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
Anderson explains that the next section of his book turns from the “social change and different forms of consciousness” that made nations possible to the sense of “attachment that peoples feel for” their nations, and their willingness “to die for these inventions.” He points out that, while most intellectuals associate nationalism with racism and “hatred of the Other,” in fact nationalism also creates “profoundly self-sacrificing love,” a sentiment much more commonly expressed than hatred in nationalist writing, music, and art. To illustrate this point, he looks back at the writings of Filipino nationalist José Rizal, and specifically his last poem, an optimistic ode to his country that does not condemn the Spanish who are about to execute him.
Having established that nationalism is an emotional phenomenon, Anderson now takes a detailed look at its emotional consequences. This is Anderson at his most controversial, especially in a contemporary context that continues to grapple with the conciliatory and xenophobic dimensions of nationalism. The latter remains more strongly associated with the phenomenon, to such an extent that Anderson’s defense of nationalism as nonracist might surprise readers today. This is partially because contemporary readers simply take it for granted that members of the same nation care about one another even if they never meet—whereas Anderson sees the creation of this solidarity as one of nationalism’s innovative characteristics.
Themes
Indeed, people talk about their countries using “the vocabulary of kinship (motherland, Vaterland, patria)” or ties to land, pointing to the naturalness of “something unchosen” and making nation seem like another thing that “one can not help.” Academics have shown that family is a power structure made to seem natural, but this way of thinking is “foreign to the overwhelming bulk of mankind,” who feel their family is a quintessentially important, natural structure. People feel the same way about nations, which are also seen as a “domain of disinterested love and solidarity” that can force people to make even unwanted sacrifices, up to and including that of their lives. There is something more profound about “dying for one's country” than dying for a political party or even international organization, because “one can join or leave” such bodies—but not one’s country, which is considered morally “fundamentally pure.”
Anderson emphasizes the parallel between family and nation for two reasons: first, it shows the extent to which a sense of care for one’s fellow citizens is conceived as natural and unchangeable, and secondly, it allows him to show how these “natural” formations are actually socially constructed. Through this observation, Anderson draws a parallel between his academic project and those of previous scholars, especially anthropologists, who have sought to examine the way concepts of family and kinship are formed in different social contexts. Like families, then, nations have a powerful reality and emotional force despite being constructed.
Themes
Anderson “return[s] once more to language,” which leads him to a fundamental contradiction in the character of nations. Languages appear primordial, older than anything else human and capable of carrying intelligible meaning across long spans of time. And they allow people to create “a special kind of contemporaneous community” by, for instance, reading a nationalist poem or singing a national anthem together. Therefore, language is a means of imagining a community and rooting it in a potentially endless, ahistorical, ancient primordialism. And yet nations are also undeniably “embedded in history,” with peoples joining them and individuals naturalizing into them over time. As a result, Anderson explains, “Seen as both a historical fatality and as a community imagined through language, the nation presents itself as simultaneously open and closed.”
Anderson looks first at how language, like the family, can serve as a useful metaphor for the nation. Languages, families, and nations are all defined by a contradiction: they are historically-constructed, contingent products of human social life, but to humans themselves, they look natural and timeless. Then, Anderson turns to the way nations harness this paradoxical feature of language in order to consolidate their own power: by popularizing a national anthem or poem, for example, they create something that seems timeless, exploiting both the changeability of language and its apparent eternalness and power. This helps explain Anderson’s argument in the first chapter: nationalism is a fundamentally illogical ideology with no “great thinkers” because of its internal contradictions, like this “present[ation of] itself as simultaneously open and closed.”
Themes
Offering as examples a beautiful nationalist poem and a passage of history in English, and then a passage from a famous Indonesian nationalist story that is plainly indecipherable to anyone who does not speak the language, Anderson argues that the only limit to learning new languages is “one’s own mortality,” which lends “a certain privacy to all languages.” The powerful often use racist epithets to talk about the same oppressed people they force to learn their own powerful language, but Anderson thinks this is proof that nationalism does not cause racism: he notes that all these epithets are powerful precisely because they deny their targets the dignity of “nation-ness,” usually by reducing them to biology.
Anderson plays on his readers’ linguistic prejudices to show how English nationalism is potentially attractive to them, but Indonesian nationalism is nonsensical. However, they can see how it might become sensical to them: they would merely need to learn Indonesian. This allows him to extend the parallel between nations and language communities, both of which are closed in practice (because not everyone has the time, access, or resources to join them) but open in theory (anyone who puts in the effort could join). The core of Anderson’s argument here is that nationalists use the tools of racism when they are really discriminating based on nationality: they say, for instance, that some races are inferior because they are not members of the nation (not, for instance, that some foreigners are inferior for being of different races).
Themes
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Anderson turns more broadly to the relationship between nationalism and racism. Whereas “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, […] racism dreams of eternal contaminations” and hates people no matter what nation they belong to. Racism, Anderson argues, is actually about class—an obsession with bloodlines and purity within nations. In empires, racism arose when the upper classes tried to replace popular nationalism with official nationalism, and because the bourgeoisie could pretend to be nobility in colonies, performing “capitalism in feudal-aristocratic drag” (which is neatly illustrated by the difference between the professional, soulless armies kept in Europe and the ragtag mercenary ones kept in the colonies). And, of course, Europeans from different empires saw themselves as equally superior to native peoples in any empire.
Contemporary readers, potentially armed with the more elaborate and nuanced understanding race and politics developed since Anderson published this book, are of course free to disagree with these points, which are nevertheless pertinent to any understanding of nationalism in the 21st century. It is worth noting that Anderson agrees that nationalists use racism to their advantage, that racism was central to the spread of European empires, and that nationalism creates other, related prejudices based precisely on nationality. But he also thinks that nationality-based prejudice is more flexible than race-based prejudice (which might have both positive and negative implications—excluded people can perhaps find inclusion, but it can also be easier to exclude new groups of formerly-included people).
Themes
In contrast, colonized people virtually never insulted their former colonizers on racial grounds, but rather consistently emphasized equality, lauding the contributions of groups deemed inferior by whites, without turning against whites themselves. Although these forms of love for the nation rely on linking it to “‘imagined’” objects, so does every other form of love. Language is, of course, the medium by virtue of which all this imagining is possible.
Anderson looks at how colonized people responded to their colonizers in order to show that they began thinking in national terms rather than racial ones, seeking freedom on the basis of an imagined national identity rather than a similarly-imagined racial one. He takes this as evidence that nationalist thinking is somehow more evolved and less inherently prejudicial than earlier racial thinking, although he continues to emphasize that it is far from perfect.
Themes
