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.

Contents

Introduction

Babs Boter and Marleen Rensen

Archival traces

Mieke Bouman (1907-1966) and the Jungschläger/Schmidt trials

Ernestine Hoegen

Colonialism, class, and collaboration: A wartime encounter on Java

Eveline Buchheim

¿The Voortrekkers, on their way to Pretoria, 1952¿: Doing Race in Life Writing from South Africa to the Netherlands

Barbara Henkes

Networking

Sleepwalking to a poem: A theory of Adrienne Rich¿s translations from the Dutch

Diederik Oostdijk

W.E.B. Du Bois at Ons Suriname: Amsterdam transnational networks and Dutch anti-colonial activism in the late 1950s

Lonneke Geerlings

Following the letters: Emile de Laveleye¿s transnational correspondence network

Thomas D¿haeninck

Circulation

Booker T. Washington¿s Up From Slavery in the Dutch Empire, 1902-1995

Marijke Huisman

The production and contestation of biography: New approaches from South Africa

Ciraj Rassool

Ordinary lives: teaching history with life narratives in transnational perspective

Nancy Mykoff

Starring Morgenland! The life and work of Jan Johannes Theodorus Boon (1911-1974)

Edy Seriese

Positionings

¿She is English, isn¿t she?¿: transnationality as part of Cissy van Marxveldt¿s self-presentation

Monica Soeting

¿A caveman in a canal house¿: The rejection of transnationalist biography in Hafid Bouazzäs A Bear in Fur Coat

Sjoerd-Jeroen Moenandar

Afterword: Reflections from a diplomatic historian

Giles Scott-Smith