After the Imperial Turn

Antoinette Burton is Catherine C. and Bruce A. Bastian Professor of Global and Transnational Studies, Department of History, University of Illinois. Among her books are Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and History in Late Colonial India and At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain.

“After the Imperial Turn is an important collection of essays marking the 'coming of age' of 'new imperial history.’ One of its great strengths is its range-from the big picture to the local study, from the pedagogic to the institutional, from the British exemplar to a number of comparative perspectives, from the U.S. to the Caribbean and Hong Kong. This is an essential read for aspiring young historians.”-Catherine Hall, author of Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 “This is a timely intervention in the conversation on the nation sparked by critiques of the imperial foundations of modern nations and disciplines. It both assesses the fruits of the ‘imperial turn’ in scholarship and charts new directions on how to think and teach in the aftermath of the critiques of the nation. Incorporating perspectives from a range of disciplines and locations, the essays offer challenging reflections on the historicity of the present.”-Gyan Prakash, editor of After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation / Antoinette Burton 11. Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking beyond the Boundaries Rethinking British Studies: Is There Life after Empire? / Susan D. Pennybacker 27Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History? / Stuart Ward 44Empire and “the Nation”: Institutional Practice, Pedagogy, and Nation in the Classroom / Heather Streets 57We've Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already? / Ann Curthoys 70Losing Our Way after the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial / Terri A. Hasseler and Paula M. Krebs 90Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond) / Tony Ballantyne 1022. Fortresses and Frontiers: Beyond and Within Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity / Gary Wilder 125Notes on a History of “Imperial Turns” in Modern Germany / Lora Wildenthal 144After “Spain”: A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography / Christopher Schmidt-Nowara 157Making the World Safe for American History / Robert Gregg 170Asian American Global Discourses and the Problem of History / Augusto Espiritu 186Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport / Radhika Viyas Mongia 1963. Reorienting the Nation: Logics of Empire, Colony, Globe Periodizing Johnson: Anticolonial Modernity as Crux and Critique / Clement Hawes 217The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851 / Lara Kriegel 230Double Meanings: Nation and Empire in the Edwardian Era / Ian Christopher Fletcher 246The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress / Kristin Hoganson 260The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture, and National Histories / Hsu-Ming Teo 279Britain's Finest: The Royal Hong Kong Police / Karen Fang 293One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire / John Plotz 308The Whiteness of Civilization: The Transatlantic Crisis of White Supremacy and British Television Programming in the United States in the 1970s / Douglas M. Haynes 324Selected Bibliography 343About the Contributors 357Index 361