Chapter 28 - Whose Imagined Community?

Chatterjee is giving a summary and critique of Benedict Anderson’s previous chapter, which is Imagined Communities. In order for you to understand what is being said in this chapter you need to read the previous chapter. And in case you didn’t read it because it is the end of the semester and you have lots of work to do, I will try to give you a little info on it and follow it with Chatterjee and Whose Imagined Community. Anderson is talking about the origin and spread of nationalism. He says that since World War II every successful revolution has defined itself in national terms and because of this “has grounded itself firmly in a territorial and social space inherited from the pre revolutionary past”. Anderson says nationalism is difficult to define and analyze, so he proposes the following definition of the nation: “it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign”.

Anderson says it is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. This made me think of all the communities on the Internet, myspace, facebook, and of course the new tweeter communities, among others. They are imagined communities were the people never meet each other yet they consider themselves a type of fraternity. Anderson says these imagined communities are limited because of boundaries, and outside of these are other nations. Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation…the nation is always conceived as a deep horizonal comradership. What Anderson tries to figure out is why so many members are will to die for their imagined community. Why die in war, suicide bombing, genocide, etc.? He gives an example of the unknown soldiers grave and how that tomb is saturated with ‘ghostly national imaginings. He believes this answer lies in the roots of nationalism. And that nationalism has to be understood by aligning it with the large cultural systems that preceded it. He says the novel and the newspaper are the "basic structure of two forms of imagining which first flowered in Europe in the eighteenth century. He explains the simple novel plot, basically what we see over and over again, yet this shows the novelty of this imagined world that has been conjured up by the author in his readers’ minds. He gives another example of how an American will never meet, or even know the names of more than a handful of his thousands of other Americans, or even know what they are up to, but he says that “he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. Anderson goes on to explain the imagined linkage to community of newspaper readers and their relation to the people and events they are reading about. Even after explaining all this Anderson goes back to why people are ready to die for these inventions. He says “it is doubtful whether either social change or transformed consciousness, in themselves, do much to explain the attachment that people feel for the inventions of their imaginations – or, to revive a question raised at the beginning of this text…. Why people are ready to die?” Chatterjee says, “nationalism is now viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable force of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life.” And that nationalism was entirely a product to the political history of Europe and “there may be in the recent amnesia on the origins of nationalism more than a hint of anxiety about whether it has quite been tamed in the land of its birth.” Chatterjee says it is great that Anderson has brought attention to nationalism with his writings, but Chatterjee’s objection is “whose imagined community” is he talking about? “If nationalism in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain ‘modular’ forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?” Chatterjee cannot reconcile Anderson’s thought, because of the evidence on anticolonial nationalism. He says is it not totally Anderson fault because we have all taken the claims of nationalism to be a political movement much to literally and much to seriously. He agrees with Anderson’s example of “print capitalism” which provides the new institutional space for the development of the modern “national” language. But, he says in his country of Bengal, the East India Company and the European missionaries first printed books in the 18th century, and in the 19th century the English “displace Persian as the language of bureaucracy and emerges as the most powerful vehicle of intellectual influence on the new Bengali elite.” So the language became a zone over which the nation first had to declare its sovereignty and then had to transform in order to make it adequate for the modern world. He goes on to discuss his community and the changes in it because of European influence and how the Europeans criticized Indian tradition as barbaric and focused on teaching religious beliefs and practices. Sound like America to me. Chatterjee goes on to discuss nationalism more and makes a good point. “If European newspapers in India were given the right of free speech, could the same apply to native newspapers? Ironically, it became the historical task of nationalism, which insisted on its own marks of cultural difference with the West, to demand that there be no rule of difference in the domain of the state.” So why are our nations imagined? Who imagined them into being? Are they really our nations or someone else’s imagined communities? Chatterjee says “If the nation is an imagined community and if nations must also take the form of states, then our theoretical language must allow us to talk about community and state at the same time. I do not think our present theoretical language allows us to do this.