Reconstruction 8.4 (2008)
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Ian Tyrrell. Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective. Houndmills, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 286 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4039-9368-7.
<1> About nine decades after Randolph Bourne's much-cited pamphlet "Trans-National America" was published on the eve of the U.S.'s entry to World War [1], the field of American Studies has recently undergone what has been called a transnational turn. Within this paradigm, the focus of study is increasingly on the transnational exchange of ideas and goods, on border-crossing migrations of people, and on how all of these movements shape (and are shaped by) cultural discourses within and outside the U.S., always in a historically diachronic perspective [2]. Bourne, coining the term "trans-national", started his essay by an analysis of the failure of the leading self-image of American society as a melting pot, a passage that has not entirely lost its actuality if one regards the surge of a narrowly defined, nationalist patriotism since 9/11, a discourse which has claimed the solidification rather than a diversification of America as a desirable goal to fend off potential enemies:
No reverberatory effect of the great war has caused American public opinion more solicitude than the failure of the "melting-pot." The discovery of diverse nationalistic feelings among our great alien population has come to most people as an intense shock. It has brought out the unpleasant inconsistencies of our traditional beliefs. We have had to watch hard-hearted old Brahmins virtuously indignant at the spectacle of the immigrant refusing to be melted, while they jeer at patriots like Mary Antin who write about our "forefathers." We have had to listen to publicists who express themselves as stunned by the evidence of vigorous traditionalistic and cultural movements in this country among Germans, Scandinavians, Bohemians and Poles, while in the same breath they insist that the alien shall be forcibly assimilated to that Anglo-Saxon tradition which they unquestionably label "American." As the unpleasant truth has come upon us that assimilation in this country was proceeding on lines very different from those we had marked out for it, we found ourselves inclined to blame those who were thwarting our prophecies. (86)
Rambling against an understanding of Americanization as assimilation to Anglo-Saxon culture, Bourne's central argument was that the United States was, and had always been, uniquely transnational in terms of ethnicity and culture. It is this unique trait Bourne sees as the greatest asset. A concept of the nation as transnational, in contrast to the melting-pot ideology, implies to understand the immigrant not as a subject to be quickly assimilated but as an agent in an ongoing process of cultural and national definition:
To face the fact that our aliens are already strong enough to take a share in the direction of their own destiny (…), is not, however, to admit the failure of Americanization. It is not to fear the failure of democracy. It is rather to urge us to an investigation of what Americanism may rightly mean. It is to ask ourselves whether our ideal has been broad or narrow - whether perhaps the time has not come to assert a higher ideal than the "melting-pot." (…). We act as if we wanted Americanization to take place only on our own terms, and not by the consent of the governed. All our elaborate machinery of settlement and school and union, of social and political naturalization, however, will move with friction just in so far as it neglects to take into account this strong and virile insistence that America shall be what the immigrant will have a hand in making it (…). (ibid.)
Bourne's writing implies a culture-based definition of transnationalism intricately linked to immigration; he sees the richest resource for American cultural wealth in its nature as an immigrant nation, thereby upholding diversity as a core value of national democratic development (though he has no appreciation whatsoever for cultural mixing or hybridity). Unsurprisingly, immigration and its social, political, and cultural implications have remained at the heart of transnational research in American studies. Yet the revived focus on America as a transnational nation in historical and cultural studies has also striven to broaden the range of inquiry comprised by the new paradigm. In her presidential address to the American Studies Association (ASA) of 2004, Shelley Fisher Fishkin addresses the consequences of a transnational turn for the field of American Studies [3]. Fisher Fishkin, renowned professor of English at Stanford University, devises a tentative outline for transnational American Studies, whose purpose would no longer be "exporting and championing an arrogant, pro-American nationalism" but "understanding the multiple meanings of America and American culture in all their complexity" (20), an endeavor requiring a view beyond the geographical territory of the U.S. in order to find out "how the nation is seen from vantage points beyond its borders" (ibid.).
