It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into Loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide intoĪ limitless future. To kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.

Over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, Prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontalĬomradeship. Realm nations dream of being free The gage and emblem of thisīecause, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may The concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution wereĭestroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic Of the human race will join their nation in the way it was possible, inĬertain epochs, for say, Christians to dream of a wholly Christian planet. The most messianic nationalists do not dream of a day when all the members No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind. The nation is imagined as limited becauseĮven the largest of them has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond Villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined.Ĭommunities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but

Of their communion In fact, all communities larger than primordial Meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image Of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. The following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community In an anthropological spirit, then, I propose See longer extracts from Imagined Communities in RICORSO Classroom, Postcolonial Fiction, infra. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (1991)īenedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso 1991) The revival of the native was an inevitable protest against such homogenisation, a recognition that to be anglicised was not at all the same thing as to be English. (Andersson, ∞xodus, in Critical Inquiry, 20, 2, Winter 1994, p.316 quoted by Caroline Amador, UG Diss., UUC.

Nation as imagined community