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Interview with Donna Gabaccia
Professor Donna Gabaccia will stay as a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for European Global Studies from April to July. In this interview, she introduces her research project on Imagining Nations of Immigrants.
Welcome to the Institute for European Global Studies, Professor Gabaccia! What kind of research project will you pursue during your stay in Basel?
My current research project, “Imagining Nations of Immigrants” examines the intersection of demography and discourse in the making of modern nations. The United States may be the only country in the world that regularly celebrates itself as a Nation of Immigrants, but many other nations are products of the complex cross-cultural dynamics that accompany massive, long-distance and long-term migrations. As in today’s world, mass migrations in the nineteenth century were often perceived and discussed as a challenge to national homogeneity and to state governance. I examine these issues by focusing on the invention and evolution of what I call “terminologies of mobility.” To date my research has focused mainly on countries in Europe, in North and South America, and in Australia. Beginning in the year ahead however I intend to broaden my analysis to include case studies of South Africa, Singapore, Israel and perhaps also one of the modern, oil-rich countries of the Middle East. These cases require me to understand the long-term legacy of European empire-building for terminologies of mobility. They also open questions about how widely European or North American models for national exclusion or inclusion resonate outside the global North.
Why did you choose this specific topic?
For thirty years, I have repeatedly experimented as a scholar with a variety of methodologies and sources, including quantitative, archival, material culture, oral and participant observation/ field work. And I have remained committed to research projects that allow me to focus on multiple national histories. Although I began my scholarly life as a comparative historian of Europe and the United States, I have also employed other paradigms and frameworks—transnational, diasporic, transcultural and international—that allow me to understand mobility on a global scale. In my Basel project on cross-national terminologies of mobility, I have begun to use research methods associated with the so-called Digital Humanities, which include „data mining“ and corpus linguistics - i.e. the quantitative analysis of large, digitized text archives - in order to practice what literary scholar Franco Moretti has termed „distant reading.“ Rather than analyze fiction, as Moretti does, however, I analyze narratives of migration that appear in newspapers, governmental documents and national histories.
How does the topic relate to European Global Studies?
As noted above, in my answer to your first question, I hope to expand my knowledge of terminologies of mobility to include parts of Asia and Africa that have national histories shaped by centuries of European imperialism. In the past, I’ve analyzed migration in these areas largely through the application of quantitaive methods to empirical, often statistical, data. Now I want to identify a number of national case studies where I might realistically (given the limits of my languages and access to future research assistance) do distant readings of the kinds of digitized texts I mention in my previous answer.
What are you most excited about regarding your stay in Basel?
While I have very good relations with European scholars who specialize in the study of global and regional migrations, I have not been able to expand network of contacts with the new global historians of Europe. My stay in Basel will give me a chance to do that. I’ve taught world history for almost twenty years and I repeatedly hear colleagues in the U.S. insist that interest in global phenomena is limited to North America and a product of American empire building. I’m sceptical about that but I also want to understand better how world and global histories have developed over the past several decades in Europe and to compare their development (at least implicitly) to the growth of world and global history in North America.
I’m also excited about returning to a German-speakig environment. I held my first academic position at the Freie Universitaet Berlin in the 1980s, and I’m eager to re-invigorate my German language skills. I first visited Basel in the 1970s, and I’ve always been fascinated (at least as a tourist and wine drinker) by the French/German/Swiss borderlands.
Finally, I’ll be traveling to Basel after a month-long teaching stint in an M.A. in Migration Studies in Norway; I like the idea of experiencing „back-to-back“ two European societies with contemporary and quite influential anti-immigrant political movements. And in Basel (unlike Norway) I will actually be able to read discussions of contemporary migrations and to gain a sense of the terminologies used to celebrate, study, or disparage migrant foreigners. For example, is the early-twentieth century of „Ueberfremdung“ still present in contemporary debates?
Thank you for the interview, Professor Gabaccia.