Radical Moves Summary

Transnational history studies the links and the flows of people, ideas, products or culture across various societies and regions. When analyzing studies in transnational history, it is imperative to identify the historical players that weave a vast number of places to a single web. In the past few centuries, travelers, immigrants, and colonists helped to spread culture, ideology, goods, and ideology from Europe and North America to almost all corners of the world. However, the moving human beings are not always the actual linkers among regions. Many places are connected by the tangible objects or intangible ideas though carried by migrating population. Sometimes, the connection even does not need men from different locals to meet---books,
A transnational study can cover two nations, or multiple nations in a geographical region. Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitan covers the exchange of experience and strategies between anti-imperialism/caste resistances in British-controlled India and African-Americans’ anti-racism struggle. Because of the racial suppression in these two nations, they identified a common goal and a racial pride to stay together and to fight against racial suppression. On a larger scale, an author can focus on a geographical region. Lara Putman’s Radical Moves concentrates on the Caribbean islands and the United States, to be more specific, the migrant workers in this area. She stresses that the circulation of people in these regions at the same time contributed to the nativism and state-building along their path, as well as the rise of the black internationalism. The migrants in the cities and states in this area aligned themselves together via both their unique music and the newspaper articles conveying their shared pursuit and
The location is like a huge beaker in a chemistry laboratory, where different ideas or various groups of people confront and merge with each other. Such meeting may result in novel culture or thinking very different from the original ones. Warwick Anderson’s Colonial Pathologies only describes the American public health system and state-building in the Philippines in the early 20th century. The colonial officials had the sole power in promulgating the public health rules. Moreover, the author depends exclusively on the files of the colonial government and papers of American officials, but not the accounts of contemporary Filipinos or local records. Despite the limits in geography and sources, Anderson concentrates on how Americans responded to the local environment and microbial fauna. In their attempts to deal with pathogens in the Philippines and to control the colonial subjects, the western modernization represented by the colonial medical official’s knowledge and laboratory studies clashed with the indigenous culture and social activities, which were described in the papers of the colonial officials. They perceived the Filipinos’ as a dirty race thus launched campaigns both to improve their hygienic practices and to impose “American civilization” on them, during which they faced resistance from local people and the colonial projects ended in Filipino’s “mimicry.” Hence, even Anderson merely writes about the