The traditional theory of imperialism needs a major overhaul.
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After the Imperial Turn
: Thinking with and through the Nation
Antoinette Burton
From a variety of historically grounded perspectives, After the Imperial Turn assesses the fate of the nation as a subject of disciplinary inquiry. In light of the turn toward scholarship focused on imperialism and postcolonialism, this provocative collection investigates whether the nation remains central, adequate, or even possible as an analytical category for studying history. These twenty essays, primarily by historians, exemplify cultural approaches to histories of nationalism and imperialism even as they critically examine the implications of such approaches.
While most of the contributors discuss British imperialism and its repercussions, the volume also includes, as counterpoints, essays on the history and historiography of France, Germany, Spain, and the United States. Whether looking at the history of the passport or the teaching of history from a postnational perspective, this collection explores such vexed issues as how historians might resist the seduction of national narratives, what-if anything-might replace the nation's hegemony, and how even history-writing that interrogates the idea of the nation remains ideologically and methodologically indebted to national narratives. Putting nation-based studies in international and interdisciplinary contexts, After the Imperial Turn points toward ways of writing history and analyzing culture attentive both to the inadequacies and endurance of the nation as an organizing rubric.
Contributors. Tony Ballantyne, Antoinette Burton, Ann Curthoys, Augusto Espiritu, Karen Fang, Ian Christopher Fletcher, Robert Gregg, Terri Hasseler, Clement Hawes, Douglas M. Haynes, Kristin Hoganson, Paula Krebs, Lara Kriegel, Radhika Viyas Mongia, Susan Pennybacker, John Plotz, Christopher Schmidt-Nowara, Heather Streets, Hsu-Ming Teo, Stuart Ward, Lora Wildenthal, Gary Wilder
"This is timely intervention in the conversation on the nation sparked by critiques of the imperial foundations of modern nations and disciplines. It both assesses the fruits of the 'imperial turn" in scholarship and charts new directions on how to think and teach in the aftermath of the critiques of the nation. Incorporating perspectives from a range of disciplines and locations, the essays offer challenging reflections on the historicity of the present."-Gyan Prakash, editor of After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements
"After the Imperial Turn is an important collection of essays marking the 'coming of age' of 'new imperial history'. One of its great strengths is its range-from the big picture to the local study, from the pedagogic to the institutional, from the British exemplar to a number of comparative perspectives, from the U.S. to the Caribbean and Hong Kong. This is an essential read for aspiring young historians."-Catherine Hall, author of Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867
Antoinette Burton is Professor of History at the University of Illinois. Among her books are Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India and At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation / Antoinette Burton
1. Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking beyond the Boundaries
Rethinking British Studies: Is There Life after Empire? / Susan D. Pennybacker
Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History? / Stuart Ward
Empire and "the Nation": Institutional Practice, Pedagogy, and Nation in the Classroom / Heather Streets
We've Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already? / Ann Curthoys
Losing Our Way after the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial / Terri A. Hasseler and Paula M. Krebs
Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond) / Tony Ballantyne
2. Fortresses and Frontiers: Beyond and Within
Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity / Gary Wilder
Notes on a History of "Imperial Turns" in Modern Germany / Lora Wildenthal
After "Spain": A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara
Making the World Safe for American History / Robert Gregg
Asian American Global Discourses and the Problem of History / Augusto Espiritu
Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport / Radhika Viyas Mongia
3. Reorienting the Nation: Logics of Empire, Colony, Globe
Periodizing Johnson: Anticolonial Modernity as Crux and Critique / Clement Hawes
The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851 / Lara Kriegel
Double Meanings: Nation and Empire in the Edwardian Era / Ian Christopher Fletcher
The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress / Kristin Hoganson
The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture, and National Histories / Hsu-Ming Teo
Britain's Finest: The Royal Hong Kong Police / Karen Fang
One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire / John Plotz
The Whiteness of Civilization: The Transatlantic Crisis of White Supremacy and British Television Programming in the United States in the 1970s / Douglas M. Haynes
Selected Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index