Abstract
Reviewed by: Anne Rees, University of Sydney, Australia
In 1986 Joan Scott proclaimed gender ‘a useful category of historical analysis’. Five years later, Ian Tyrrell announced the ‘new transnational history’. Over subsequent decades, these twin interventions brought the issue of borders and their permeability into the heart of academic writing about the past. Now, in Women in Transnational History, the two approaches are superimposed for what is, remarkably, almost the first time. Although feminist scholars were at the forefront of the transnational turn, much of this work focused upon enriching their existing subfield. This is true of Gender History in Transnational Perspective (2014), edited by Daniel Schönpflug and Oliver Janz, as well as Bonnie Smith’s three-volume Women’s History in Global Perspective (2004–2006). Yet while gender historians are eagerly transnational, transnational and global historians have been slow to reciprocate. In its first six years of publication, not a single article in the Journal of Global History foregrounded women or gender.
This is the lacuna Women in Transnational History sets out to address. As noted in a lucid introduction, the book aims to provide ‘fresh transnational perspectives on the study of women’s history’ and ‘advance scholarship in transnational and global history’ (1). Most notably, by situating women and their experiences at the heart of transnational scholarship, it offers a corrective to ‘“grand narratives” of globalisation’ that elide the ‘“micro” realities of everyday lives’ and the ‘role of human agency in affecting change’ (1). For those frustrated that transnational women’s history has too often been limited to feminist organizations and networks, this more ambitious agenda represents a breath of fresh air. Indeed, the introduction reads almost as a manifesto for a new supranational history, one that interrogates the pervasive gendering of the global as a masculine terrain and casts women as agents in the making of a globalized world.
To this end, the editors present nine case studies, ranging from the late nineteenth century to the present, arranged into three sections. The first section focuses on transnational networks and connections, the second considers women’s agency in the context of imperialism and nationalism, while the third examines the co-constitution of the local and the global. These chapters are truly global in scope. We begin in India, move on to Japan and the Philippines, pass through Russia and Italy, and end up in Britain, New Zealand and Vanuatu. The list of contributors is similarly cosmopolitan, featuring historians from throughout Europe, Japan and the Anglophone world. This geographical diversity attests to the potential of a gendered transnational history, and exposes the reader to a rich array of approaches and subjects already under investigation. But it also poses its own challenges. To venture such broad coverage within the already capacious rubric of women’s and transnational history risks producing a volume that fails to hang together.
Fortunately, several common threads lend a degree of cohesion. Biography is fruitfully utilized in four chapters, further testifying that the individual life provides an ideal vehicle to trace entanglements across national borders. Also conspicuous is a focus on representation and discourse, which highlights that gender history – with its origins in the linguistic turn – is liable to bring a welcome cultural lens to the hitherto strongly materialist fields of transnational and global history. And the sophisticated analyses of national imperatives and identities remind us that a global optic does not preclude the study of nation-states, which were themselves remarkably transnational creations. But still, the links between individual chapters and the overarching agenda are at times underdeveloped. Each case study brims with historical detail and insight, but more extensive explication of their theoretical and methodological implications for transnational history would not have gone amiss.
On a related note, discussion of key terminology is conspicuous by its absence. As the editors make clear, the volume expressly eschews the definitional quagmire in which so many accounts of supranational history have become bogged. Although understandable, such disregard for definition does give rise to the seeming conflation of the numerous overlapping but arguably distinct modes of conceiving history beyond the nation-state. ‘Transnational’ and ‘global’, in particular, are used almost interchangeably. The prominence of imperial frames also merited further interrogation. Six of the chapters discuss histories of empire, and several could be reproduced, almost unmodified, within volumes of imperial scholarship. This begs the question: how does the ‘imperial’ figure vis-à-vis the ‘transnational’? Is the former a subset of the latter? Or are the two distinct but entangled? What makes an imperial history transnational?
In lieu of a conclusion, the book ends with a call to arms. If the introduction insists upon greater engagement between women’s and transnational history, Alison Twells’s final chapter makes a convincing case that historians working at this juncture must further engage with the public sphere to displace the ongoing pre-eminence of masculinist national narratives. With the volume bookended by such invigorating directives, the reader is left in no doubt that the project of gendering our transnational pasts promises to be transformative both within and without the academy.