Re-imagining Communities

2016

This clever little book has all that it takés to become a primary source of inspiration to anyone interested in the issue of nationalism, its causes and transformations. Written with admirable clarity and a good deal of humor, its nine chapters present the reader with a refreshing way of looking at this Modern Age universal. To the student of East Central Europe this work offers the possibility of seeing his favorite subject matter placed within a comparative framework (one that goes beyond the usual West European perspective) by an author whose own 'expertise' lies with Indochina and who feels comfortable using the work of anthropology and literary theory to draw insight on political history. Nation-ness remains as legitimate a political value today as it has been for the past two centuries. It has, equally, remained an enigma to social analysis. Rather than seeing it as another ideological 'ism', Anderson prefers to treat the related phenomena of nationality, Nationalism and nation-ness as cultural artifacts, akin to kinship and religion. He defines the nation as "an imagined political Community," since it is impossible for all members to know each other 'personally'. What distinguishes it from other kinds of imagined communities is "the style by which it is imagined." (p. 15) It is imagined as limited since it rests on the notion of membership and thus exclusion. And it is sovereign; the nation connotes the sense of freedom within its protective shell (the reality of oppression notwithstanding). Anderson is certainly not the first to trace the cultural roots of nationalism to the development of mercantile capitalism, to the increased contact with non-European worlds and to the invention of the printing press, both of which gradually undermined the vast imagined dynastie and religious communities of the Middle Ages. The originality of the author's argument comes from showing how print-capitalism aecounts for the development of a new sense of co-presence, a key component in the "obscure genesis of nationalism." The vertical world of the Middle Ages was one in which the 'now' coexisted with the past and future in one simultaneity of presence given by Divine Providence. "In such a view of things, the word 'meanwhile' cannot be of real significance." (p. 30) The medieval 'simultaneity-along-time' is replaced "by an idea of 'homogeneous, empty time,' in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, crosstime, marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment, but by temporal eoineidence, and measured by clock and calendar." (p. 30) The novel and the newspaper provided, in different ways, the possibility of presenting an earthly simultaneity in which the reader is made present to a multiplicity of actions and actors who coexist as a 'sociolo-gicaP Community 'in time'. The newspaper draws together events related often only

2019

“The nation […] is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”1, and the events of the 18th century “became modular, capable of being transplanted, […] to a great variety of social terrains, […] and political and ideological constellations”2. With these two opening statements, Benedict Anderson sets the basis of his theory on nationalism expressed in the insightful Imagined Communities. Not only does the author give a breath of fresh air to the scholarship around the topic by studying the imagined and modular aspects of nationalism, but also reflects on the relation between the nation and other dimensions as print capitalism and bureaucracy. In this text we will briefly summarize Anderson´s main ideas and contributions. After that, I will focus on the materialization of abstract notions into tangible objects and the consequences of this in the conception and practice of nationalism in four different spheres, while offering a critical analysis of the book.

Social History, 2014

faculty.cua.edu

2011

1991

Neither nationalism nor its near-relation patriotism has had a good press recently in the literary or academic or even in the political culture of the United States and Westem Europe. The reasons for chis are only

1 This essay is a response to the question " What role have ideas played in historical debates concerning the 'rise of nation state'? to be answered with reference to at least two texts or concrete examples.