Narratives

This essay explores the invention of the “global” and its role in the formation of transnational history, through a review of Isaac Kamola’s Making the World Global. As Kamola argues, global thinking reflected a particular, late-20th century moment in the history of U. S. universities and foundations, one characterized by the ascendancy of business and marketing ideologies, declining state support for area studies, and the pursuit of private investment and tuition-paying international students. As this essay argues, global discourse’s emphasis on flow, linkage and exchange informed what can usefully be called a connectionist scholarship that was structured by inquiries into connectivity and a normative valorization of connectedness; this framing profoundly shaped ideas of transnational history as scholarly enterprise. Understanding this genealogy is necessary in order to open space for other definitions of what transnational history is and might become.

This longform narrative history in the Los Angeles Review of Books, based on extensive interview and newspaper research, explores the surprising, forgotten history of Los Angeles’ first sanctuary city declaration–in November 1985—as a lens onto the historical crossings of urban politics, U. S. foreign relations, and struggles over the place of migrants and refugees in American society in an era of Cold War intervention and rising racist and nativist mobilization. Activists in the city successfully pressured idealistic council members to shepherd an ambitious sanctuary resolution through to a narrow passage, in a triumph for the sanctuary and solidarity movements nationally. But an unexpected backlash against the resolution, driven by nativist public officials cultivating moral panic, pushed sanctuary’s advocates onto the defensive. The struggle ultimately involved debates about American cities’ relationships to U. S. imperial intervention in the wider world.

This investigative history examines the consequences of war and securitization after 9/11 for US disaster preparedness, using the example of the post-Hurricane Katrina catastrophe in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.  While commonly understood as separate events, the “war on terror” and Hurricane Katrina were deeply entwined, from the siphoning…

The New Yorker, September 2014 This essay explores the ambiguities and politics of border-making through the history of the Chamizal, an area of about seven hundred acres contested by Mexico and the United States for a century.  In the mid-19th century, American and Mexican boundary surveyors established that the border…

This narrative essay recounts struggles over the Statue of Liberty’s symbolic relationship to immigration on the hundredth anniversary of its dedication, in 1986. The Reagan administration, which was actively excluding and deporting immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean, used the occasion to assert American exceptionalism and to celebrate the…

This piece puts the US Supreme Court’s upholding of the travel ban in an historical context. Supporters argued that the ban was about national security rather than racism; opponents that it was about racism rather than national security. But both sides separated logics that haven’t been separable: ideas of national…

The New Yorker (July 2013) This essay tells the story of the U. S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, emphasizing the ways that controversies over its uses and legal status have long and troubling histories.  US access to the bay emerged from coercive diplomacy between the U. S. and…

This is a fuller, more detailed version of the above essay, on the history of the U. S. naval base at Guantánamo.