<2> In the context of the New American Studies of the 1990s, an awareness for the constitutiveness of foreign relations in the formation of the United States had already developed, questioning the national mythology beyond the spadework done by earlier Myth and Symbol School and exploring the U.S. beyond national borders. Drawing on postcolonial scholarly work, Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease have famously lamented that cultural studies have neglected the significance of the American empire; they claimed it was necessary to develop new perspectives on American culture and imperialism [4], and one could argue that the transnational turn attempts to redeem this claim. Scholars in this context self-consciously locate their work within the discourse of "global-localism" (Kaplan/Pease 26) and have thus introduced the analysis of phenomena linked to globalization and of globalization discourses themselves into the field. This step has led to critically examine the U.S., as Paul Lauter states, as part of a world system in which the flow of goods and capital on the one hand and of cultural products and processes on the other knew "no borders" [5]. Over the last decades, the nation, according to Fisher Fishkin, was being replaced as "the basic unit of, and frame for, analysis" (21) by a net of contact zones now at the center of study:
The complexity of our field of study (…) requires that we pay as much attention to the ways in which ideas, people, culture, and capital have circulated and continue to circulate physically, and virtually, throughout the world, both in ways we might expect, and unpredictably; it requires that we view America, as David Palumbo-Liu put it, as a place "always in process itself." It requires that we see the inside and outside, domestic and foreign, national and international, as interpenetrating. (ibid.)
<3> Transnational Nation is also the intriguing title of Ian Tyrrell's latest ambitious monograph, in which the author, professor of history at the University of New South Wales, Australia, rewrites United States History in Global Perspective since 1789, the year that ended the revolutionary period (cf. 3). In the brief and concise introduction to his study, Tyrrell does not stumble into the pitfall that has often been characteristic of transnational studies, a pitfall that both Fisher Fishkin and Lauter do not entirely escape. He acknowledges that in contrast to the term "postnationalism" transnationalism does not negate the continuing importance of nation states and their borders both as a political category and as an identificatory potential (recurring on Benedict Andersons definition of the nation as an "imagined community"). The concept relies heavily on the existence of nations in order to analyze historical and cultural phenomena exceeding the national or irreducible to this category. Transnational approaches like Tyrrell's take into account the changing importance of the nation and nationalist discourses and view nations like the U.S. as always transnationally produced,
that is, the regional and global context o security, economic competition and demographic change means that the boundaries of the nation have had to be made. They do not exist in isolation. National identities have been defined against other identities, including the transnational phenomena that impinge upon the nation as it is constructed. (3-4)
Outlining his framework of study and terms of analysis here, Tyrrell briefly defines transnational history as focused on "the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across transnational boundaries" in "the period since the emergence of nation-states [with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648] as important phenomena in world history" (3). By drawing on developments within history such as the emergence of Atlantic history (Bernard Baylin), world history, and global history, Tyrrell looks at both the regional and global levels and at processes of globalization of both the economy and of ideas as they have shaped America since its beginnings. America's role in the uneven process of globalization(s), the "uneven growth of globally focused influences and institutions" (7), has been contradictory, Tyrrell asserts, both promoting and retarding globalization: promoting, for instance, the dissemination of American popular culture while simultaneously building on nationalist ideologies like that of American exceptionalism, unilateralism, and isolationism.
<4> The many ways in which the U.S. has connected with regional and world history, of which empire is only one, are at the heart of Tyrrell's historical tour-de-force, covering roughly 220 years on about the same amount of pages. One of his main arguments is that there were two key forces driving the global expansion of the country: the "economics of a dynamic trading and commercial nation" and a "set of cultural imperatives" (7) that have made the world-wide transmission of American culture central, mainly because of the nation's immigrant composition. As part of these imperatives, moral and ideological forces have been "intrinsic to a transnational outlook" as "[t]hey mixed in a potent brew encouraging the United States to look outward to provide moral leadership while at the same time marking the nation off from other nations" (8).
