We Are the World:
Internationalizing the National, Nationalizing the International

Louis A. Pérez Jr.

Rethinking American History in a Global Age. Ed. by Thomas Bender. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. x, 427 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-520-23057-4. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 0-520-23058-2.)
Estoy buscando a América y temo no encontrarla. Sus huellas se han perdido entre la oscuridad. Estoy llamando a América pero no me responde. La han desaparecido los que temen la verdad. (I'm searching for America and I fear I won't find it. Its traces have become lost within the darkness. I'm calling to America but it does not answer me. Those who fear the truth have made it disappear.) —Rubén Blades, "Buscando América" (1983)
"Where in the world is America?" Charles Bright and Michael Geyer ask in their thoughtful essay in Rethinking American History in a Global Age, a question they frame as "the crux of the issue." The singer and composer Rubén Blades posed almost the same question twenty years earlier—although not exactly.1 For Bright and Geyer, the whereabouts of America is a matter of context. For Blades, the location of America is question of conviction. It is also probable that they are not even alluding to the same America, either as a state or as a state of mind. That too is the crux of the issue.	1
Notions of America dwell in the realm of contention. They are subject of and subject to the demands of diverse constituencies and competing claims, a condition deeply embedded in its political culture and from which the very proposition of pluralism derives validation. America is possessed of multiple meanings, not always compatible with one another, to be sure, but all contingent on some version of the indivisible nation. Meanings change over time, of course, often in response to the times, and the means by which usable versions of America obtain consensus is itself a product of ongoing negotiations within the political process. What has not changed, however, is the proposition of the nation as the all-encompassing framework within which to contemplate the circumstance of place as source of consciousness of self, and vice versa.	2
It is to this subject that the seventeen essays in Rethinking American History in a Global Age are dedicated. The contributors provide a comprehensive and at times compelling assessment of the power of the nation to insinuate itself into the premise of the historiography, thence to shape the purpose from which the historical narrative derives meaning. The proposition of the nation as determinant of community and source of identity is viewed with misgiving, for it is perceived to obstruct or otherwise obscure access to the full range of historical possibilities embedded within the American experience. The continued efficacy of the nation as an adequate or indeed even appropriate framework for historical analysis is thus found wanting, and this suggests the need for an alternative mode of historical knowledge along the lines of Prasenjit Duara's call to rescue history from the nation.2	. . .