The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements (review)

344 Rhetoric & Public Affairs different groups see the abortion issue and are affected by it. Their perspectives are quite different from a white middle class woman's vantage point. For example, the disability rights movement emphasizes the right not to have an abortion, as articulated in Martha Sexton's chapter "Disability Rights and Selective Abortion." Their goals clash with new reproductive and genetic technologies that promise "to eliminate births of disabled children." Challenging questions are posed to traditional pro-choice arguments. The essays in this volume provide one with the opportunity to learn much more about the complexities and history of the abortion rights movement. Barbara Burrell University of Wisconsin The Comparative Imagination: On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements. By George M. Fredrickson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997; pp. i + 241. $27.50. Rhetorical criticism is messy business at best, and even more so when the object of criticism is a social movement. Add to the mix the concepts of race or nationalism , and it is easy to see why George Fredrickson's The Comparative Imagination with its subtitle, On the History of Racism, Nationalism, and Social Movements, holds potential appeal for rhetoricians. In this work, Fredrickson, a comparative historian, presents a collection of 11 essays written over almost 20 years. Comparative historians juxtapose specific nations, eras, or social structures across cultures. Presented in a pragmatic attitude, these essays focus on the cultural and social functions served by the notions under study, the transitory nature of the social construction of truth, and the avoidance of cultural relativism or ungrounded notions of justice or equity. Fredrickson announces his social location (white, male, Stanford professor , among many other descriptors) and his quest (the pursuit of justice) without apology or defensiveness. Fredrickson is particularly mindful to place his pronouncements in the context of current and traditionally respected scholarship regarding notions of frontierism, slavery, and economic determinism. All this is potentially of interest to the rhetorical critic, especially the critic of social movements , and even more especially to those wanting to avoid the limitations of disciplinary parochialism. The first four essays deal with Fredrickson's justification for and his explanation of the status of comparative history. The initial essay, written in 1980, laments the paucity of comparative history texts and the lack of academic reward (the creation of dedicated journals, funded chairs, and promotion) for doing comparative history . Fredrickson positions comparative history as the antidote to disciplinary parochialism that accompanies fixation on the history of one nation. He lays out in this essay the specific prescriptions for what can be accomplished within the field: Book Reviews 345 one must focus on only two nations at a time; one must learn the languages of the non-home culture; one ought not unconsciously privilege the American experience if one is truly doing comparative history. Fredrickson identifies C. E. Black's Dynamics of Modernization and Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (both published in 1966) as seminal theoretical works and argues that most comparative history produced since that time has not been focused on producing overarching theory. He contends that most work since 1966 has been fragmented, dealing more with "particular ideas, institutions, modes of social and political action, or environmental challenges"(26). He argues further that most comparative history has asserted uniqueness for the American experience. He laments the lack of a book-length testing of Frederick Turner's frontier hypothesis. The essay reviews a series of ideas that have been explored (e.g., ideas and actions of colonizers, European settlement of a variety of environments, character and consequence of Afro-American slavery). It is the last in this set of examples that has been studied most and most fruitfully; it is also this last that has been at the center of Fredrickson's research. The second essay provides an exemplar of Fredrickson's notion of comparative history in its focus on the elimination of the frontier metaphor as a useful, uniquely American, determinant. Fredrickson compares the American experience with another frontier experience, that of the "Great Trek" of the Afrikaners. Fredrickson highlights economic and population differences between the two cultures, and notes in both cultures "the early emergence...