Description
Book SynopsisUsing Australian history as a case study, this collection explores the ways national identities still resonate in historical scholarship and reexamines key moments in Australian history through a transnational lens, raising important questions about the unique context of Australia’s national narrative. The book examines the tension between national and transnational perspectives, attempting to internationalize the often parochial nation-based narratives that characterize national history.
Moving from the local and personal to the global, encompassing comparative and international research and drawing on the experiences of researchers working across nations and communities, this collection brings together diverging national and transnational approaches and asks several critical research questions: What is transnational history? How do new transnational readings of the past challenge conventional national narratives and approaches? What are implications of transnational and international approaches on Australian history? What possibilities do they bring to the discipline? What are their limitations? And finally, how do we understand the nation in this transnational moment?
Trade Review“This volume brings together some of our most respected historians to consider the impact of the transnational on Australian history making, on how historians approach their craft, the questions they ask, the sources they seek and how they utilise them. … This volume is a welcome and timely addition to the Australian historiographical canon.” (Malcolm Allbrook, Australian Historical Studies, Vol. 49 (3), 2018)
Table of ContentsTesting the Boundaries: Reflections on Transnationalism in Australian History.-
Section I Crossing Borders: New Transnational Histories.- A Tale of Two Rivers: The Cooks River and the Los Angeles River in Transnational and Comparative Perspective.- Australia’s Black History: The Politics of Comparison and Transnational Indigenous Activism in Commonwealth Settler States.- Rebel Handmaidens: Transpacific Histories and the Limits of Transnationalism.- Transnationalism and the Writing of Australian Women’s History.-
Section II National Histories in an Age of Transnationalism.- Is Australian History Over-determined by the Transnational Turn?.- Australia’s 1980s in Transnational Perspective.- Subjects and Readers: National and Transnational Contexts.- Reading Postwar Reconstruction Through National and Transnational Lenses.-
Section III Intimacy and Transnationalism: Reading Vernacular Histories.- Thinking Transnationally about Sexuality: Homosexuality in Australia or Australian Homosexualities?.- Family History and Transnational Historical Consciousness.- Intimate Jurisdictions: Reflections upon the Relationship Between Sentiment, Law and Empire.
