ANTOINETTE BURTON
For Muslim veils in France to seem out of place, we need to forget that Charles Martel stopped ‘Abd-al-Raman only 300 miles south of Paris, two reigns before Charlemagne.
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The perspective of the world”
the body itself balks account
Walt Whitman, “I sing the body electric”
If you were to do an ethnography of world history textbooks with an eye to assessing how well they account for women, gender and sexuality across time and space, I suspect that even historians who have no truck with those subjects of inquiry would be surprised by what a comparatively slight impression they have left on the grand narratives that many of us in the United States use to help us teach the global past. Indexes are a rich and remarkable archive in this regard. The category “women” generates the most hits, typically in the form of a long sublist: one page for “Hittites,” one page for “during war,” two pages for “Islamic,” and three – three! – for “feminism.” “Mass politics” might generate a few pages, as might “education of” and “between 1650 and 1750.” If you are lucky the textbook index will also direct you to “see gender” or “see feminism” and will specify people such as Mary Wollstonecraft or Marie Antoinette or Eleanor Roosevelt. “Marriage” might also be a category, and subjects like women and gender and sexuality might be embedded in “clothing,” “Christianity” or “hijabs.” Any of the above might lead to an illuminating photograph, which is where women often appear to support a claim – over there in the main text – about religion, politics, science or the law. While it would require a more sustained study, I’d venture a guess that women are to be found most commonly in world history textbooks at the margins, popping up here and there to complement a section on revolution or trade or cultural contact or what have you. Despite the work that has been done to decenter Europe and to move world history away from the Western Civilization models whence it partly derived – and regardless of whether the text takes a civilizational or an integrative approach – women tend to act mainly as buttresses to larger narrative claims, even when the narrative turns microhistorical. Histories of women or gender rarely, if ever, drive histories of the global except when those histories are themselves about recovering women.
The latter project is a worthy cause, and it has absorbed the energies of some of the most distinguished practitioners of women’s and gender history coming out of, and in turn shaping, the second wave of academic feminism (Berger et al. 1988). Some of them, such as Lynn Hunt and Bonnie Smith, have even turned their attention to general textbooks, with decidedly better results for the incidence of women in both the index and the narrative (see Hunt et al. 2005). But this largely leaves aside the question of how to sediment both women as regular historical subjects, and gender and sexuality as historical systems in introductory narratives of the past. The stakes of such an undertaking are undoubtedly high. Undergraduate students in the US are increasingly required to take world history as part of their liberal arts curriculum, and AP (Advanced Placement) exam preparation is an increasing staple feature of a high school education, at least for the college- and university-bound. The comparative failure of best-selling world history textbooks to do more than glancingly address these subjects – serious and practically uncontested ones in intellectual and disciplinary terms – is even more astonishing when we consider the vast scholarship, both historical and interdisciplinary, that has been produced in the field, even when we delimit that field simply as “women’s history.”1 And if we acknowledge that women’s and gender history has long been transnational and comparative (with all the pros and cons those approaches entail), it seems incredible that they can have left so little mark on major textbooks in world history, one of the few growth industries in early twenty-first century academic publishing and one of the major delivery systems of knowledge about “the global,” if not the only one, to which institutions of secondary and tertiary education in the US share a commitment. In the face of world history’s role as both handmaiden to and gadfly on contemporary globalization, it is tempting to tweak Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (1992) ontological lament and observe that the project of gendering the global past refers to a history that does not yet exist, because it presumably cannot exist without accounting somehow, anyhow, for these critical dimensions of the human experience via more than an indexical trace.
