Unhinging The National Framework

This book focuses on the 20th century lives of men and women whose life-work and life experiences transgressed and surpassed the national boundaries that existed or emerged in the 20th century. The chapters explore how these life-stories add innovative transnational perspectives to the entangled histories of the world wars, decolonization, the Cold War and post-colonialism.The subjects vary from artists, intellectuals, and politicians to ordinary citizens, each with their own unique set of experiences, interactions and interpretations. They trace the building of socio-cultural and professional networks, the casual encounters of everyday life, and the travel, translation, and preserving of life stories in different media. In these multiple ways the book makes a strong case for reclaiming lost personal narratives that have been passed over by more orthodox nation-state focused approaches.These explorations make use of social and historical categories such as class, gender, religion and race in a transnational context, arguing that the transnational characteristics of these categories overflow the nation-state frame. In this way they can be used to ‘unhinge’ the primarily national context of history-writing.By drawing on personal records and other primary sources, the chapters in this book release many layers of subjectivity otherwise lost, enabling a richer understanding of how individuals move through, interact with and are affected by the major events of their time.

An exploration of how personal life-stories, when reconstructed as 'transnational lives,' escape the confines of national histories and open up new avenues for interpreting cultural identity, social mobility, and public memory.

This book is situated at the cutting edge of the political-ethical dimension of history writing. Henkes investigates various responsibilities and loyalties towards family and nation, as well as other major ethical obligations towards society and humanity when historical subjects have to deal with a repressive political regime. In the first section we follow pre-war German immigrants in the Netherlands and their German affiliation during the era of National Socialism. The second section explores the positions of Dutch emigrants who settled after the Second World War in Apartheid South Africa. The narratives of these transnational agents and their relatives provide a lens through which changing constructions of national identities, and the acceptance or rejection of a nationalist policy on racial grounds, can be observed in everyday practice.

"This volume offers a multifaceted selection of studies on 19th-century Belgian reformers and initiatives they instigated to solve the ‘social question’ by ‘civilising’ and moralising the lower classes. Around 1850 Belgium was continental Europe’s most heavily industrialised state. From the mid-century until the Belle Époque many international social reform associations were based in Belgium, as well as their main international actors. This book aims to place the history of social, moral and educational reform in Belgium during the long 19th century within a broader European perspective. This collection of contributions by both young and established scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds not only fills some gaps in Belgian historiography, but also offers a better understanding of broad epochal processes such as the bourgeois civilising offensive, the expansion of educational action and the historical growth of welfare states.

Over the last couple of decades there has been a strong academic interest in how individuals interact with each other while en route. Yet, even if various studies have informed us about present-day realities of travel companionships, we know little about the influence of gender both on these realities, as well as on the discourse in which these are being narrated. This book aims to establish an agenda for the study of companionship in travel writing by offering a collection of new essays which study texts that belong to the broad category of pre-modern and modern travel literature. Chapters explore the differences and similarities in the ways that women and men in the past chose to describe their experiences with, and/or their ideas about companionship, and specifically reveals the influence of gender norms, conventions, restrictions, and stereotypes. This is the first book which looks at the long-term, interdisciplinary, and genuinely international history of gendered discourses on companionship in travel writing. It will be of interest to scholars and students from a wide variety of disciplines, including cultural and social history, as well as cultural, literary, gender, travel, and tourism studies.

The twelve essays in this book – by scholars from the U.S., France, Germany, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic – offer new transnational perspectives in transatlantic historical, literary, and cultural studies. They explore the special role of American and European intellectuals as agents of transatlantic cultural transfer, and examine the mechanisms and instruments through which artists, writers and intellectuals communicated across oceans and national borders, in the half century between 1914 and 1964. Their focus is on transatlantic networks and the instruments of culture through which such networks become operative as sites of cross-cultural exchange, circulation and interaction: magazines, cafés, publishing houses, book fairs, agents, translators, and mediators – and last but not least, transatlantic personal friendships. Contending that the dynamics of transatlantic cultural transfer need to be understood as reciprocal and multi-directional, they also exemplify the shift within transatlantic intellectual history from a traditional concern with European-U.S. relations to a multidirectional, triangular exploration of cultural, political and intellectual relations between Europe, the United States, and Latin America.

This book demonstrates the significance of transnationality for studying and writing the lives of artists. While painters, musicians and writers have long been cast as symbols of their associated nations, recent research is increasingly drawing attention to those aspects of their lives and works that resist or challenge the national framework. The volume showcases different ways of treating transnationality in life writing by and about artists, investigating how the transnational can offer intriguing new insights on artists who straddle different nations and cultures. It further explores ways of adopting transnational perspectives in artists’ biographies in order to deal with experiences of cultural otherness or international influences, and analyses cross-cultural representations of artists in biography and biofiction. Gathering together insights from biographers and scholars with expertise in literature, music and the visual arts, Transnational Perspectives on Artists’ Lives opens up rich avenues for researching transnationality in the cultural domain at large.

"This volume fills a void in current studies of Eleanor Roosevelt. Offering a comprehensive analysis of Roosevelt as a diplomat during the Cold War era, it is particularly insightful in analyzing her position on United States race relations while at the United Nations. It provides a new look at Roosevelt’s leadership from an American perspective played out on a global stage."- Maurine H. Beasley, Professor Emerita, University of Maryland College Park, USA "My grandmother was an ardent "small-d" democrat, as well as a Democrat - but she didn't think we were very mature in our living of it! This well-written and illuminating collection of essays, focused on what ER thought it meant to be a global citizen, offers a unique perspective of her views on a host of issues. Let us hope these fresh insights can inspire young people today to construct that better world to which she dedicated much of her life." - Anna Eleanor Roosevelt This book focuses on Eleanor Roosevelt’s multifaceted agenda for the world. It highlights her advocacy of human rights, multilateral diplomacy, and transnationalism, and it emphasizes her challenge to gendered norms and racial relations. The essays of this collection describe Eleanor Roosevelt as a public intellectual, a politician, a public diplomat, and an activist. She was, undeniably, one of the protagonists of the twentieth century and a proactive interpreter of the many changes it brought about. She went through two world wars, the harshness of the Great Depression, and the emergence of nuclear confrontation, and she deciphered such crises as the product of misleading nationalism and egoism. Against them, she offered her commitment to people’s education as an example of civic engagement, which she considered necessary for the functioning of any democratic order. Such was the world Eleanor Roosevelt envisioned and tried to build – symbolically and practically – one where people, the citizens of the world, may really be at the center of international affairs.