This book focuses on the 20th century lives of men and women whose
life-work and life experiences transgressed and surpassed the
national boundaries that existed or emerged in the 20th century.
The chapters explore how these life-stories add innovative
transnational perspectives to the entangled histories of the world
wars, decolonization, the Cold War and post-colonialism. The
subjects vary from artists, intellectuals, and politicians to
ordinary citizens, each with their own unique set of experiences,
interactions and interpretations. They trace the building of
socio-cultural and professional networks, the casual encounters of
everyday life, and the travel, translation, and preserving of life
stories in different media. In these multiple ways the book makes a
strong case for reclaiming lost personal narratives that have been
passed over by more orthodox nation-state focused approaches. These
explorations make use of social and historical categories such as
class, gender, religion and race in a transnational context,
arguing that the transnational characteristics of these categories
overflow the nation-state frame. In this way they can be used to
'unhinge' the primarily national context of history-writing. By
drawing on personal records and other primary sources, the chapters
in this book release many layers of subjectivity otherwise lost,
enabling a richer understanding of how individuals move through,
interact with and are affected by the major events of their time.
"Taking up what the editors refer to as the 'casual border
crossings of everyday life,' this collection considers how lives
are made in, through, beyond, and in spite of, nation-state
configurations. The essays demonstrate that transnational
encounters - human, material, conceptual, and translational -
enable unique and sometimes unexpected contact zones, and further,
show how a transnational lens can complicate and unsettle
understandings of class, race, gender, and ethnicity, but also, and
importantly, life writing and transnationalism themselves." - Prof.
dr. Sonja Boon, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada "This
volume is a call to question national contexts as self-evident
starting points for life writing. Rather than presenting a limiting
method or perspective on the transnational lives of the central
figures (and objects) in each chapter, the authors show that
unhinging the national framework implies grappling with discursive
powers such as archival arrangements, international networks as
legacies of past imperial spaces, and inequalities in terms of
gender, race, class, and language. Unhinging the national framework
also helps demonstrate how national frameworks push and pull, while
transnational allegiances add up, overlap, and conflict. The
evocative episodes of the lives (and in some cases the deaths) of
the volume's historical actors help us, as readers, to reflect on
the continued dominance of national frameworks in our current
globalized world, and what they mean in our own lives." - Prof. dr.
Susan Legene, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!