Do women, gender and sexuality have a place in world histories other than as supplements and ornaments – functions which may be said to neatly summarize how women as such have been viewed by civilizations, Western or not, across the landscape of human and geophysical time that accounts of the global past(s) aim to capture? Yes and no. In this chapter, one of the few in this volume to nominate anything that might be related to these questions in its title, I want to think this problem less through an additive or inclusive framework than through a strategic one. Drawing on the insight of feminist historian Kathleen Canning, who coined the phrase “body as method,” as well as on the work I have done with Tony Ballantyne, I suggest that in addition to recovering embodied histories across landscapes of civilizations, regions, empires and/or “the world,” we ought to think about the body as a strategy – in this case, a strategy for how we structure introductory level courses and train graduate students in the field (Canning 1992; Ballantyne and Burton 2005). A locus of discipline, spectacle and power; a screen onto which fantasy and violence are projected, literally and otherwise; a carrier of biopower across space and place; a recurrent tool of rulers and ruled – these are just a few of the possibilities the body offers as the ground for thinking with and through the global. And no matter which approach you take to conceptualizing “globality” – via civilizations, webs, war, religion, trade networks, the environment, events, material culture, catastrophes – the body is arguably indispensable for understanding how power was imagined, aspired to, and executed in specific times and places and across them as well. More than just the addition of women and sexuality to the syllabus, attention to bodies as technologies of resistance and rule and much in-between illuminates virtually any topic or thematic you might wish to cover: it is a strategy as much as a subject per se. In a very real sense, the body as method seeks company with many of the preoccupations shared by scholars and teachers of world history in the last 20 years. If we think of the body itself as an access point, an index not only of specific women or genders and sexual practices but as a dynamically interconnective historical force, contingent on time and place; absorbent and irritating; vulnerable to exploitation and contagion yet hardy and resourceful; dangerous to would-be hegemons and a carrier of all kinds of power – if, in other words, we rethink the body as a kinetic and malleable agent, actor and acted upon – we might just be able to realign it with the project of world history and, in the process, persuade our students of its transformative impact on that enterprise, and the worlds they live in as well.
Acts of Relegation, Acts of Repositioning
It is tempting to rehearse that simple refrain of first-wave women’s history when confronted with the dearth of sustained attention to women qua women in world history narratives: Women were there. They were in the streets during various phases of the French Revolution, with its global antecedents and reverberations; they were there in the worlds that trade has made across wide swaths of the early modern, modern and late modern worlds; their labor, both physical and reproductive, was at the heart of the slave system wherever it occurred (in ancient Greece and Rome, in Eurasia, in the Atlantic world and the Pacific Rim, in the Indian Ocean world, and in the southern hemisphere); they were a key symbol of social and sexual order in imperial regimes of all kinds; they played consequential roles in anticolonial nationalism; they have shaped bodies of law, sacred and secular; and they have been critical to the historical forces of migration and religious practice and war from one millennium to the next. Choose any topic, any temporal frame, any geographical unit, any spatial ecumene, any scale of history. Not only can you address the impact of women, you can access a sizable body of historiography that can help you integrate women into any given lecture, as well as across your syllabus as a whole.
Why, then, are women per se not more visible in world history textbooks? It’s partly a matter of omission, partly a matter of genre. With few exceptions, and despite the widely acknowledged impact of women’s and gender history on the content and practice of History (capital H), these topics remain the specialty of only a medium-sized proportion of the profession in North America – and I will be so bold as to say that when they appear, they remain a drop-in feature of much historical work, whether monographic or grand narrative in form. In the case of world history, this is certainly intelligible, especially if we understand “the history of women” or of “gender” as specific examples of “larger” phenomena – as a dimension, if you will, of Andean peasant culture or the May Fourth Revolution in China. And, taken on their own terms, the kinds of macronarrative schemes to which world history textbooks are usually committed preclude the possibility of too much particularity or too much dimensionality; or, rather, there is so much to cover, there is not enough time and space for “drilling down” to the local example, of which women are often considered to be a species. This is equally, if differentially, true for people of color and other subjects – laborers, for example, who are often women and people of color – perceived to be “at the bottom” of world history. They erupt at the sightline of big events or as dimensions of global processes, to recede again until the next big political crisis or economic transformation or subsection of that chapter that deals with social and/or cultural matters. When we visualize the work that individuals or people do to move accounts of world history forward we see a dotted landscape, where the landscape itself is not just a horizon but marks the ground of historical visibility, the threshold to which legitimate subjects, of all kinds, must rise in order to be recognized and cited as such. Women are most often, if not always, relegated to a kind of subliminal zone until they are called on to deepen our understanding of the main event.2
