Some Recommendations ...
To wind up Dissertation Week, Caleb McDaniel at Mode for Caleb has two posts on"transnational history." In the first, he identifies himself as a"transnational historian" and discusses the movement among some historians to decenter attention from the nation-state. It's a fairly radical move, as he observes, because our tendency to invest the nation with essential qualities goes back far beyond the emergence of the modern nation-state to some of the earliest historians, Herodotus and Thucydides. In the second post, Caleb historicizes the idea of"globalization," from which he believes the tendency to transnational history emerges. The notion that our technology annihilates space is more recent than the belief that nations have essential qualities, but still it has a long history and we must think critically about its implications. This is fascinating work.
My colleague, Tim Burke, recently celebrated his fortieth birthday on a fishing trip to Canada, but he still spins off ideas with the ease of a graduate student. In the first of two posts on the subject, Burke spells out his intuition that some environmentalists' fears of"invasive species" have their origins near, in, or with modern essentialist notions of race, identity, and nationality; and, in a second post's gloss on the first (scroll down; the permalink's not active), he notes other people's suggestions about what he'd written, including Gary Jones's comments at Crumb Trail. I first made some of these connections when I learned that Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), who coined the German word for"ecology", was also a major influence in the development of national socialist thought. To put it most crudely in the national socialists' words,"Are Jews [or Muslims or Mexicans -- substitute your choice of target] the invasive species?", is to highlight the connection. No one should take that to mean that the environmentalists' concerns should be dismissed as Nazi propaganda, but there is a rich intellectual history here, more than enough for a single book, and Jones offers some bibliographical starters.
Tim's other post at Easily Distracted,"Stick a Fork in the Road", is a"must read." It's about Zimbabwe and about the United States; it's about when and whether we have choices. It's Burke at his thoughtful and provocative best. Tim doesn't and wouldn't, I think, make the connection, but John Holbo and John Quiggen sparked interesting discussions at Crooked Timber this past week about apocalyptic modes of thinking. Brandon Watson at Siris posts a brilliant apologia for apocalyptic thought. If it's authentic, it's inevitably subversive, he argues. The anemic language of the secular Left might find strength in apocalyptic imagery, as the prophets often have in the past. There's nothing quite so powerful as naming the Whore of Babylon, because the imagery has such resonance.
Finally, our newest colleague, Hala Fattah, goes home this week to visit Baghdad. She promises to post from there, if possible, but in any case to give us her impressions when she returns to Aman. I'm intrigued by her parting word to Oscar that"history trumps reality every time." It gives me reason to look forward to reading Cliopatria in the days and weeks ahead. And, to whatever providence, fate, fortune, or happenstance gave me such richly talented colleagues, I can only say"thank you."