SUMMARY:

In Andrew Zimmerman’s view, the dialectic of “I” and “we” in Choi Chatterjee’s “Manifesto” allows to speak of transnational history not just as an academic subspecialty but also as a particular vision of the future. This vision is simultaneously realizable and utopian, a real autobiography and a visionary project. The “I” in this text represents a decolonial position and hence perceives globality not as abstract cosmopolitanism but as myriad struggles, never complete, against multiple forms of oppression – colonial, postcolonial, and beyond. This “I–we” dialectic also informs the connection between teaching and research. Zimmerman interprets Chatterjee’s research program as a decolonial reinterpretation of Voltaire’s Candide – “cultivating one’s garden” as the only meaningful response to a world of cruelty and misery around. Whereas Candide gardens to escape the world, Chatterjee and her students garden for the opposite purpose: to embrace the world, to seize the land. To write transnational history as Chatterjee suggests is to write history in, by, for, from, and about the “surround,” – a history free from the ahistorical logic of the capital and domination.