And this is fine in many respects. Who has not used Ibn Battuta or Marco Polo or Zheng He or Isabella of Spain or Emmeline Pankhurst or Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, or W.E.B. DuBois or Chica Da Silva to humanize colossal moments and phenomena in a world history lecture? As Natalie Zemon Davis (1997) has shown, even individual women admittedly “at the margins” – in her case, Glikl Bas Judah Leib, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Marie Sybilla Merian – can illuminate entire worlds, multiple worlds in all their simultaneity. World history cannot, perhaps, afford to be interested in individual accomplishments or lives except instrumentally. And yet teachers of world history must call on many things instrumentally. I, for one, use empire as a structuring device: a way to track connectivity, its limits and possibilities, and the many historical phenomena it makes hypervisible (war, capital, migration). Practitioners of world history have to cop to the necessity of such selective and partial frames, or else they would not be able to craft any narratives at all. And frames invariably occlude and exclude. Choices must be made and those choices close out wide swaths of planetary experience. Our choices also involve making arguments about proportionality: When is empire an important explanatory device, when is it not? When does it drive global processes, and under what specific circumstances? What are the limits, indeed, of any analytical frame or subject for historicizing what we are consolidating as world history?
If the same questions were applied to women and gender, they might or might not yield a revision of your syllabus, depending on where you have relegated them initially in your course. Even if you want to give a human face to world history, it is likely that unless you are a historian of women, gender or sexuality by training, you will not be easily convinced that women, whether as individuals or in aggregate, have exerted enough of a force on world history to make their histories a consistent feature of your course plan, or even that it is possible to do more than add gender and sexuality at specific moments. This is both ironic and vexing, because feminist historians have not just been producing work that models “connective comparisons,” they have been the vanguard of thinking globally, as the scholarly work of the last three decades – and the careers of the two major Anglophone journals in the field, Gender and History and the Journal of Women’s History – amply illustrate.3 Their relatively newer equivalents in the field of world and global history have struggled, in contrast, to register women, gender and sexuality as subjects of research and teaching in their table of contents more than sporadically. Recourse to the body – not merely as a subject but as a method for apprehending historical processes, vectors of power, capillaries of circulation and materialities of violence and struggle – is one alternative to this impasse, an impasse that I, for one, am not content to allow simply to endure as an occupational hazard of world history teaching. Using the body as a (re)positioning device challenges the add-women-and-stir mentality that characterizes much world history pedagogy by capturing women, gender, sexuality not as identities or dimensions of the past but as historical forces that have to be reckoned with if students are to come away with an appreciation of what “history” is and what thinking about it in a global way actually entails.
What do I mean when I say the body? I mean a complex of material and symbolic properties that do not exist a priori but are produced and consolidated by their collision with historically specific events, formations and experiences. Emphatically not a universal or transhistorical category, the body is neither self-evident nor static. To borrow from Judith Butler (1993: 9), it is not a site or surface in the passive sense of those terms, in part because it is always being brought into being as a subject by the historical contexts that animate it. As a complex or a matrix – and in contradistinction to accounts that render it mainly a supine subject – the body is an agent, a force, which indexes historical processes that, in turn, help to stabilize it as an object of violence, a resource for labor, a vessel of reproduction, an instrument of pleasure, and above all, a mode of power. As such it is an invaluable archive of history at work, with the capacity not simply to represent identities (women, men) or reflect “what happened” (women shaped the suffrage debate) but to render visible historical conditions in-the-making and to throw the dynamism of historical processes into bold relief as well. And in the context of world history, the body has the capacity to register circulation, mobility, processes of exchange and trade, political economies in all their scope and scale – to dramatize, in short, the very connective tissue of globality in its myriad micro and macro forms.
