1.21.2006
Imagined Communities (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Note: this is really, really long. I will try not to make my notes so long in the future. But the tone of it is about what I intend for this blog - mostly rough, some summary, some quotes, some random musing.
Title
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
Field
Postcolonial Asian American Studies
Summary:
Anderson begins his project of charting the development and legitimization of nationalism by noting how notoriously difficult it is to name (at least, naming as some sort of truth telling venture) what a nation is. Here Andersen lays out the stakes of his project: "My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that word's multiple significations, nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artifacts of a particular kind. To understand them properly we need to consider carefully how they have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy. I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artifacts towards the end of the eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex 'crossing' of discrete historical forces; but that, once created, they became 'modular,' capable of being transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and ideological constellations." (4)
We then get what is probably the most important keyword for the text, or at least the most referenced (I mean, it is the title), the imagined community. The nation is an imagined community - the obvious example is that a person does not, and can never, know each member of her nation, but must, rather, imagine an abstracted relationship through the nation. I like the point that Anderson makes that this does not then suggest that the imagining is false or that behind or beyond nation there might be some essential truth of community - it is a useful thing to keep in mind when thinking about questions of authenticity. The nation, along with being imagined, is also limited, sovereign, and a community - "the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship." (7)
The nation is tied to conceptions of time and space. Obviously, we can see that through the definition of imagined community. Further, this issue of time and space is linked to the nation's preoccupation and rootedness in death and fatality. With this comes the linking of nationalism to both newness (historically) and legitimating permanence and continuity. Anderson traces the downfall of previous delineations of time and space, as self-evident at their own historical moment as the nation - the two forms are the religious community and the dynastic realm. The nation came about (and of course, it is not such a simple coming about - but this blog is about note taking, really...) alongside the downfall of these due to that other most important keyword of this text: print capitalism. The novel and the newspaper fundamentally changed the conception of time from messianic to calendrical, homogenous time. Further, as printing presses allowed for the rapid expansion into vernacular markets, the imagining of communities was facilitated by the very act of communal reading across space. "What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relationships (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity." (43) In that it was print, language was now fixed on the page as opposed to mutable through speech. As print-capitalism traded in the vernacular (although there were various calibrations of what this vernacular might be, either state-official or popular), new power structures of language were created. "The convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in it basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation." (46)
Anderson goes on to map why, through the power of language and print, the New World with its Creole pioneers came to nationalism first (linguistic similarity with the metropol and the impossibility of mobility for the Creole to the metropol) as opposed to the Old World (linguistic dissonance between the linguo-cultural practices of the people and the state). Further, simply because the New World came to nationhood first made nation an imaginable possibility, reproducible in Europe and post-WWII. In the case of the empire, official nationalisms of the colonizer simultaneously masked and produced the paradox of Englishman, for example, who could never be Englishmen. I think here we get shades of Homi Bhabha and later, as he revises his discussion of "Last Wave" nationalism in the Post-WWII period (that is, in the former colonies) of Fanon’s native intellectual. There is a lot more here, I mean, more detail and complexity as to the historical contingencies that allowed these differing moments of nationalisms to come into being, but I feel that I have outlined the general threads that run through the specificities of time and location Anderson discusses in depth and what is at stake in thinking nationalism.
Other Thoughts:
I am interested (ok, get ready for a shock!) this blue-print idea of nationalism and the transplantability of the almost empty term of nation (as it is bounded so often by what has fallen before it or by what it masks or by its paradoxes) across borders. And then, in his chapter on maps and museums, Anderson goes into how this transplantability is part of a process of detachability of the nation from all other nations as "pure sign." (175) Kind of neat.
Also, this imagining as something tangible and real is neat in terms of the body - what kind of print capitalism is needed to understand the body as a bounded unit that will never, ever be understood? Another, shock, I am fascinated by all the death and fatality in here. "Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed." (146)Not really a surprise since he is talking about new narratives of community and ways of understanding life and times.
Interesting also that the chapter on Patriotism and Racism should also be the chapter on love of nation: "What the eye is to the lover-that particular, ordinary eye he or she is born with - language - whatever language history has made his or her mother-tongue - is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at the mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships are imagined, and futures are dreamed." (154) That's weird, right?
