History – UH Press

Journal of World History Special Issue: Transnational Approaches to the History of Race and Racism – Free!

Posted on June 1, 2023May 17, 2023 by mmyama

The World History Association will be hosting its annual meeting at the University of Pittsburgh’s World History Center from June 22 to 24, on the theme “ENERGIES.” The Journal of World History offers this accompanying special collection, “Transnational Approaches to the History of Race of Racism,” free on the Project MUSE platform through September 30. Select World History titles will also be 30% off from July 1 through Sept 30, 2023.

The special issue “Transnational Approaches to the History of Race and Racism” draws together some of the journal’s most frequently cited and downloaded material alongside some less well-known contributions. Together, these articles compare historic roles, debates, and struggles in relation to today’s trials and tribulations with race consciousness.

Bricktop with patrons and fellow singer Mabel Mercer in Bricktop’s club, featured in “Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris” by Rachel Gillett in this special collection.

Editor Matthew P. Romaniello talks about this Special Issue in excerpts of his introduction, “Race and Racism beyond National Borders”:

Assembling a special collection of previously published articles has created an opportunity to engage with the legacy of Journal of World History. As with the first of these issues four years ago, I took the opportunity to review our “most downloaded” articles list from Project Muse. It has changed more than I expected – not only from the arrival of newly-published articles but also from articles published decades ago that have gained new prominence. One of those served as the launching point for this collection, Matthew Pratt Guterl’s “The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910-1925,” a “top 10” article for 2022, though it was first published in 1999.

The renewed interest in race and racism is hardly unique to Journal of World History, much less global audiences in this particular historical moment. However, looking to JWH for an article on racism in America may not be the first stop on anyone’s pursuit of more information on the topic. For much of its history, JWH only published a few articles with American content.

Research on race and racism, settler colonialism and anticolonial rhetoric, cosmopolitanism and “Orientalism,” involving global empires and modern nations, has regularly appeared throughout the journal’s history. The benefits of pursuing these topics through a transnational lens broadens our discussions and hopefully encourages more thoughtful engagement with their presence in our daily lives. The articles included in this collection highlight these themes in a variety of regions, offering original perspectives on the entangled debates of race and racism globally.

It should not come as any surprise to a reader of Journal of World History that the history of colonialism is fully entangled with racial hierarchies, much less that colonial and neocolonial policies imposed racialized systems, whether it imposed segregation or achieved assimilation. Neither supported equality. Nor did cosmopolitan lives, those people who crossed borders and interacted with foreign cultures, necessarily demonstrate greater understanding or compassion for diversity. This special collection does highlight that these challenges are not unique or specific to the United States, and, perhaps, we might inform our ongoing discussions of diversity, equality, and inclusion by considering other viewpoints and histories beyond our own borders.

Transnational Approaches to the History of Race of Racism

“Race and Racism beyond National Borders”
Matthew P. Rominello

The Imperialism of Cultural Assimilation: Sir George Grey’s Encounter with the Maori and the Xhosa, 1845-1868.
James O. Gump

Gobineau on China: Race Theory, the ‘Yellow Peril,’ and the Critique of Modernity.
Gregory Blue

The New Race Consciousness: Race, Nation, and Empire in American Culture, 1910-1925.
Matthew Pratt Guterl

An Orientalist in the Orient: Richard Garbe’s Indian Journey, 1885-86.
Kaushik Bagchi

Jazz and the Evolution of Black American Cosmopolitanism in Interwar Paris.
Rachel Gillett

White Anglo-Saxon Hopes and Black Americans’ Atlantic Dreams: Jack Johnson and the British Boxing Colour Bar.
Theresa Runstedtler

‘Town of God’: Ota Benga, the Batetela Boys, and the Promise of Black America.
Karen Sotiropoulos

Settler Historicism and Anticolonial Rebuttal in the British World, 1880-1920.
Amanda Behm

Students, Sex, and Threatened Solidarity: East African Bodies and Indian Angst, 1955-1970.
Timothy Nicholson

Learn more about the WHA conference here.

The World History Association will host its annual meeting in person, from June 22 to 24, on the theme “ENERGIES.” The Journal of World History offers this digital special issue “Transnational Approaches to the History of Race and Racisms” free on the Project MUSE platform through the end of September 2023. Select World History titles in will also be 30% off July 1 through September 30 with coupon code WHA2023.