Take one of the most commonly taught subjects in world history, the trade in slaves. There are all kinds of ways to convey its global character – in terms of maps, in terms of numbers, in terms of personal testimony by slaves and slavers alike. A focus on the body in this context arguably encompasses all of these modes of inquiry, allowing you to capture the massive corporal movement at the heart of the trade and to make a case for slavery as the first, if not the paradigmatic, modern global system. In this particular instance, you can mobilize bodies not as passive subjects but as historical forces that index a variety of dynamic factors: capital, sexuality and empire, among others. Doing so allows you, and your students, to appreciate slaves as people who were turned into commodities, who were made body in commercial and symbolic terms – a racializing and sexualizing process that unfolds differently in different times and places and helps to account for the discrepant relationships between bondage and indenture and to track the shades of meaning and practice that attached to those designations from the Atlantic to the Indian Oceans. Here the body functions as an aggregate but also as the driver: the maps, the demographics, even the slave narratives (where they exist) are contingent on it not just as an analytical category but as a social, political or economic actor. Once you’ve established it as a point of departure, the framework of your narrative, you can, of course, unpack the body and move your story in any number of directions, again to underscore the global character of slavery and its correlatives as a system. You can use the slave ship as an example of how and under what conditions bodies were transported and, in the case of the Middle Passage, transformed in transit, most often from living into dead but also from Mandinkan into Carolinian or boy into man. You can talk about the shift from slavery to indenture as a kind of bodily refit; you can focus on the body at work on plantations, in flight via runaway slave ads, in rebellion in Haiti, in childbirth wherever estate and other records permit you to see and/or imagine it. The body is both an abstraction and an opportunity for interpreting lived reality, however speculatively. And it can provide opportunities for understanding both what roles women (as well as men) played and how gender and sexuality worked as well.
Jennifer Morgan’s Laboring Women (2004) is exemplary here, emphasizing as it does how women of African descent were transformed into slaves by the exigencies of colonial profit in early colonial Barbados and South Carolina. Her skepticism about the inherent nature of women’s historical experience – a refusal to take the body as self-evident or a priori – is crucial. She argues that neither their femaleness nor their blackness was a given: as bodies, they accrued specific meanings and functions in the service of local and global economies but equally as a result of planters’ recognition of their tremendous labor/reproductive power. Both their womanness and their blackness were produced by what Morgan calls their “enslaveability”; those properties were historically, contingently, produced through the fact of New World slavery and they cannot be understood outside of those specific contexts of production. Nor was it only as slaves that African women manifested as bodies, as sexualized and racialized beings: they were also “free laborers … wives of traders and settlers and … travelers in their own right,” who either circulated widely in the Atlantic world or who occasioned, via their work and their value, much of the global mobility that characterized this region (Morgan 2004: 1–2). Whiteness was also dramatically produced, gendered and sexualized in such contexts (Jones 2007). “Women” don’t just have a history, they offer ways into the workings of History itself. And when I mobilize Morgan’s research in my own world history teaching, it is not as a local example of a global phenomenon. Rather, by establishing the body as a method for apprehending the global effects of slavery, we have the opportunity to see the striations of historical event and process writ large and small on either aggregates or individuals.
Although this strategic use of the body can lead to the “recovery” of individual women and their experiences, it is not a magic bullet. Recourse to bodies does not produce “voices” or speaking subjects any more than brief and generalized invocations of women in textbooks can do. The majority of enslaved women left no discursive trace, though scholars like Morgan and others have striven to read planters’ wills and other kinds of documentation to recreate their worlds; they have even engaged in historically informed speculation as to how such women may have felt about their children, their daily lives, their fates. If anything, the body as method complicates the idea that women can simply be restored to history qua women. As Morgan’s work so effectively shows, gender was never the only variable at work. Enslaved women were also imagined as black or “colored” or “mulatto” – racialized assignments that were part of the complex of gender, the modality in which it was lived, but that were ultimately inseparable from the slave’s identity as “woman.” For scholars of women and gender and sexuality committed, as many of us are, to thinking sex/gender as a system rather than as an identity per se, attention to the body makes more complicated – and historically dynamic – accounts of “women’s experience” not only possible but inevitable. In this sense, the body is as critical for feminist histories on a global scale as it is for world history as a genre or a practice. In methodological terms – and somewhat paradoxically – taking the body seriously in and as world history means both rematerializing gender/sexuality as a historical system and refusing to reduce histories of women simply to the sexed and gendered body. It means acknowledging, in other words, that bodies have histories that depend in part on their sexual capacity but that they function in a variety of other domains – economic, social, political – as well (see Butler 1998).
