Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

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Verso Books, Nov 17, 2006 - Political Science - 256 pages
This world-famous work on the origins and development of nationalism examines what drives people to live, die, and kill in the name of nations.

“One of the greatest.” London Review of Books
“Anderson transformed the study of nationalism.” —The New York Times
“Boldly original.” —Guardian


The full magnitude of Benedict Anderson’s intellectual achievement is still being appreciated and debated. Imagined Communities remains the most influential book on the origins of nationalism, filling the vacuum that previously existed in the traditions of Western thought. Cited more often than any other single English-language work in the human sciences, it is read around the world in more than thirty translations.

Written with exemplary clarity, this illuminating study traces the emergence of community as an idea to South America, rather than to nineteenth-century Europe. Later, this sense of belonging was formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, through print, literature, maps and museums. Following the rise and conflict of nations and the decline of empires, Anderson draws on examples from South East Asia, Latin America and Europe’s recent past to show how nationalism shaped the modern world.
 

Contents

Introduction
1
Cultural Roots
9
The Origins of National Consciousness
39
Creole Pioneers
49
Old Languages New Models
69
Official Nationalism and Imperialism
85
The Last Wave
115
Patriotism and Racism
145
The Angel of History
159
Census Map Museum
167
Memory and Forgetting
191
On the Geobiography of Imagined Communities
211
Bibliography
237
Index
241
Copyright

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About the author (2006)

Benedict Anderson was Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He was Editor of the journal Indonesia and author of numerous books including A Life Beyond Boundaries, Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and The Age of Globalization: Anarchists and the Anticolonial Imagination.

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