Previous
Chapter 10
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Imagined Communities, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Nation as Imagined Community
Language, Publishing, and Identity
Centralization, Technology, and Power
Piracy and the Uses of History
Summary
Analysis
Under the heading “Space New and Old,” Anderson begins by asking why Europeans started naming places like “New York, Nueva Leon, Nouvelle Orléans,” and so many others, “as ‘new’ versions” of the places they came from. In much of the rest of the world, it was normal to name something “new” after the “old” version of a place had been destroyed. But in these cases, “new” and “old” exist at the same time, in “homogeneous, empty time.” This is because the concept of “living lives parallel to those of other[s]” became possible during the colonial era.
Anderson’s final chapter again turns to a new subject related to, but fundamentally separate from, the core argument of his book. Building on his earlier analysis of piracy and nations’ mutual influences on one another, he turns here to the question of how nations themselves narrate history in order to shape citizens’ understanding of themselves and the places they live. This is closely related to his discussion of museums and monuments at the end of the last chapter. The “new” and “old” cities, like the novels of José Rizal, for instance, are historical indications of a psychological break in people’s picture of the world between the Middle Ages and the age of colonialism. This break, Anderson believes, is in part what allowed people to think of sovereignty as changeable and achievable through human action, rather than a natural condition bestowed by God.
Active
Themes
Unlike the huge numbers of Chinese and Arab migrants to other parts of Asia during this period, who usually assimilated into the places to which they moved, European migrants in the New World “successfully established coherent, wealthy, selfconsciously creole communities subordinated to a great metropolitan core.” This was an important reason why nationalism began in the New World, not the Old. The creole elites who led American independence movements wanted not to take control over the imperial center, but rather to “safeguard their continuing parallelism.” They maintained their family and emotional ties to Europe, and frequently rebuilt “close cultural, and sometimes political and economic” ties as soon as possible after independence.
Anderson suggests that the conception of sovereignty developed in Europe—one that allowed Europeans to think of themselves as superior to and justified in dominating other peoples—got exported to the New World and spurred revolution there. He sees the American revolutions as representing, in a sense, elite creoles pirating off of concepts of sovereignty and techniques of power developed in Europe. As a consequence, New World revolutionaries conceived the states they formed as analogous to European ones, not radically opposed to them. In other words, the New World creoles never questioned their supposed “right” to exert their rule over natives and territory an ocean away from where they began.
Active
Themes
Under the next heading, “Time New and Old,” Anderson argues that the concept of New World nations as “parallel and comparable” to European ones gained new steam with the American Declaration of Independence, which was both “absolutely unprecedented" and “absolutely reasonable.” The Declaration offered a vision of republican government for revolutionaries around the globe to follow. Crucially, it did not appeal to history, but rather to the future, and the revolutions of this age all saw themselves as, one might say, “blasting open […] the continuum of history.” At the same time, the accelerating manufacture of watches, newspapers, and novels contributed to the transition to “homogeneous empty time,” and the academic discipline of History was being formed. This shift in perceptions of time contributed to the sense of “an historical tradition of serial continuity” in the spread of nationalisms.
Active
Themes
During the next wave of nationalisms, from roughly 1815-1850, leaders began looking backwards rather than forwards, using the metaphor of “awakening from sleep” to describe the sudden surges of national sentiment in their countries. This sleep metaphor explained both how the Americas got to nationalism first and why European elites suddenly embraced vernaculars they had rejected for generations.
Active
Themes
Get the entire Imagined Communities LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
In the Americas, on the other hand, there was no ancient order to restore and no vernacular to rehabilitate, so nationalists turned to History. Anderson cites Jules Michelet, a prominent historian of the French Revolution, who conceived his discipline as a means of giving meaning to the acts of the dead, especially those of patriots who died in service of the nation (whether they knew they were serving it or not). In this vein, people throughout the Americas spoke for the dead—whether for the martyrs who died in their revolutions or for the indigenous civilizations that were largely destroyed by the conquest.
Active
Themes
Under his penultimate heading, “The Reassurance of Fratricide,” Anderson contrasts the notion that History is about remembering what has been forgotten with the idea that nationhood requires collectively forgetting certain aspects of a shared history. Specifically, he looks at the controversial French scholar Ernest Renan’s peculiar argument that people should “have already forgotten” certain massacres from French history that they probably never learned about in the first place. Anderson argues that Renan’s argument is a means of reinterpreting long conflicts through the language of nationalism and national identity, concepts which did not exist at the time of the original events.
Active
Themes
As a parallel, Anderson discusses how Americans are urged “to remember/forget” the Civil War as a conflict “between ‘brothers’ rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states.” And Brits learn to see a Frenchman who spoke no English—William the Conqueror—as their “great Founding Father.” He cites many other examples, including the so-called Spanish Civil War that involved people from around the world; the way that slaughter of Native Americans in the United States is commemorated by fiction portraying them as white people’s friends and allies; and the erasure of racial violence in the American South through novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. By rewriting conflict as fraternity, Anderson argues, historians and novelists attempted to hold the nation together by narrating it retroactively in an era “when it was no longer possible to experience the nation as new.”
Active
Themes
In his final section, “The Biography of Nations,” Anderson argues that “All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias” from which in turn “spring narratives.” This is much like the way people can never remember how they felt as children because their memories are colored by their experiences of growing up, and so they narrate chronological stories to fill in the gaps among the evidence they do have, like photographs and dates. Nations too, Anderson argues, recognize they are “imbedded in secular, serial time,” which means their histories are linear. But they do not remember these histories and so tell narratives to make sense of their own identities. The main difference is that people are born and die—they have specific start and end dates—but nations do not. National histories are written in retrospect, going as far back as their authors deem proper.
In closing, Anderson makes an interesting comment on “the deaths that structure the nation’s biography.” While one kind of history can highlight the “myriad anonymous events” that allow people to try and understand what life was like at some given time, national histories are written “against the going mortality rate” and highlight deaths for the sake of the nation: “exemplary suicides, poignant martyrdoms, assassinations, executions, wars, and holocausts” that are made to be “remembered/forgotten as ‘our own.’”
Active
Themes