As a method, the body is protean and eminently portable. Want to understand Mughal court life in the age of Akbar? Think about the centrality of the harem to its management and hegemony. A “domestic” spatial arrangement that assigned specific domains to specific bodies, it mapped both the conditions of daily life and the dynastic ambitions of the emperor himself. As Ruby Lal’s work on the subject suggests, the harem was neither static nor fixed: it assigned women to certain spaces and regulated men’s contact with them, but it was continually on the move – producing what she calls a “peripatetic world” of court politics and an increasingly, if unevenly, gendered and sexualized sovereign subject in the body of Akbar himself. Given the emphasis on his genealogy, his divinity and the “fortified masculinity” of his body in Mughal chronicles – and given the stakes of these for his sovereign power – it is frankly hard to imagine how one could talk about Akbar absent attention to these questions (Lal 2005: 152). They are not simply ethnographic, though they do offer some window into the daily life of the court and the monarch’s place in it. As in the case of Louis XIV – whose ceremonial morning levee was a performance of the most intimate bodily detail and the highest political magnitude – attention to the body affords us entry to a whole set of historical processes, allowing us to slice politics and political economies wide open and access their protocols and modes of operation. Even if women are not the subject, or their individual historical experiences are not accessible, an embodied view of dominant forms offers insight into how power worked, and how inseparable it was from civilizational aspiration – even when such aspiration was thwarted or went unrealized.
Can the body as method really get at the big and/or traditional subjects of world history? Revolution is perhaps exemplary in this regard; to what extent is the body a useful strategy for its global histories? One very useful feature of this approach is the way the body can serve as a scalar standard, an index of how far ostensibly catastrophic events reach and what impact they have across populations, as collectivity and in the particular. Douglas Northrop’s (2004) work on struggles over the veil as a means of extending Soviet revolutionary power into Muslim Central Asia is a perfect example here, not least because it engages body politics in a very expansive way, illustrating how critical the family and specifically women and girls were to Moscow’s ideological and economic programs. His study allows us to see with particular vividness how linked local struggles against the unveiling campaign were to longer histories of Russian colonization and how readily the body might be reappropriated as a terrain of resistance or accommodation. As in the example of slave women, we see here with particular vividness how a political and cultural identity – “the Soviet woman,” “the Uzbek family” – is being forcibly assigned to certain subjects as part of a larger historical process; those designations do not exist a priori and in fact emerge directly from historical struggle. Depending on your predilections, this story could attach to a more conventional lecture on the Russian Revolution; it could be linked with narratives of how gender worked to shape the Mexican Revolution; or it could be used to remap what counts, in geographical terms, as Soviet territory into the interwar period, with the veil/body a kind of mercury trail for the success and limits of Sovietization as a globally aspirant ideology.4 At the very least, the impact of “revolution” on the body politic – as measured by the old and new regimes’ visions for the sociosexual order – is an indicator of the extent to which claims of historical transformation of the kind to be found in revolutionary rhetoric may actually have obtained. The body is, then, a litmus test for the scale of change – a critical indicator of a canonical disciplinary concern, for world history no less than any other. In part because students can be as hostile as anyone else to them in such settings, it is a litmus test you might not be able to employ with as much rhetorical or persuasive force if you employed “women” or even “gender,” although attention to these are clearly enabled by the body as method. (See chapters by Bain and by Getz, this volume.) Indeed, it would take some effortnotto account for women and gender once you have mobilized the body as a strategy.
