British Scholar: November 2007 Scholar of the Month

Scholar of the Month

November 2007

For Previous Scholars of the Month Click Here

British Scholar is proud to present the November 2007 Scholar of the
Month Jason Parker. Parker is Assistant Professor of History at
Texas A&M University. His published works include:

- Brother's Keeper: The United States, Race, and Empire in the British
Caribbean, 1927-1962 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming,
April 2008)

- “Remapping the Cold War in the Tropics: Race, Communism, and
National Security in the West Indies," International History Review 24:
2 (June 2002).

1. First of all, you are formally an American historian but your work overlaps
with British and British imperial history. What drew you into studying Anglo-
American relations in the Caribbean?

JP: Like a lot of historians, I was drawn to my subject by both personal and
professional gravities. I went to grad school to study U.S. foreign relations–
especially the impact of race and decolonization on America’s Cold War
diplomacy– and had plans to do a secondary field in modern Latin
America/Caribbean. The more I dug into the literature, the more I concluded
that all of the above converged in the British West Indies. Moreover, for all
the riches it held, this was a largely overlooked story. It had been explored
by a couple of scholars, but not yet with both the archival depth and
interpretive framework to do it justice. I got lucky with the timing on the
former, as a number of key archival collections opened up at exactly the right
moment, and this allowed me to construct the latter. That is, the evidence let
me present the West Indies’ path to independence as a story of inter-
American, Anglo-American, U.S.-Caribbean, and U.S.-Third World relations;
a story of World War II and the Cold War; and a story of the global “race-
revolution” of the postwar era. It is thus inescapably and consummately an
international history. As a scholarly field to till, you couldn’t ask for better.
On the personal side, my wife– whom I met before starting grad school– has
roots in the French Caribbean, so that put the Antilles at the forefront of my
mind and our lives. Even before that, I think I had the Caribbean on the
brain, as a consequence first of too many pirate stories as a kid, and
second of growing up in landlocked Oklahoma, dreaming of those heavenly
beaches.

2. Did you have any important mentors that influenced your decision to
become a historian or to choose your particular topic?

JP: In Tom Schwartz’s incredible seminar at Vanderbilt while I was doing
my M.A., I read an essay by Bob McMahon that led me directly to where I am
today. The seminar was among the more exciting intellectual exercises I’ve
ever been a part of, and it convinced me that foreign-relations history was
what I wanted to do. I had already chosen an M.A. topic in Southern and
African American history, and was working full-time while going to grad
school, so it wasn’t really feasible to switch at that stage. But we had read
the McMahon essay that singled out decolonization as a promising frontier
in foreign-relations and international history, and from his prose (and a follow-
up discussion with Schwartz) I had the feeling that Bob was the kind of
advisor I wanted. He proved to be a fantastic mentor. I feel like I really
flourished in grad school, and it’s thanks to him.

Of course by that time I’d already decided to become an historian; Bob just
showed (and shows) me the kind of historian I want to be. Before that, I
came to history thanks to two people and one place in my undergrad days.
The place was France, where I spent a semester abroad as a junior. I
couldn’t read much French until late in my stay, so I devoured all the English-
language books in the tiny library of our center. Those included classics
(and not-such-classics!) on European history like Toynbee, Fuller, and
Trevelyan– and I think the experience of reading them in a French city so
suffused with history really clinched it. I “heard the calling,” so to speak. I
was actually an English major, but I added a History minor when I came back
to Vanderbilt, and was blessed to take classes with Michael Bess and with
the late Hugh Davis Graham, two of the finest historians and finest people I’
ve ever known. They inspired me to believe that I could make a living doing
what I’d fallen in love with, long before I had much of an idea of what exactly I
would study.

3. How does your American perspective provide you with a different
interpretation of British imperial history than say, a formal British imperial
historian?

JP: If you’re of an international-history persuasion to begin with, as I am,
then it adds many colors to your palette. The hugely salutary development of
the “empire-as-a-two-way-street” approach– tracing connections between
metropole and colony in both directions– has in recent decades invigorated
study of all the empires, perhaps British most of all. But even a well-lit two-
way street, to continue the metaphor, can leave parts of the larger roadmap
in darkness. A background in U.S. foreign relations, especially in the
twentieth century, almost by definition ensures a broader and proper
contextualization of the metropole-colony exchange.