<5> In the 14 chapters to follow, the author concentrates on economic and cultural aspects - arguably with a little more emphasis on the former and, at least from a cultural studies scholars' perspective like my own, not always enough on the latter - in the development of the U.S. as a transnationally shaped political unit. Chapter one looks at how America was born "in the struggles of empires" (10), freeing itself from colonial rule in an age of transnational revolutionary thought (with an emphasis on the French and the Haitian revolutionary struggles as intertexts for their American counterpart). Chapter two shifts its attention to "economic connections and disconnections" (20) of the young nation in the late 18th and throughout the 19th century, continued by an analysis of transnational political and social reform movements like temperance, prison reform, and abolitionism in that century in chapter three. Tyrrell remains in the 19th century in chapter four, which has the migration experience at its center. This chapter is continued in chapters five and six, which focus on slavery and the slave trade as "unwilling" immigration (65) and on racial and ethnic discourses as they were connected to the American frontier experience, respectively. Chapter seven takes a fresh look at the Civil War by highlighting its "world historical implications" (84), and chapter eight discusses travel to and from the United States between 1865 and World War I. The next two sections look at the progressive era (ch. nine), culminating in America's age of empire (ch. ten) in which the nation became itself a colonial power. America's role in World War I is at issue in chapter eleven, followed by two too brief chapters on the period between 1925 and 1970, which was marked by wars and the coming of the American century as well as by "insular impulses" (187) of unilateralism. The last chapter (14) is concerned with the three decades from 1971 to 2001, in which both American "transnational power" (201) and its limitations became prevalent. A short epilogue considers 9/11 as a transnational event, trying to correct a reception of the terrorist attacks that "obscured multiculturalism and transnational influences" (225).
<6> There is no doubt that the publication of a monograph like Tyrrell's is a benchmark event in the development of transnational scholarship in history and American Studies, and as such it is laudable that its author did not shy away from his monumental endeavor. Equally impressive are Tyrrell's readable writing style, the range of transnational phenomena he takes into view (from agricultural, industrial, and media technology transfers to global finance and popular culture), and his broadening of a merely transatlantic perspective to include American interrelations with the Pacific area as well, with Asia and even Australia. To my knowledge, the study represents the first comprehensive account of American history from a transnational perspective, and as such unsurprisingly reads like a collection of results of transnationally focused micro-research of all kinds and in many areas and disciplines.
<7> That an ambitious project like Tyrrell's must have its flaws perhaps goes without saying, especially in a field that is relatively young and has not produced too many standard works for orientation. The relative brevity of the monograph in view of its aspiration to cover not exemplary periods, but every single historical period since the formation of the United States is one factor which accounts for the partial impression of superficiality (added by a number of spelling errors like Wehrmach instead of Wehrmacht, or [Franz] Boaz instead of Boas) and lack of abstraction or more in-depth analysis; a little less comprehensiveness would have been well worth to add more insight into what a transnational approach to American history is capable of doing and how it relates to older, related paradigms and concepts. When Tyrrell discusses, for example, the cultural transfer processes that marked post-WWII Euro-American relations, one misses at least a mentioning of Reinhold Wagnleitner's formative conception of American cultural imperialism as "Coca-Colonization" [6], not to mention a critique and/or engagement with its significance within a transnational approach to postwar cultural history. A point one could make from such a transnational angle would be to look at other areas of cultural influence than the occupied European nations, the traditional object of study for transatlantic historians. Instead of discussing such issues in any detail, Tyrrell's analyses often stop short at a single sentence which appears in almost all of his chapters: that "[t]he American state was transnationally produced" (119) or, in a different version only three pages later, that "[t]he nation state was produced transnationally" (122). As this statement is programmatic for the book and spelled out as such clearly in its introduction, it does not need constant repetition to a level at which the reader can finish the sentence without reading on. What this sentence implies for history as a field of study, and how exactly this kind of transnational production takes places at times remains regrettably elusive.
<8> Yet the feeling of vagueness that this repetitiveness effects in the reader is also due to another problem: the book's lack of conceptual distinction beyond its introduction. One is at times inclined to heretically ask who really needs a "transnational" turn or paradigm in order to study the relations between the United States and other countries, which historians and political scientists have been doing long before the 'trans-'word came en vogue. Fellow transnational historian Micol Seigel, for instance, has been able to outline, however tentatively, a distinction between international history and transnational history in terms of concept and methodology in a few pages in an essay entitled "Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn," while Tyrrell never even poses the question. How is transnational history different from world history, how related? In how far do transnational studies require a different methodology from comparative history? Not only do questions like these need to be addressed in the introduction to a book bearing "transnational" so prominently in its title, it also needs to make consistent conceptual distinctions in its case studies. Although Tyrrell's introduction at least attempts to do so in some respects, it is much too short to present an overview and critique of the concept of transnationalism, which would have helped to ground the author's theoretical framework more solidly than is the case. Unfortunately, Tyrrell at times also mixes and equates the terms "international" and "transnational," as when he characterizes the Progressive Era: "(…) the international struggle to strengthen the nation - the transnational production of the nation - was integral to progressivism" (122).
