Themes
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.
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.
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.
Anderson’s characterization of the Declaration as “absolutely unprecedented” but also “absolutely reasonable” suggests that, in its time, political and philosophical thought had far surpassed states’ actual politics and ideologies: there was little overlap between what was “absolutely reasonable” from a theoretical perspective and what was actually politically normal. If Anderson is interpreted as suggesting that the political sphere is always somehow caught in this kind of inertia, it would be reasonable to think he believes his work could be in a similar position relative to the nationalisms of the contemporary world: namely, that he is trying to push “absolutely reasonable” ideas that are nonetheless “absolutely unprecedented” in practice so far. Just as Anderson showed in the last chapter how colonial empires and postcolonial states took control over a linear, causal narrative of “history” in order to define the meaning of their nations, here he shows how emerging republics entirely rejected the previous notions of history in order to put this linear, causal concept of it in place.
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.
This shift demonstrates how the nation transitioned from being a new idea to being a default or copiable template: nations were no longer using logic in an attempt to explicitly justify their existence as nations (rather than as empires or monarchies), but rather now trying to give their populations a sense of what the nation meant for them by retroactively projecting the nation into the past, as though it had always existed on some deep level of identity.
Themes
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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.
Michelet’s argument specifically illustrates the kind of thinking that lies behind things like Tombs of Unknown Soldiers: he and nationalist thinkers like him understood that nationalism was a narrative and cultural identity rather than a natural or inherent one, and they manipulated this fact in order to actively construct a narrative of sacrifice and create a sense of pride in the French Revolution. (Tangentially, this raises an interesting question for the reader: how much does knowing that nationalism is artificially constructed actually change people’s nationalist feelings?)
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.
While Anderson sees “History” as valorizing certain dates, events, and lives (even ones that never existed, like that of the Unknown Soldier) in order to give meaning to the essentially hollow entity that is the nation, he also sees that nationalist storytelling means hiding and erasing parts of the truth. By citing Renan, he clearly points out that there is a danger in this: it can lead people to unknowingly celebrate evil. In other words, the erasure of history through nationalism is yet another technique that nations and institutions can use to maintain ideological and political power over people.
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.”
Anderson uses the example of the United States Civil War to show the profound effects of the fact that history is written by the victors: the official narrative assumes that the North and South were somehow “destined” to remain together, therefore portraying the current state of affairs (the North and South are united) as somehow “natural” or “correct.” Similarly, Anderson suggests that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn used an image of racial harmony to try and make readers think the legacy of slavery and racism had magically disappeared. The fact that this and Anderson’s other examples run contrary to “common sense” shows how much this “common sense” is based on ideological narrative rather than facts; curious readers should start wondering not only whether the stories they learned about their nations’ histories are true, but perhaps more importantly, what these stories try to say about the nation and whom they benefit.
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.
Anderson’s argument has quite radical consequences for the discipline of history: he not only contends that much commonly-accepted official history is incorrect, but he actually thinks that people have a disincentive to seek out and believe in the truth (because it is often inconvenient or challenging). Of course, this is a good reason to value and prioritize disinterested historical scholarship, but by showing that history narrated in “secular, serial time” is also constructed and ideological, he forces the reader to challenge what objective scholarship would actually look like.
Themes
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.’”
Anderson ends by even further complicating the relationship between official and true histories: the former selects data out of narratives, and the latter makes the construction of narratives possible by recovering data. He sees that there is always a risk of nations exploiting historians’ work for political ends. This is important because it further reinforces his argument against scholars who mistakenly believe that exposing nations and nationalism as hollow will somehow challenge their dominance. If nations are narrative and cultural, just like history and identity, then what is needed is not logical arguments against or counterexamples to nationalism’s excesses, but rather counternarratives to them.
Themes