An obvious example of this is something I pursue in Brother’s Keeper: the
relationship between the Cold War and decolonization. It’s a thornier
question than it first appears. Decolonization was negotiated between
metropole and colony, in some cases over a course of decades– but it only
came to fruition during the Cold War, and the superpower conflict could
horribly warp the process. Even in places where neither superpower
intervened militarily or covertly, the Cold War could speed up, slow down, or
otherwise bend and alter the dynamics of decolonization. Nor was this
confined to the postwar era. Erez Manela’s fantastic new book shows the
impact of American actions and rhetoric, in this case Wilsonianism, on
nationalist movements in the interwar imperial world. It’s a great reminder
that even the deepest exchanges of politics, culture, language, or what have
you can be best understood as not only two-way but multivalent. Of course
any British-imperial historian can leaven his or her two-way story by adding
the right dosage of external (not necessarily American) elements. But I find
that a background in U.S. foreign relations ensures that one never forgets
the larger stage on which imperial processes occur. The lessons apply in
the other direction, too: anyone studying twentieth-century U.S. foreign
relations is studying empire whether so named or not, so some grounding in
British imperial history is an extremely useful comparative to have at hand.

4. Do you see transnational history and the history of empires continuing to
grow? Framed as a larger question: what direction do you see history as a
profession moving?

JP: Yes. I think transnational history and empires-history will indeed
continue to grow, and grow very much together. They lend themselves so
beautifully to each other; in a sense they were essentially made for each
other. Nations exist, and nations matter. But most are relatively new, and
they are seemingly forever internally contested, always “in the making.” For
a long time, too, where the circumstances of power permitted it, nations and
empires were synonymous. The more we historicize the nation-state as a
construct of the modern era– especially but not exclusively those nation-
states assembled from faltering empires– the more fragile it tends to look.
We see in our own time the ways in which sovereign nationhood is
challenged by things like capital flows, alternative identities grounded in
religion or language or culture, and the global media matrix. We are thus
reminded daily that certain dynamics, processes, and movements simply
are not contained within national borders. Students of empire especially
know this is nothing new, having seen similar currents flow back, forth, and
through their subject; and students of foreign relations know that formal
diplomacy is sometimes a lagging rather than a leading indicator of
changes in regional or global affairs. All told, and well beyond these two
subfields, I think the international and transnational approaches will prove to
have real staying power in our profession.

5. You just finished your first book, Brother's Keeper: The United States,
Race, and Empire in the British Caribbean, 1927-1962 (Forthcoming,
Oxford University Press, April 2008). What is your next project? Does it
involve British history?

JP: I’m currently at work on two book projects. In the first, British-imperial
history will only make a cameo appearance, but in the second it will have a
starring role. The first project is a study of U.S. Cold War public diplomacy
in the Third World. This grew, somewhat indirectly, out of the West Indies
project. My interest in race and decolonization as factors in U.S. foreign
relations kept me attuned to American efforts at “image management” in the
Caribbean, so along the way I kept notes about this. A lot of excellent work
has been done recently on the activities of the United States Information
Agency and other U.S. propaganda, notably Ken Osgood’s outstanding
book. But a lot of this literature focuses either within the First World, or
between the First and Second. My project seeks to fill that gap by looking at
crisis-management public diplomacy in a series of case studies in U.S.-
Third World relations. So the Brits will show up here and there, and much of
the action will take place in the decolonizing British Empire, but it draws
almost entirely on U.S. archives and is more of a “policy” story than a
“relations” one.