My examples so far have, admittedly, been quite particular. Let’s take a wider swath of times and places and see how the body as method might play out as an explanatory framework for a larger portion of a world history syllabus. What follows is a rationale for how I conduct the part of my world history syllabus I call “Global Economies and Uneven Developments,” in which I strive self-consciously to globalize a kind of core European narrative of modernity and progress, prizing it open to and for histories of empire both east and west, both above and below. I operate under the presumption that since the publication of volume 1 of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality in 1979, a scholarly consensus has emerged about the centrality of the body to modern Western regimes of discipline and punishment, to the political economies of production and consumption, and indeed, to the history of liberal democracy and its discontents as well. As over a quarter of a century of research across a variety of Euro-American contexts has illustrated, it is not simply that the exigencies of biopower were foundational to the emergence of modern state bureaucracies, or even that governmentality, in its strictest sense, was predicated on the presumption that bodies, in all their messiness, be rationalized as citizen/subjects. The enduring though often overlooked insight offered by Foucault’s conceptual apparatus is rather that the body has had a distinctivelypolitical career entailed by its ideological and material work as a vector of labor and violence, reproduction and atrocity, alterity and civility. Bodies serve, in short, as lightning rods for politics – sexual and otherwise – across spaces small and vast. The body is nothing more nor less than the scandal of the state, in many senses of the term (Sunder Rajan 2003). For whether hegemonic or not, the agencies of modern power have struggled with, and often failed in, the project of fixing bodies, striving to make them legible to dominant forms of power and as stable and stabilizing sites of legitimacy. In doing so, state power has most often violated, reshaped and otherwise deformed the body: most commonly in the name of progress and civilization and with a very specific, if always unfolding, iteration of a “universal” white, male and middle-class model in view. Whether we begin the story of modernity in the 1350s, the 1490s or the 1750s, we must admit to the body as more than incidental to the fate of polities, nations and empires.5 In both the aggregate and the particular, bodies have consistently, and most often insistently, shaped the forms and meanings of the modern world in ways we have only begun to fully countenance.
Indeed, one way to approach the modern is as a set of symbolic and material practices that were made with, through and against the bodies of colonial subjects, however limited we may ultimately deem their agency. As students of other empires have been quick to point out, neither this temporal/causal relationship nor the category of colonial modernity itself is unique to Western empires. It is an observation that throws the exceptionality of the European experience into question and raises doubts about the segregation of the Western imperial body politic from Asian and Eurasian imperial histories. These are subjects that limits of space, regrettably, prevent me from taking up here (but see Barlow 2007; Sinha, this volume). In any case, if we heed the work of postcolonial histories and take colonial modernity as our point of departure, Foucault’s terms of embodiment are invariably colonial biopower, colonial governmentality, and colonial subjectivity; and the injunction is to understand body and its geopolitical careers as entangled in and by the multifaceted histories of empire as well. Subsections that dwell on “Working bodies: slavery and geopolitics, 1750–1900,” “Body politics: suffrage and citizenship, 1850–1920” and “Bodies for the nation: racial purity, imperial war and the ‘international’ order, 1870–1940” might ensue.
Clearly there is no single approach to the body as method. I see that as one of its many virtues: rather than an additive, it is a repositioning device (Ahmed, 2006) that can serve to restructure how we think about world history and offer us a set of procedures for thinking through the global. In elaborating some possibilities as I have done here, I want to offer a few caveats. First, if the body is to be a strategy for teaching world history, it must not stand still, as it were. It should be used wherever possible to forward arguments about interconnectedness rather than only to provide an example of or at a particular location. Some practitioners in the field may well disagree with me, but it is all too easy – especially in the US – to imagine a world history syllabus in which “it is Tuesday, so it must be East Asia.” Plotting syllabi that capture the dynamic interconnectedness of places and spaces, that attempt to map exchange and circulation and mobility, is one of the huge but highly motivating challenges of doing world history. Bodies can enhance the argument about connectivity but examples must be chosen that do that work, if not only that work. So my use of the veil in Central Asia in a world history lecture would not be simply to touch down on a local example but to dramatize the interregional ambit of Soviet state projects and/or to make comparisons with contemporary examples that look similar or dissimilar. Making visible the reticulate histories of whatever we nominate as a subject is nothing more nor less than the task of world history itself, however idiosyncratically we enact it in various professional venues. On the other hand, I also understand world history in its most critical, self-engaged form to be committed to assessing the limits of such interconnectedness, rather than