Fletcher on Gregg

Robert Gregg’s provocative new book, Inside Out, Outside In, should be welcomed by all scholars interested in colonialism and colonial history. In four long essays interspersed with six shorter essays, he not only argues persuasively for a break with nation-centered historical writing but also offers intriguing mappings of what he calls the “imperial terrain” of modern history. It is impossible to convey in a short review the richness and variety of Gregg’s essays, but suffice it to say that he combines an acute sense of the historical connectedness of things with a wonderful ability to draw out the multiple meanings of lives, events, and texts.

In the opening essay, Gregg challenges the claims of exceptionalism often put forward about the United States by revealing the intertwined histories of the U.S. and South Africa. Focusing on miners, missionaries, and prostitutes during the two gold rushes and on Voortrekkers and Populists on the two frontiers, he uses the experiences of marginalized groups to undermine the historiographical conventions that uphold national difference. Taking a closer look at recent comparative histories of the U.S. and South Africa, the two following essays question the dichotomies favored by some comparativists and offer more evidence of the weblike relations that bind and shape supposedly separate countries and cultures. In a long piece on Edward Thompson and E.P. Thompson, Gregg and his co-author Madhavi Kale discuss the ways in which father and son celebrated the “peculiarities of the English.” Whether highlighting the imperial mission, as Edward Thompson did in his treatment of the British in India, or ignoring slavery, as E.P. Thompson did in his saga of the English working class, both men avoided coming to terms with subaltern perspectives on empire and Englishness. The next two essays consider the racial discourse of Pan-Africanism and traces of Orientalism in post-imperial British culture. In a brilliant essay that ranges widely over the history of cricket and other sports in colonial Trinidad, apartheid South Africa, and contemporary India, Gregg explores the uses and constraints of Englishness for C.L.R. James and other (post)colonial subjects. James, of course, restored the Haitian revolution to its central place in our understanding of modern history. Two further essays offer sensitive responses to historical and literary texts that address the nature and legacy of this revolution. A final long essay gauges E.P. Thompson’s problematic influence on the writing of U.S. social history, in particular the blindspots of labor historians around the racialized processes of class formation, immigration, and ethnicity.

While there is something in the collection for almost everyone — Africanists, Americanists, Caribbeanists, Europeanists, South Asianists — the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With the comparative history of discrete states and societies giving way to an interactive history of global flows and local conjunctures, Inside Out, Outside In moves the discipline in new and exciting directions. As his title suggests, Gregg is concerned throughout to shift perspectives, cross boundaries, and confront the future in the past and the past in the present. He does this by original research and readings, historiographical critique, and a self-reflexive form of writing. Foregrounding the complex interrelations of gender, race, class, culture, and identity, he resists the overarching yet often reductionist explanations of political economy and discourse analysis. He is never content to leave the last word to dominant narratives, juxtaposing them instead to the alternative accounts and even the enigmatic silences of subalterns. Gregg criticizes the work of historians like E.P. Thompson not so much for its empirical weaknesses as for its troubling theoretical and political implications. And he does not exempt himself from scrutiny, contextualizing and interrogating his own location and choices along with those of other scholars in the field.

The need to historicize the brave new world of decolonization and globalization is urgent. While historians increasingly question the foundational status of the nation, few of us would deny the inherent difficulties of articulating such categories as the colonial and the metropolitan, the national...