Journal of World History, vol. 29, no. 1 (March 2018)

Posted on March 7, 2018April 12, 2018 by uhp-guest

Journal of World History volume 29, number 1 arrives with three articles covering Brazil, China, and India:

Articles

The British Empire and the Suppression of the Slave Trade to Brazil: A Global History Analysis by Tâmis Parron
- Abstract: This essay examines the connections between the British free trade experiment, the reorganizing of the British Empire and the ultimate suppression of the transatlantic slave trade to Brazil in its fully global operative context. While most analyses of the nineteenth-century transatlantic slave trade focus on bilateral diplomatic relations or national decision-making processes, this essay puts forth a broader analytical framework. It places the end of the transatlantic illegal slave trade to Brazil in 1850 within the dynamics of the world-economy. In a broader sense, this essay sheds new light on debates about capitalism and slavery as it reveals nineteenth-century capitalism not as a static background for historical analysis, but rather as a dialectical process moving through a sequence of disruptive commodity market integrations, each of which posed specific economic and political challenges for slaveholders and antislavery actors alike.

The Rise of Nationalism in a Cosmopolitan Port City: The Foreign Communities of Shanghai during the First World War by Tobit Vandamme
- Abstract: By the early 1900s, globalization and imperialism had created cosmopolitan cities such as the Chinese treaty port of Shanghai, where foreign minorities lived side by side. The outbreak of the First World War put enormous pressure on these multiethnic urban societies. By exploring how the war altered the cohabitation of Westerners in Shanghai, this article connects with current debates on the mechanisms of longdistance nationalism and cosmopolitanism as well as on the importation of conflict in diaspora communities. The many imperial diasporas of Shanghai mostly lived in the French- and British-controlled territories, where the balance of power was renegotiated during the war. Analyzing local community newspapers and diplomatic archives, this article explains why nationalism superseded the shared feeling of cosmopolitanism that prevailed before the war. The cosmopolitan tradition and political complexity clearly delayed the arrival of the war at Shanghai, but could not prevent the process.

Present at the Creation: India, the Global Economy, and the Bretton Woods Conference by Aditya Balasubramanian and Srinath Raghavan
- Abstract: This article considers India’s participation in the Bretton Woods conference, where the framework for the post-World War II global economic order emerged. Building on the new historiography of Bretton Woods as well as a more specialized literature on the Indian economy, it shows India’s role in Bretton Woods at the confluence of national, imperial, and global historical processes. The article argues that India’s presence in the conference shaped the evolution of the country’s relationship to international economic institutions. The article addresses India’s changing role in the British Empire and world economy, the evolution of a discourse of Indian economic development alongside anti-colonial nationalism, the formulation of Indian objectives for the conference in the aftermath of the economic dislocations of World War II, and the interpretation of the outcomes of the meeting at home that informed India’s subsequent ambiguous relationship with international economic organizations.

Plus 15 book reviews and books received.

Find the full text of the issue at Project MUSE

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About the Journal

The Journal of World History publishes research into historical questions requiring the investigation of evidence on a global, comparative, cross-cultural, or transnational scale. It is devoted to the study of phenomena that transcend the boundaries of single states, regions, or cultures, such as large-scale population movements, long-distance trade, cross-cultural technology transfers, and the transnational spread of ideas.

Subscriptions

Individual subscription is by membership in the World History Association. Institutional subscriptions available through UH Press.

Submissions

The Journal of World History is proud to introduce a new article and peer review submission system, accessible now at at jwh.msubmit.net.

Journal of World History, vol. 28, nos. 3 & 4 (2017)

Posted on January 18, 2018 by bentone

Excerpt from La Vie Indo-Chinoise — Japanese sex workers occupied a special place in the desires and fantasies of French colonial men in Asia as seen in ‘Our Hungarians,’ *La Vie Indo-Chinoise*, November 13, 1897. From “Sex and the Colonial City” in this issue.

Journal of World History volume 28, numbers 3&4 is a special double issue guest edited by Tracey Rizzo on Gender and Empire. It includes more than 400 pages of articles and book reviews from world history scholars.

From the Editor’s Introduction:

Gender and Empire as a subfield of world history goes beyond the study of the men and women who made and unmade empires. Intimacies generated ties that facilitated or impeded the modernization of family and nation, demarcating contact zones. Bodies–adorned, fetishized, public–displayed and negotiated imperial relations. Detritus, the material remains of empire and intimacy, lodged itself in the institutions and discourses of modernity. When world historians talk across boundaries and borders, we situate disjointed ruins in broader trends and patterns, without which they are mere curiosities. Assembled here: a Chinese scalp; a silver buckle from Malaya; a bawdy cartoon from Hanoi; a hybrid recipe from Nigeria; dossiers from Lebanon and El Salvador; government orders promoting or suppressing prostitution… Confined to a national or even imperial history, such fragments do not tell us anything about coloniality. Here they do.