On a final note, Anderson's discussions of language, time and space come into a really cool place in the final chapter on memory and forgetting. I think I'll just write out some of the quotes - given my fields and interests it should be pretty clear why I am ending with them.
"All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives." (204)
"Out if this estrangement [he is talking about looking at the photograph of oneself as a baby] comes a conception of personhood, identity (yes, you and that naked baby are identical) which, because it can not be 'remembered' must be narrated. Against biology's demonstration that every single cell in a human body is replaced over seven years, the narratives of autobiography and biography flood print-capitalism's markets year by year." (204) Ok, wow, this is really cool, I think. Where is narrative bleeding into imagining? And where is memory stored, anyway? It is already breaking down the bounded body, esp. with the foundation on the terminus, death. Plus, I am giggling because I am thinking about James Frey and Oprah. And also Lacan.
Other QE Works Cited:
Barthes, Roland. Michelet par lui-meme. (Narrative)
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (Film and Media Theory)
Said, Edward. Orientalism. (Postcolonial Asian American Studies)
Summary, Imagined Communities
How have the "imagined political communities" of nations achieved such power in the modern world that people will die for them? Anderson's much-cited text seeks to answer this question by pinning the development of nationalism down to a historical timeline. It is a useful tool for thinking about how to articulate the fraught political unit of the "nation" in relation to ideology and its generalized but qualitatively different form, the state, though the text does not comprehensively situate nationalism in contemporary (or even historical) theoretical terms. Rather, for the most part the text is a much more focused and limited historical narrative of how communities called nations could be imagined in the first place, for example through the evolution of vernacular languages and print capitalism (what Anderson calls the "philological" and "lexicographic" revolutions). Moving back further in time Anderson describes the decline of kingships and how the same cultural systems that accounted for mass religious fervor account for nationalistic fervor. Anderson attributes the roots of modern nationalism to movements in the Americas ("creole pioneers") which then bounced back and had effects in Europe. Finally, dominant groups adopt "official nationalism" as a way of consolidating and reinforcing their power. Museums, maps, and censuses are a few official ways of abstracting the nation as a community.
keywords: print capitalism, vernacular languages, creole, reading classes, the philological / lexicographic revolution, official nationalism, Russification, colonial nationalism, political museumizing
: 4:53 PM : 4:58 PMYour summary is really useful to me. I didn't talk about the replication, if hollow, of the populism (low risk populism, though, and hypocritical in the case of slavery) of New World nationalisms in Old World/Colonial "official nationalism." Plus, you situate the text in a larger framework. Also, your keywords are nice. I like Russification esp. since it reminds me of small stuffed bears and not the policies of what's his name and Macauley.
Benedict Anderson begins his project of exploring the emergence and development of the nation as an ‘imagined political community’ by introducing the concepts of nationality and “nation-ness” as not only “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our times,” but more interestingly as a cultural artifact (Anderson, 3). This provocative statement becomes rather telling of Anderson’s analytical approach throughout his text as he positions a creative array of often unexpected cultural phenomenon as historical artifacts in order to conceptually ground his discussion of this extremely abstract concept and structure of collective consciousness. Anderson’s creative use of these often untapped archives and artifacts such as stained glass windows, nameless graves of soldiers, languages, novels, newspapers, songs, and baby pictures seem to me to be one of the greatest strengths of this text. In fact, in the preface to his second edition, Anderson mentions his decision to leave his text largely as “an unrestored period piece with its own characteristic style, silhouette, and mood,” encouraging the reader to view even this text as a cultural artifact of sorts (Anderson, xii). In this sense, Anderson encourages (quite productively, I think) a reading of this text that remains attentive to the larger set of historical and theoretical issues at play during the time of the book’s initial publication.
Anderson positions his discussion of nationalism within the broader framework of Marxism and Marxist movements and sets up his project as both an attempt to trace the historical emergence of the nation with the rise of capitalism, as well an attempt to explore why nationalism “commands such emotional legitimacy” (4). Anderson’s claim that the nation is an imagined community refers to the fact that members of a nation will never know most of their fellow members, and therefore, one abstracts a relationship with fellow members through the figure of the nation: “in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (6). One of the most interesting questions Anderson poses in this context is “what makes so many people willing to die for such imaginings?” (8). In his second chapter, “Cultural Roots,” Anderson attempts to answer this question by examining nationalism’s preoccupation with death as emblematic of its relationship with religious imaginings.
