Works in Progress
I am currently working on two projects: a collection of essays entitled "Rewriting Nostalgia: Scotland, Print Culture, and the Politics of Memory, 1707-2000" which I am co-editing with David Finkelstein; and also a new book project, "Transnational Articulations: Print Culture and the Imagining of Global Communities in Britain, Ireland and Abroad, 1745-1850."
1. "Rewriting Nostalgia": This is a collection of essays by North American and British scholars which examines the way in which nostalgia was both conceived and contested by writers in Scotland after the Act of Union in 1707. "Rewriting Nostalgia" is unique in its consideration of the relationship between print culture and the cult of nostalgia and also in considering the effects of the Scottish diaspora on the construction of Scottish identity. As well as editing the essays, I will be writing the introduction and the first essay on orality, print culture and nostalgia after the Union.
2. "Transnational Articulations": In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson examines the role of the newspaper and novels in promoting both a vernacular language and the sense of "empty, homogeneous time" which he links to the idea of the modern nation. My two first books and the "Rewriting Nostalgia" collection are largely indebted to Anderson and his critics. In my new project, I want to return to and go beyond the issues of national identity which Anderson and others have raised as I seek to identify the ways in which the development of national identities in England, Scotland and Ireland went hand in hand with a global mapping of identity. As British and Irish citizens imagined their own national identities, they simultaneously came to understand the way that their nation fit into a global scheme of nations. Although in many cases their representations of other nations served to solidify their own sense of a national Self by identifying a foreign Other, in the case studies which I examine, their articulations can also be seen as setting the stage for a sense of transnationalism by establishing connections that cut across national boundaries.
My first chapter will examine theories of national identity which emerged in the eighteenth-century, as I suggest how these theories also carve out a space for international connections. Each subsequent chapter in the book will focus on an event which encouraged a sense of transnationalism both through the establishment of social and political sympathies between members of different nations and though the dislocation of actual bodies. Accordingly, I consider the Jacobite Rebellion; Corresponding societies in Britain and Ireland during the era of the French Revolution; the Irish Rebellion, the emancipation movement and the post-rebellion diaspora in America; Scottish emigration to North America in the early nineteenth century; and transatlantic tours by writers during the Romantic era. The material for these chapters will be drawn from both non-"imaginative" and "imaginative" material, as part of my project will be to question the inter-relationship between the two and to examine the way in which a sense of the "literary" developed over this time in association with a consolidation of national identity and a rejection of transnationalism. Crucial to this project will also be consideration of the intersections between transnationalism and gender, class and race.
My objective in "Transnational Articulations" is to provide an historic sense to current studies of transnational and diaspora studies, much of which represents transnational and diasporic identity as phenomena of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. It seems to me crucial to a proper understanding of globalization to examine the interconnectedness of national and global identity at its earliest point of articulation, that is at the very point at which the concept of the nation came into being.