arguing for a transhistorical globality of the kind we most often see unfolding across the cable news networks and other mainstream media venues. For the body is as useful a marker of the breakdown of linkages and the limits of circulation or exchange. One of my favorite texts to teach is Shula Marks’s Not Either an Experimental Doll (1998), which tells the story of the worlds of three South African women in the late 1940s, the moment of the onset of apartheid. At the heart of the story is the relationship between a young Xhosa girl, Lily Moya, and her would-be white patron, Mabel Palmer. Though their “friendship” is framed by all kinds of “worldly” forces – global empire, the transnational Christian civilizing mission, intertribal and linguistic economies, and Lily’s own determined mobility – what prevents their connection is the hard fact of racially segregated space designed to keep black and white bodies apart. I do not use the book as either a story of female solidarity thwarted or, just as problematic, a specifically African instance of body politics – although students invariably reach for both of those interpretation frames, sometimes at once. Rather, I set the evidence Marks provides alongside the partition of Pakistan, the creation of the state of Israel and the birth of the iron curtain as metaphor and reality, tracking the body/ politic in and through all of those temporally simultaneous and variegated sites to make an argument about the limits placed on mobility, even in a postwar era known for its unmoored subjects, its refugees and displaced persons. It is a very challenging narrative and I am still perfecting it. But these very challenges are a perpetual reminder to me and to the students who grapple with it that neither “the body” nor “the world” of world history is self-evident. The subjects thrown up by them have to be understood not only (if ever) as “representatives” of specific histories but as artifacts of often broad, geospatially linked or divergent historical processes and epistemes that we need to learn how to make sense of.
So far I have been working inside what might be called some fairly canonical frameworks, both geographical and temporal. This has as much to do with the limits of my own expertise as it does with anything else. But there are all manner of frames and architectures in the vast field of “world history” that are emergent and, as contributors in this volume attest, that are in urgent need of being called into being. For my part, I am acutely aware of my own North American location, and of its impact on how I see “the global,” which “globals” I have access to, and how naturalized some can look to me and to my students in east central Illinois in the second decade of the twenty-first century. This is what I think of, following Adrienne Rich (1991), as the “where do we see it from” question. The emphasis on geopolitics that can underwrite world history narratives in textbooks and source books is equally an issue, and has a huge impact on what kind of body we see and use as we develop and implement our methods. World environmental history, in which I am an interested but occasional reader at best, is one of the most innovative in this regard. At its most radical it offers challenges to all the narrative forms I have proffered in this chapter, because it offers new ways to historicize and render proportional the role of human agency at the heart of most history writing, even if we think of that agency as collective, social, civilizational. Sea and ocean worlds, as Jerry Bentley remarked over a decade ago now, might reasonably displace nation-states and empires as frameworks for historical analysis (Bentley 1999), with the result that the bodies we should privilege are salty and every bit as dis/integrative as any other methodological instrument we might choose to use to navigate world history. (See Salesa, this volume.) In the age of the BP disaster, who could disagree?
I submit that even allowing for such shifts – which are in any case not new, having enjoyed a long life thanks to scholars of the Pacific and Indian ocean worlds – the (human) body remains a useful and indeed an indispensable method for “following nature across time and place.” This is especially true as conventional “primary” sources for such a project do not abound for the pure environmental historian any more than they do for the scholar of the body. I would suggest that what Michael Egan so eloquently argues for historicizing “natural agency” – that is, that “historians read the physical environment as an active participant in human history, not just a backdrop” (2010: 112) – can readily be applied to the body as I have been outlining it here. Our projects share a conviction about the dialogic relationship between history and our primary subjects. Like Egan, I’d like to see more imaginative engagements with the processes of collision rather than a focus on the sovereign status of the “matter” at hand, whether nature or body. It is their motility that interests me because it reminds us that historical “matters” are rarely static or given, in part because their motile properties (even if they remain just potentialities) make them candidates for apprehending the very historicity of what we call “the global.” I would also like to see scholars like Egan attend to the body as an index of what he calls “mercury’s web” to describe the history of mercury’s global impact in the twentieth century. Toxins are carried in part by bodies and have ramifications for consumption, reproduction, labor, energy, biopower. Engagement with those interfaces requires, in turn, a commitment to reading and encouraging the production of body histories on all of our parts, because without it, we are not in a position to make anything like an informed set of claims about what constitutes world history.