It also interests me, Nisha, that death becomes such a central figure in Anderson’s text, both in his analysis as well as seeping into the metaphors of his discourse (“the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human languages created the possibility of a new form of imagined community”(46) - I wonder what this is symptomatic of?).
In this second chapter, Anderson argues that with the age of Enlightenment rationalist secularism, and the end of religious communities and dynastic realms, the nation as an imagined concept emerged in response to the human needs of a “secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning” (11). With this transformation of collective consciousness came a transformation in the fundamental conceptions of time and space. Anderson provides an extremely useful discussion of how the novel and the newspaper were key factors in altering the notion of ‘simultaneity’ from a concept “along time” “marked by prefiguring and fulfillment, to a movement “cross-time” through “homogenous empty time” marked by clocks and calendars. Furthermore, with the invention of printing presses, “print capitalism made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways” (36). Print capitalism gave a fixity to language that created certain languages of power, as well as a notion of antiquity which becomes a central figure in nationalist imaginings.
In the following chapters, Anderson attributes the roots of modern nationalism to the “creole pioneers” in the Americas. In response to these these nationalist tendencies, nationalism was then appropriated by European religious dynasties, creating “official nationalisms” in order to consolidate power, then giving rise to the final form of the nation state, co-opted by those emerging out of anti-imperial struggle. As Ania Loomba usefully synthesizes, this last leg of Anderson’s history of the nation (in the “Last Wave” chapter) has sparked a great deal of discomfort with the implicit dependency of the colonized on the model of the colonizer: “Anderson’s argument here converges with the standard older understanding of nationalism in the colonized world. English historians had even suggested that Indians learnt ideas of freedom and self determination from English books” (Loomba, 189). Loomba also usefully notes that in the context of the creole pioneers, Anderson claims that modern nationalism in this context was born out of both dispossession and privilege, which is “a dichotomy that also informs various anti-colonial nationalisms at a later time in history” (Loomba, Ania. Colonialism/Postcolonialism, 189). This combination of privilege and dispossession in this context is also interesting to me in thinking about the rise of third world nationalist figures as intellectuals (such as Nehru).
I found Anderson’s chapter on “Race and Patriotism” perplexing and a bit disconcerting, perhaps delineating the limitations of his analytical approach. In a chapter where I expected a (long awaited) discussion of the difference, fear, and hate from which modern nationalisms also draw breath, there is an odd discussion of national and self-sacrificial “love.” I think of this as not only symptomatic of Anderson’s overall blind-spot of issues of exclusion and marginalization, but also perhaps symptomatic of the limitations that theoretical or historical discourses such as this one poses when it comes to issues of emotive, embodied, or affective structures. Anderson’s questions surrounding the extreme emotional investments in nationalism seemed to me the most important in many ways, and yet a bit undertheorized in his text which interests me because of my own endeavors to grapple with spaces of “unreadability.” However, despite the absence of a discussion of those marginilized by these imagined communities, I do think it is notable that his engagement does not foreclose analysis of nationalism’s structures of exclusion. The idea of the community as “imagined” opens up avenues to discuss the (failed) promise of inclusion that nationalisms and concomitant ideologies such as multiculturalism seem to carry.
Finally, Anderson’s chapter on “Memory and Forgetting” broach some important issues surrounding the collective amnesia that transformations of consciousness bring, and the kinds of narratives that must then replace ‘memory’. This chapter also opens up possible avenues to discuss the historically marginalized in the context of national histories and memories. While Anderson never explicitly discusses the notion of trauma, in the context of this last chapter along with the centrality of fatality and the image of Benjamin’s “Angel of History,” it seems to me that trauma could also be a productive analytical category which would perhaps provide greater conceptual (and perhaps discursive) dexterity in thinking about “why these particular cultural artifacts have aroused such deep attachment” (Anderson, 4).
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