Synopses & Reviews
The transnationalism of ordinary lives threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography. This book takes mobility, not nation, as its frame, and captures a rich array of lives, from the elite to the subaltern, that have crossed national, racial and cartographic boundaries.
About the Author
DESLEY DEACON is Professor of Gender History in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. She taught in the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin from 1985 to 2001. She is the author of
Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago 1997) and is writing a life of the Australian-born international star Judith Anderson.
PENNY RUSSELL Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her books include A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Melbourne University Press, 1994); and This Errant Lady: Jane Franklins Overland Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839 (National Library of Australia, 2002). She is currently completing Arctic Romance: Lady Franklin and the Lost Polar Expedition for the University of Toronto Press.
ANGELA WOOLLACOTT is the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. Her books include On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (University of California Press, 1994); To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); and Gender and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction--D.Deacon, P.Russell &--A.Woollacott
PART I: WRITING LIVES TRANSNATIONALLY
Issues and Methods
A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captains Wife--M.Hodes
Peripheral Visions: Heterography and Writing the Transnational Life of Sara Baartman--P.Scully
Boundaries Cross Bodies
Writing the Entrapped Nations of Indigenous Australia into Being--P.van Toorn
Dancing With Shadows: Biography and the Making and Remaking of the Atlantic World--M.McDonnell
PART II: OPPORTUNITIES
Fantasies
Opportunists and Impostors in the British Imperial World: The Tale of John Dow, Convict, and Edward, Viscount Lascelles--K.McKenzie
Imperial Melodies: Globalizing the Lives of Cliff Richard and Engelbert Humperdinck--A.Carton
Colonial Origins and Audience Collusion: The Merle Oberon Story in 1930s Australia--A.Woollacott
Livelihoods
Herbert Hoover and the Transnational Lives of Engineers--C.Pursell
Manyats 'Sole Delight': Travelling Knowledge in Western Australias Southwest, 1830s--T.Shellam
Connecting Lives: Elihu Yale and the British East India Company--R.Sudan
Performances
'That will allow me to be my own woman': Margaret Anglin, Modernity, and Transnational Stages, 1890s-1940s--C.Morgan
Made on Stage: Transnational Performance and the Worlds of Katherine Dunham from London to Dakar--P.M.Von Eschen
PART III: QUESTS
Subaltern Crossings: Looking for Liberty?
The Transnational Lives of African-American Colonists to Liberia--B.Dorsey
Resistance in Exile: Anthony Martin Fernando, Australian Aboriginal Activist, Internationalist, and Traveller in Europe--F.Paisleyii - Intimate Crossings: Looking for Love
'Citizens of the World'?: Jane Franklins Transnational Fantasies--P.Russell
The Meanings of a Transnational Life: The Case of Mary Berenson--R.Pesman
PART IV: COSMOPOLITANISM
The World at Home
Lowe Kong Meng Appeals to International Law: Transnational Lives Caught Between Empire and Nation--M.Lake
Becoming Cosmopolitan: Judith Anderson in Sydney, Australia, 1913-1918--D.Deacon
At Home in the World
A World-War-II Odyssey: Michael Danos, En Route from Riga to New York--S.Fitzpatrick
Donald Friend: An Australian Artists Affair with Italy--I.Britain
Gypsy in the Sun: The Transnational Life of Rosita Forbes--H-M.Teo