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doi: 10.1017/S0009640708001510 Race, Nation, and Empire in American History. Edited by James T. Campbell, Matthew Pratt Guterl, and Robert G. Lee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiii + 384 pp. $65.00 cloth; $22.50 paper.
Ramón Gutiérrez has remarked that the fundamental problem of historiography is the persistent devotion to telling history in contiguity with the rise and progress of the nation-state {"What's Love Got to Do With It?" Journal of American History 88:3 [December 2001]: 868). This is no accident. Virtually all of us have been trained since grammar school to think about the past as the story of a particular nation, usually our own. We are taught to study the formation of "citizen-subjects" of the state in hope of becoming the same. National boundaries and nationalist frameworks shape the plot and determine the cast of characters (American history must be about American citizens). The nation-state, consequently, functions as the default mode for examining "what has happened."
In the past decade, however, transnational methods have emerged in departure from this approach, opting instead to recognize that invented geopolitical borders are by no means impermeable boundaries, and that societies are networks, first and foremost, marked by constant movements, exchanges, intricate relations and interests of power, and intersubjectivities that transcend the nation-state. Recent examples include Thomas Bender's edited Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002) and John Carlos Rowe's edited Posl-Nationalist American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). The editors of Race, Nation, and Empire in American History "tilt their hats" to...