nationalism A name for the modern social and political formations that draw
together feelings of belonging, solidarity, and identification between national
citizens and the territory imagined as their collective national homeland. The
existence and coherence of a particular nation are in this sense best understood
as an ongoing product and not the primordial precursor of nationalism. But while
nations can therefore be said to be made by nationalism, they are not made up.
They are neither illusions nor invented like works of fiction. Although his book’s
title has sometimes been misinterpreted as suggesting such an inventive
account, it is instead his emphasis on the politically and socially constructive
work of nationalism that is at the heart of Benedict Anderson’s now muchreprinted thesis that nationalism produces nations as “imagined communities”
(Anderson, 2006). They are imagined, he argues, because nationalism mobilizes
a strong but abstract sense of community between distant strangers in a way that
consolidates their identification with both a common historical inheritance and a
shared national space. This is also why nationalism is more social than the
personal passions of patriotism and less legal than the regulative norms of
citizenship, even though, as feminist and queer geographers have underlined in
particular, it is clearly interwoven with each (see Bell and Binnie, 2000; Marston,
1990).
In a review of his book’s many translations and globe-trotting travels that
is added to the most recent edition, Anderson further documents how nationalism
clearly fosters distinct national cultures of reading, writing, teaching, and
communication. He underlines, too, that one of his initial intentions in the book
(and one that he thinks accounts for much of its global popularity) is that
geographically it shifted the focus in the study of nationalism away from Europe
(and the Eurocentrism that traditional Marxist accounts shared with traditional
liberal accounts) and towards various post-colonial nationalisms of the global
south, including not least of all what he calls the “creole nationalisms” of the
Americas (a formulation that itself also usefully undermines exceptionalist
American arguments about US republicanism as the uniquely pioneering
prototype of post-colonial nationalism). In making this case, however, Anderson
does not so directly address the many ways in which his arguments have both
resonated with and been advanced in various versions of post-colonial theory.
His own attention to the role of maps and other geographic depictions in
imagining the communities of nationalism clearly resonates, for example, with
Edward Said’s theoretical concerns with the imaginative geographies of
orientalism, including the ways in which the cultures of imperialism worked
contrapuntally to construct the modernity of Euro-American nationalism by
constantly contrasting the supposedly pre-modern human geographies of their
colonies with the ordered and enframed landscapes of metropolitan museums,
exhibitions, and textbook cartographies (Said, 1979, 1993; cf. Gregory, 1994;
Mitchell, 1988). Further developing these lines of examination, other post-colonial
studies of nationalism have continued to problematize the diverse geographical
arguments and assumptions that continue to create hierarchies of national
belonging, national achievement, and national blame in the course of imagining
community. Whether it is concerns with the fate of women on the margins of the
post-colonial nation (Spivak, 1992), interest in the necessarily extra-territorial
affiliations of anti-racist and anti-colonial activists (Gilroy, 1993; Singh, 2004), or
reflection on the historical tragedies that have led to geographies of blame for the
so-called failure of post-colonial nationalism in countries such as Haiti (Farmer,
1992; Scott, 2004), scholarship addressing the imagined communities of
nationalism has increasingly also problematized pre-emptive epistemological
assumptions that limit national history to national geography. At the same time,
work on the ways in which national geography is taught and learned in nationalist
teachings themselves has also increasingly sought to unpack how the
performance of nationalism can close down as much as open up opportunities for
imagining territory anew (cp. Bhabha, 1994 with Brückner, 1999; Schulten, 2001;
Sparke, 2005). All these post-colonial questions indicate in turn how nationalism
can be implicated in racialized imaginings of space and place in both dominative
and resistant ways, an ambivalence that has historically been one of the reasons
why defining nationalism has been so vexing for critical theorists. As Etienne
Balibar puts it with both a question and an answer of his own: “Why does it prove
to be so difficult to define nationalism? First, because the concept never
functions alone, but is always part of a chain in which it is both a central and
weak link. This chain is constantly being enriched . . . with new intermediate or
extreme terms: civic spirit, patriotism, populism, ethnicism, ethnocentrism,
xenophobia, chauvinism, imperialism, jingoism . . .” (Balibar, 1991: 46).
MS
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