In Fujikane’s “Between Nationalisms…,” the author writes that Partha Chatterjee “argues that Anderson takes as his models Europe and the Americas, leaving untheorized the specific national formations in Asia and Africa” (6). Now, I will certainly grant that Fujikane has stated earlier on the same page that “[p]ostcolonial critics have found Anderson’s emphasis on the ways a nation is imagined particularly useful in analyzing the ambivalence of nationalist narratives” (6); however, that she goes on almost immediately to cite another critic who finds Anderson problematic seems to negate her premise. But Anderson need not be read as pro-imperialism, as suggested by Chatterjee’s reading of his text: “Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought our on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized (12, italics mine); rather, Anderson’s analysis of nationalism and the means whereby nationalism is constructed is inherently useful to postcolonial writers and critics. Indeed, if one reads Anderson, one may find a ‘map of nations’, if you will, by which one can see the ways nationalism is created. Anderson’s text is almost a set of instructions, and once one is aware of how something, such as a nation, is constructed, the object’s deconstruction should be possible. Thus, Anderson, by setting forth the foundations of nationalism, both illuminates how nations come to be and provides ground for comparison; furthermore, his text invites—rather than resists—other texts that “complicate [his theory of nationalism] by an analysis of the ways anticolonial nations negotiate their relations with each other” (6). What I’d like to do is give a truncated version of Anderson’s premises so that when we come together in class, we can have at least a Reader’s Digest version of what Anderson is doing. I also think that Anderson’s argument is useful for our discussion of Yamamoto, particularly in Anderson’s exploration of use of pictures or photography as a means of creating nationalist sentiment. Just an aside: for those of you who listened to my presentation on the book in Postmodernism, I apologize for redundancy, but I do think knowing a bit more about Anderson will be constructive.
What I find perhaps most interesting about Imagined Communities is the title, for immediately Anderson commits himself to the basic position that overarching the existence of a nation is the fact that it is an imagined entity. This in no way detracts from its power, but it does leave a nation in a fluid state. A nation has clear, definite, and defined geographical parameters, as well as ideology, but neither one of those elements of a nation is completely fixed. At any time, indeed, at all times, for a nation to maintain its nationhood, it must be open to change, to incorporation of challenging ideologies. The flip side of this is, of course, repression of challenging ideologies. In order to create the “horizontal comradeship” that Anderson identifies, nations rely on various means. Some of these are a national history that is created by emptying the history of the nation and refilling it with carefully chosen vignettes from both recent and ancient history; a reliance on national symbols that all can members can easily identify (read the flag, the national anthem—Anderson focuses quite a bit on the importance of music to nationalism, and other such symbols); language and the ability to master (something Fanon speaks of in this exact context); artwork and photography that creates a taxonomy of the geography of the nation and its people; and alignment of birth, death, sacrifice, and childhood with the nation itself. There are more, and Anderson teases out the nuances in much more detail than I’ve given, but the above list gives the most foundational of the means by which nationalist sentiment is instilled in members of a given nation. All of these things, Anderson argues, exist for the very purpose of taking something that is artificial and making it seem quite natural. For example, in “America the Beautiful” we sing (if you’re a singer, that is!) “from sea to shining sea.” In those five seemingly innocuous words is the reference to the beauty of the ocean, carefully and purposefully placed inside the parameters of America as a nation. Thus, the natural ocean is part of the now ‘natural’ America. That is just one very limited example—it does not take one long to come up with countless others.
Fujikane notes that Amy Kaplan describes American imperialism as something that has been “’invisible’ to America itself” (15). In terms of our discussion, what I find most problematic about Fujikane’s use of Anderson is the fact that she does not give the text credit for its illumination of the very invisibility that Kaplan references. And it seems that once the light shines into all of the corners, showing all that is lurking in the darkened corners, our task is to take advantage of the fluidity of nationalism in order to reject / accept ‘other’ and ‘different’ ideologies. That the texts we’re reading seek to do that hasn’t escaped me, but I do think that if Fujikane is any example, a certain hypersensitivity toward being ‘otherized’ certainly exists, and what we could be more cognizant of is the fact that if indeed an imagined community is a series of “horizontal” relationships, then what comprises that community is my relationship to the member next to me, and that member’s relationship to the person next to him/her, and so on. Therefore, we should be able actually to subvert the dominant ideology and then to change it by the proverbial ‘grass-roots’ effort. Idealistic? I am an Aquarius, after all.
I’m off to the Middle Ages, folks, and have a good night.
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