More "Trans-," Less "National"

MATTHEW FRYE JACOBSON

FOR SEVERAL YEARS NOW the grail of "transnationalism" has defined the quest of historical inquiry in a number of suhfields. Practitioners in the area of immigration have quite naturally heen near the center of this emergent and developing discussion: whatever else any one of us has been up to in our work, our cumulative project has sketched and indexed the history of global transportation routes, transnational labor frontiers, international population flows, and resettlement patterns of every sort, including inter-continental political and cultural diasporas, trans-oceanic family arrangements, and seasonal or even daily bordercrossings and re-crossings. Ours is a "transnational" field by definition. Odd, then, that for so long it has also been so national in its orientation and its pervasive sensibilities. For immigration studies in the era of ascendant "transnationalism," the nation-state is the gum from the sidewalk that we can never quite seem to scrape from our shoes.