In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Transcending the National in Migration History in North America
  • Yukari Takai (bio)
Alexander Freund, ed., Beyond the Nation?: Immigrants’ Local Lives in Transnational Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012)
Grace Peña Delgado, Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012)
Aya Fujiwara, Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity: Japanese, Ukrainians, and Scots, 1919–1971 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2012)

Migration history and ethnic history have come a long way from their earlier emphases on the celebration of ethnic heroes, on ethnic contribution to nation-building projects, and on victimization of racial minorities in Canada and the United States. This shift has stemmed largely from the engagement on the part of migration historians in the approaches of social history, history from the bottom up, and the activism and the consciousness that feminist, civil rights, and countercultural movements fostered in the 1960s and 1970s.1 Beginning in the 1990s, transnational history began to shift the focus of historical writing beyond the confines of the nation-centred history which had dominated historical narratives since the 19th century. Migration historians have been at the forefront of a transnational turn even since before this phrase gained currency. Exploring a new set of sources and new perspectives, they have expanded and complicated the burgeoning fields of transnational history and borderlands history. They have also recovered the agency of men and [End Page 243] women on the move, their families and friends who waited for them or who joined them. They have further explored the complicated and wide-ranging roles of third parties of migration such as labour contractors, immigration companies, and other intermediaries who interacted with the migrants on the one hand and with government officials and immigration authorities on the other hand. Gender and feminist historians of migration, for their part, have disaggregated ethnic groups and families through their examination of gendered relations, social classes, and unequal power distribution within a family and an ethnic group. As a result, their research has revealed immigrant families and ethnic groups to be simultaneously a site of comfort and an arena of contestation.2 Alexander Freund’s Beyond the Nation?, Grace Peña Delgado’s Making the Chinese Mexican, and Aya Fujiwara’s Ethnic Elites and Canadian Identity each offers a compelling example of the results of such efforts.

Freund’s and Delgado’s studies challenge the limitations of the nation-state centred history while Fujiwara’s sheds new light on the contribution of ethnic leaders in the transformation of Canadian identity. The limitations of nation-centred history are numerous ranging from delimiting metanarratives of nationalistic historiographies (such as American exceptionalism) to inherent biases in methodology (such as methodological nationalism).3 Migration historians are among those who were most keenly aware of such limitations in historical research based on nation-state centred history. True, one cannot deny the benefit, the insights, and the centrality that the nation-centred history continues to yield. Neither can one overlook the observation that the nature of the transformation that transnational history brought to the discipline of history is not revolutionary but rather modest as nation-centred history continues to be the mainstay of the historical writing.4 Nevertheless, the new perspectives, questions, approaches, and sources in the works of Freund, [End Page 244] Delgado and Fujiwara provide us with fine examples of recent changes in the research and writing on migration, ethnicity, identity, citizenship, borders, and borderlands.

At the vanguard of a criticism of the “tyranny of the national”5 is Alexander Freund’s collective volume Beyond the Nation?: Immigrants’ Local Lives in Transnational Culture. It is about German-speaking Canadian immigrants from the 18th century to the 20th century whose trajectories and lives crossed several national boundaries. In its opening chapter, Dirk Hoerder critiques the national in the transnational. As Freund notes in his introduction, Hoerder underlines that migrants did not move from one nation to another but from one locale or region to another within the networks, imaginaries, and traditions that rested on their family, friends, and community.6 This point is well-established among migration historians but often remains overlooked in popular understanding that...

pdf

Share