The second project I’m working on, though, brings the British Empire back to
center-stage. It is a comparative study of postwar federations in the Third
World. This too grows out of the West Indies project, during which I became
fascinated by the short and ill-starred life of the West Indies Federation. My
fascination deepened when I looked around outside the region a bit, and
discovered that there was a tremendous vogue for such federations from the
late 1940s to the early 1960s. They seemed to hold out something for
everyone: anticommunist stability for the U.S., continued influence for the
British, and proof of pan-national solidarity for visionaries of “race”
consciousness and identity. Nor was this enthusiasm for federations
confined to the British Empire. Most of the other empires tried it in one
place or another, as did some newly independent entities. Even Europe
itself got into the act at this time, in the form of the European Union. What I
find amazing is that with the exception of the EU, none of these federations
survived even a decade in their original form– and when they faltered and
failed, they all did so in more or less the same way. They were coincident
with the Cold War, but that conflict didn’t kill them. Rather, they fractured
along “ethnic”– linguistic-cultural, or more broadly “racial”– lines. I think there’
s a great story there, one that connects back to the Wilsonian dilemma, and
forward to some of the lingering pains in the global South in the present day.

6. You took jobs or fellowships at West Virginia University, Ohio State, and
now Texas A&M, all good schools. What advice would you give graduate
students and younger faculty on how to more effectively apply for and win
jobs or fellowships?

JP: There are two parts to it, and a deeper underlying connection between
the two. You have to build a good CV, and you have to learn the art of the
application. A good CV– highlighted by the accompanying materials–
contains four crucial items. It has an interesting research topic, and frames
it in ways that appeal to non-specialists and specialists alike. It has
publications, done or in progress. It has teaching experience already in
hand. And finally it has honors, grants, and fellowships, from both within your
institution and from wider competitions too. The art of the application
reflects the homework you’ve done about the job or fellowship. This allows
you to tailor the application to the particular post, and to show how your CV
and project make you a great candidate to take it on. This sounds obvious
but a surprising number of applicants don’t put in the time to “fit” themselves
into the parameters and objectives of the job or fellowship. And practice
makes perfect– you have to be ready to apply to a wide range of things, and
often multiple times for the same ones. The research-travel grant programs
of some of the presidential libraries, for example, are very generous to folks
working on dissertations; others are less so. In the latter case, you just keep
refining your application, and keep trying.

The “deeper underlying connection” is the need, put simply, to think things
through– to think strategically not just about a given application but about
grad school as a whole. You want to be thinking about how every step of the
process can pay dividends down the road. A seminar paper, for example, if
carefully done can morph into both a grant proposal and a published article.
In similar fashion, thoroughly researching a job or fellowship can help you
find “angles” that let you apply different aspects of your CV to varied aspects
of the post. And with apologies to Napoleon Bonaparte, luck is an important
quality to have too; to the extent it’s possible, you want to put yourself in a
position to be lucky when opportunities arise.

7. You participated in the British Scholar Conference this November. What
did you take away from the experience?

JP: It was a wonderful experience. I’d already become friends with some of
the UT grad students thanks to my being first a participant and then a faculty-
leader in Roger Louis’s International Seminar on Decolonization. Those
students are extremely impressive and I looked forward to more
opportunities for our paths to cross. So when I got the invitation to chair a
panel at the British Scholar Conference, I was delighted to accept. It was a
marvelous meeting. The panel I was on was great fun, the papers there and
at the other sessions I saw were of high-caliber, and the atmosphere was
wonderful. I plan to take part every year; I see it as one of the perks of my
new job at A&M, being here “in the neighborhood” in central Texas.

8. Any concluding thoughts on all things broadly defined as British?

JP: One of my favorite things about the Caribbean project was that I found it
impossible to get bored with the topic. There was always another angle
needing, and more importantly, rewarding attention. I suppose most
historians feel that way about their subjects, but I found it exceptionally so
thanks to the multiplicity of influences, histories, and agents at work in the
Caribbean. My time on that project and with the Decolonization Seminar
has shown me that “British/British empire history” is the same way. That
broad realm, to borrow from Whitman, contains multitudes. It is endlessly
rewarding, perhaps especially for students of foreign-relations.
Decolonization not only brought down the modern European empires, of
which the British was the largest and deepest. Decolonization also brought
an end to “empire” as an organizing principle of statecraft. That principle
goes back as far as Ramses. Its disappearance is a development of
millennial importance, and one in which the British played an outsized role. I
admit that some parts of that legacy puzzle me– the abiding love of cricket in
the ex-empire, for example– but I am certain it will continue to reward
historians working on it, and reward their readers with a vibrant and growing
literature.

Click Here to View Jason Parker's Website