<9> All in all, Transnational Nation is an impressive array of the "bewildering variety of transnational contacts" (171) well worth reading despite a number of points of criticism one can level against it - not only because it shows that the transnational turn in American Studies is by no means completed but is instead in dire need of further conceptualization, but also because it testifies to the worthwhileness of this approach for the many fresh angles it yields on subjects heretofore considered simply "American." Thus, I read Tyrrell's study, no doubt an important step for the transnational to keep turning, as an inspiration for further study. To end with Randolph Bourne, "[l]et us make something of this trans-national spirit instead of outlawing it" (97). [7]
Notes
[1] Bourne, Randolph. "Trans-National America." Atlantic Monthly 118 (Juli 1916): 86-97. [^]
[2] This change of paradigms within the field can be seen in a plethora of recent publications transnational perspectives in American Studies, among them John Carlos Rowe, ed., Post-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000) and Rowe, The New American Studies (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002); Jane C. Desmond and Virginia R. Domínguez, "Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism," American Quarterly 48.3 (1996): 475–90; Michael Cowan and Eric Sandeen, "The Internationalization of American Studies," American Studies Newsletter 71.4 (1994); Günter Lenz, "Internationalizing American Studies: Predecessors, Paradigms, and Cultural Critique - A View from Germany," in Predecessors: Intellectual Lineages in American Studies, ed. Rob Kroes (Amsterdam: VUP, 1999): 236–55; Lenz, "Toward a Dialogics of International American Culture Studies: Transnationality, Border Discourses, and Public Culture(s)" in The Futures of American Studies, ed. Donald Pease und Robyn Wiegman (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2002), 461–85; Heinz Ickstadt, "American Studies in an Age of Globalization," American Quarterly 54.4 (2002): 543–62; Robert A. Gross, "The Transnational Turn: Rediscovering American Studies in a Wider World," Journal of American Studies 34.3 (2000): 373–93; Rodica Mihaila, "Cultural Translation and the Discourse of Transnationalism in American Studies," in Transatlantic Connections: Essays in Cultural Relocation, ed. Rodica Mihaila and Irina Grigorescu Pana (Bukarest: Editura Integral, 2000); Rediscovering America: American Studies in the New Century, ed. Kousar J. Azam (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 2001); John Muthyala, "'America' in Transit: The Heresies of American Studies Abroad," Comparative American Studies 1.4 (2003): 395–420; Doris Friedensohn, "Towards a Post-Imperial, Transnational American Studies: Notes of a Frequent Flier," American Studies 38.2 (1997); Susan Gillman, Kirsten Silva Greusz, and Rob Wilson, eds., Worlding American Studies, Sonderheft Comparative American Studies 2.3 (2004); Bernard Mergen, "Can American Studies Be Globalized?" American Studies 41.2/3 (2003): 303–20; Richard P. Horwitz, ed. Exporting America: Essays on American Studies Abroad (New York: Garland, 1993), Priscilla Wald, "Minefields and Meeting Grounds: Transnational Analyses and American Studies," American Literary History 10:1 (1998), 199–218. [^]
[3] "Crossroads of Cultures: The Transnational Turn in American Studies - Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, Nov. 12, 2004." American Quarterly 57.1 (2005): 17-57. [^]
[4] Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993). [^]
[5] Qtd. in Fisher Fishkin, 21. [^]
[6] Cf. Wagnleitner, Reinhold. Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War. Translated by Diana M. Wolf. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994. [^]
[7] Seigel, Micol. "Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn." Radical History Review 91 (2005): 62-90. [^]
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