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Reviews
| 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. vii + 383 pp. Table, notes, and index. $65.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper).
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The specter of the ongoing Iraq War hangs over this important collection of historical essays. The editors argue against those in the media who suggest that the war has been a departure from anti-imperialist policy by noting that "the United States is and has long been a robustly global nation, whose politics, economy, and culture have both shaped and been shaped by developments in the wider world ... these two seemingly contradictory processes, of boundary crossing and boundary making, are and have always been intertwined" (p. 7). The essays touch upon centuries of U.S. engagement with the world, which has resulted in, among other things, immigration from Europe, Asia, and Latin America and by enslaved Africans and their descendants, American Indians, and others with whom the United States came in contact through processes of annexation, colonization, imperial foreign policy, and "Americanization." What differentiates this from other edited historical volumes is its insistence on keeping one eye on the past and one on the present; thus, in lieu of a concluding chapter, the editors have closed the volume with three essays concerning contemporary times. |
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The collection is broken into five parts, each with three essays. Part I, "Who's Who: American Encounters with Race," includes cogent reconsiderations of anthropologist Franz Boas by Vernon J. Williams, Jr. and of Harlem Renaissance writer Nella Larsen by George Hutchinson. Joanne Pope Melish's essay stands out for its discussion of how Rhode Island's Narragansett Indians were—after decades of mixing with African Americans—subsumed into a rigid black-white binary beginning in the early nineteenth century. Having over time lost their status as "Indians," Narragansetts who sought public recognition as such in the twentieth century met with skepticism from the white majority and confusion from the black minority. Melish ends with a fascinating and sensitive account of a recent political tug-of-war regarding the racial designation for a Newport monument dedicated to a black-Narragansett regiment from the American Revolution. |
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Part II, "Ironies of Empire," includes insightful contributions from Eric Love, Matthew Frye Jacobson, and James T. Campbell. Regarding Hawaii's annexation, Love argues against the "received historiography" that credits "the logic of market-capitalist expansion, hemispheric security, missionary-humanitarian obligation, manly honor, and white supremacy" (p. 76) as the rationale for U.S. involvement in a late-nineteenth-century worldwide imperial project. Instead, he maintains, the U.S. intervened in Hawaii out of concern for its voluble white minority, which raised the specter of "Yellow Peril" due to the influx of Asian (especially Chinese and Japanese) immigrants brought in as laborers in the wake of a population collapse by Native Hawaiians. In their essays, Jacobson explores the creation of external markets for U.S. products and internal markets for foreign workers, while Campbell provides a detailed account of economic, cultural, political, and military ties between the U.S. and South Africa. |
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Part III, "Engendering Race, Nation, and Empire," features Louise M. Newman's investigation into early white feminists' activism in shaping gender roles for those considered racially "inferior"; Matt Garcia's analysis of masculinity and interethnic conflict in Mexican–Mexican American farming communities in mid-twentieth-century southern California; and Natasha Zaretsky's account of the strategies employed by anti–Vietnam War activist Delia Alvarez. |
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Part IV, "Crossings," focuses on the experiences of individuals whose life histories offer "one of the most promising vehicles for escaping the confines of narrowly national histories" (p. 10). Essays by Matthew Pratt Guterl, Kevin K. Gaines, and Ruth Feldstein center, respectively, on the experiences of three women: Eliza McHatton, a Confederate exile in colonial Cuba; African American attorney Pauli Murray, in Ghana during the 1960s Congo crisis; and performer Nina Simone as she articulated a gendered form of cultural black nationalism in the early-to-mid-1960s. |
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Finally, Part V, "End Times," brings the collection up to the present. Prema Kurien's work on self-styled "Hindu American" challenges to academia is a methodical explication of the genesis, goals, and techniques of the South Asian American movement. The final essays by Robert G. Lee and Melani McAlister critique Samuel Huntington's thesis on the "clash of civilizations." Lee maintains that, in Huntington's framing of international politics, "brown is the new yellow"—that the "Yellow Peril imaginary" has been "rewritten to include Latinos," who also do not represent an Anglo-Protestant ethos (p. 335). McAlister closes the collection with a "rethinking" of Huntington's ideas as they relate to evangelicals' involvement in the lead-up to the Iraq war. Her thesis—that "evangelical views of Islam have become matters of national, as well as global, interest" (p. 352)—is unsurprising given that 25 to 40 percent of Americans self-identify as evangelical or born-again Christians (p. 353). The marriage of neoconservatism with a particular strain of evangelicalism has not been without tensions; whether one adheres to the "clash of civilizations" or to their essential "sameness" affects one's perspective on whether democratization in a Muslim Iraq is even possible. With the end in question, the means were scarcely doubted; as McAlister notes, 77 percent of white evangelicals voted for George W. Bush during the 2004 election. |
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While the connections among some of these essays—particularly within their component parts—at times appears strained, each author's work can stand alone for use in undergraduate courses. The volume would have benefited from better copyediting, as there are a number of omitted words and typos. Also, the index is extremely limited, which is a shame considering the richness of these essays and the wide range of topics covered within them. All in all, this collection will be a strong addition to the libraries of historians on race, empire, nation formation, gender, and diaspora studies.
Anju Reejhsinghani
University of Texas at Austin
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