Conclusion: The Body as World System?
Although I opened this chapter with a musing on women and world history textbooks, I am less interested in how these questions I have mooted are dealt with in grand narratives that students read (or don’t!) than I am in how they are addressed in the courses we actually teach. What is the world, for whom, and how do we begin to apprehend it and relay it in our classrooms? I open one of the first lectures in my 100-level world history course by quoting Immanuel Wallerstein, who defines a world-system as follows:
[it is] a social system, one that has boundaries, structures, member groups, rules of legitimation, and coherence. Its life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage. It has the characteristics of an organism, in that it has a life-span over which its characteristics change in some respects and remain stable in others. One can define its structures as being at different times strong or weak in terms of the internal logic of its functioning. (1976: 229)
While the body as I mobilize it does not fulfill all of these schematics, it is enough of a workable approximation to warrant asking whether the body might not be included in our consideration not of what a world-system looks like (its identity) but what a world-system does (its material and ideological work). And the organicism that Wallerstein’s notion of world-system conjures reminds us, again, of how “naturally” the body can and should serve as a ground for thinking globally in historical terms. This returns me to the distinctions I drew earlier between identity versus function, dimension versus index, when assessing the place of women, gender, sexuality and the body in our narratives of world history. My antipathy to the identitarian impulse grows, as I hope have made clear, from my conviction that bodies are not simply to be found in history, they are produced: they are the consequential effects of the collision of people and systems with a variety of contingent histories. If these processes are inveterately human, they also draw a boundary between homo sapiens and the rest – a peculiarly “humanist” effect with its own environmentally global histories.6In any case, bodies are not outside or below the sightline of History, they are one of its material and discursive agents: kinetic evidence of its vitality, its power, its grandeur, its intimacy, its cruelty, its indifference.
Or perhaps the body is better understood as a genre, where genre means not taxonomy but a means of access to some historical aspects of global experience that other methods do not provide. In rhetorical terms, the body has a dynamic energy in part because it is an open system, capable of registering the evolution of new forms of embodiment and of older, decaying ones as well.7 A capacious hold-all in many respects, the body has the capacity to act in aggregate and to disaggregate specific examples; it can be “about women” but it is also about race and class and age and status and labor and order and pain and mobility and disease and birth and death. Bodies can illuminate connection and exhibit its real and deadly limits. If the body has limitations as an analytical category, if it telescopes too much or too little, it does so no more and no less than the other categories we work with (politics, religion, militarism, trade), and which we should surely subject to as much critical scrutiny. World history may look inclusive, but it has its own axes of power, its evidentiary standards, its blind spots. This is especially true given its predominantly North American provenance and its function in US curricular arenas, state and local, public and private, in an age of hyper-trophic globalization. The body as method, even the body as world-system, is by no means a way out of these conundrums. But it does offer an angle of vision on the problem of world history as a struggle over the very form and content of that enterprise.
Notes
The author thanks Adele Perry, Emily Skidmore and Siobhan Somerville for their feedback.
1 I understand “women’s history” as a practice that engages questions of gender and sexuality, without necessarily being coterminous with them.
2 I draw here on Sarah Ahmed’s notion of “acts of relegation” (2006: 31).
3 For connective comparison see Weinbaum et al. (2008). For an account of the first 20 years of women’s history journal work, see Allman and Burton (2008).
4 For Mexico see Olcott et al. (2007).
5 For possible chronologies for the onset of modernity and/or European hegemony see Abu-Lughod (1991); Frank (1998).
6 I am indebted to Siobhan Somerville for this point, and for raising the question of organicism as well.
7 Here I borrow from and reshape arguments from Miller (1984: 151, 53). Thanks to Asha Varadharajan for this reference.
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