothing short of provocative and rewarding for scholars and students across multiple fields of study.
