Crossing Boundaries: Ethnicity, Race, and National Belonging in a Transnational World ed. by Brian D. Behnken, Simon Wendt, and: At the Border of Empires: The Tohono O’odham, Gender, and Assimilation, 1880–1934 by Andrae M. Marak, Laura Tuennerman (review)

Contemporary maps divide the world into territories controlled by discrete nation-states, the very entities that have structured the modern discipline of history. Yet social and political reality is also characterized by transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas.

Paradoxically, these exchanges—the raison d’être of the burgeoning field of transnational history—include nationalist ideas and mobilizations. “Transnationalized concepts of national belonging” are the focus of the wide-ranging and provocative anthology Crossing Boundaries. Its editors endeavor to show how such concepts have been “forced and adopted, borrowed and compelled, adapted and coopted, and, ultimately how they can be accepted and rejected by local people” (p. 2). The volume consists of fourteen brief essays, of about twenty pages each, which range over the twentieth century. Half of the essays examine transnational dynamics in the Americas; four are set primarily in Asia; and the rest describe transnational relationships rooted primarily in Africa and Europe. The center of gravity lies in the study of political movements, but transnational cultural history is a strong secondary theme, particularly in Brian Behnken’s discussion of music and hair-style in his essay on connections between the U.S. Chicano movement and Mexican student unrest and in Pablo Dominguez Andersen’s examination of Chinese American movie star Anna May Wong and her fame in Weimar Germany. The last essay, Kevin Amidon’s superb and wonderfully theorized “Beyond the Straight State: On the Borderlands of Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Nation in the United States and Europe,” is more comparative than explicitly transnational.

The individual essays have their particular ambitions and historiographic interventions, but the editors conclude that the volume’s most fundamental revelation is that “transnational and transcultural processes impeded political elites’ efforts to create ethnically and racially homogenous national communities, while they also produced a hybrid sense of national belonging that frequently transcended traditional forms of ethnic nationalism as well as national boundaries” (p. 6). This revelation is pursued in a particularly compelling fashion in several of the essays. Charles Reed makes a convincing case for the importance of “imperial citizenship,” which allowed early twentieth-century South African activists to struggle for dignity and autonomy within the British Empire and to thereby escape the distinctions that later scholars often drew between civic and ethnic nationalisms. His subjects, Reed observes, “imagined themselves as British citizen-subjects (civic) and ‘natives’ (ethnic) without contradiction and without such distinctions in mind” (p. 104).

Similarly, Charlton Yingling’s recreation of Dominican exile networks from the 1930s to 1950s traces the joining of notions of pan– Latin Americanism with Dominican nationalism, concluding with a forceful articulation of the importance of exile “as a decisive site of nation-building” (p. 54). Karen Morris points to debates over Ivoirité in the Cote d’Ivoire in recent decades as illustrative of the wider tensions “inherent in equations of post–World War II national citizenship with ancestry-based pre-colonial territoriality” in postcolonial Africa and beyond (p. 173).

The similarities in themes link together essays that are diverse in empirical terms. Examining different national projects on five continents over the course of a century necessarily draws on an enormous range of historical developments and historiographies. The fact that the essays speak so well to one another reflects a strong editorial hand and the sweeping importance of the questions about ethnicity, race, and nationalism that lie at the heart of the volume.

The anthology’s success in terms of thematic unity, however, raises questions that it does not answer or even substantially address. Taken as a whole, Crossing Boundaries offers very little sense...