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Introduction: Custodian of the Empire

Condee Nancy

in The Imperial Trace: Recent Russian Cinema

Chapter One summarizes the volume’s two intertwined projects: first, an investigation of work by Russia’s six major filmmakers who—in the context of the Soviet empire’s collapse—sustained work in a ... More

Chapter One summarizes the volume’s two intertwined projects: first, an investigation of work by Russia’s six major filmmakers who—in the context of the Soviet empire’s collapse—sustained work in a radically redefined professional environment. Nikita Mikhalkov, Kira Muratova, Vadim Abdrashitov, Aleksandr Sokurov, Aleksei German, and Aleksei Balabanov are arguably Russia’s lead directors of the last quarter-century. The six comprise a critical continuum from late Soviet to post-Soviet cinema. Second, through individual chapters on these filmmakers, the volume addresses its larger, more speculative issue: how Russia’s cultural environment, a space historically shaped over four-and-a-half centuries by the practices of empire, might figure in the directors’ work, both imaginatively and logistically, in ways we have not yet fully conceptualized. Turning to debates on nation in Gellner and Anderson, as well as on Russia’s imperial legacy, state engagement, and attenuated nationhood in Hosking, Beissinger, Suny, and Martin, the introduction principally frames the theoretical issues variously pursued in later chapters.Less

Women, Literature, and National Brotherhood

Emilie Bergmann, Greenberg Janet, Gwen Kirkpatrick, Francine Masiello, Francesca Miller, Morello-Frosch Marta, Kathleen Newman, and Mary Louise Pratt

in Women, Culture, and Politics in Latin America

This chapter explores travel literature that illustrates Gabriela Mistral's Poema de Chile. La historia oficial bears witness to the current emergence of new female political and historical subjects ... More

This chapter explores travel literature that illustrates Gabriela Mistral's Poema de Chile. La historia oficial bears witness to the current emergence of new female political and historical subjects in Latin America. It also discusses the early women collaborators of the Peruvian Revista Amaula. Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism investigate the idea of the nation as an imagined political community whose totality can never be experienced concretely. The writings of national icons, such as José Mármol, Juana Manuela Gorriti, and Juan Manuel de Rosas, are described. Rómulo Gallegos' Doña Bárbara and Teresa de la Parra's Las memorias de Mamá Blanca represent forms of female power and entitlement destroyed by modernization. The Poema de Chile reorganizes the literary patrimony in a poetry of movement and action which is not a poetry of heroics or transformation.Less

People Around the World Writing in External Languages

Minae Mizumura

in The Fall of Language in the Age of English

This chapter presents Minae Mizumura's arguments regarding external language—that people, since discovering language, did not read and write the language they spoke, and that they communicated ... More

This chapter presents Minae Mizumura's arguments regarding external language—that people, since discovering language, did not read and write the language they spoke, and that they communicated through the language of a neighboring civilization that exerted influence. These languages are referred to by Mizumura as universal languages. Mizumura develops her argument around three main concepts: universal language, local language, and national language. In explaining her notion, Mizumura draws from Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983) as a foundation. She focuses on Anderson's understanding of the formation of national languages through nationalism. The chapter examines how, during the Enlightenment period, Europeans began to ignore Greek and Latin in their pursuit of knowledge, and thus read and write in their own languages. It concludes how this “golden age” of national languages ended as a result of the rise of the novel as a literary genre.Less

In Tending Scotland

Cairns Craig

in Intending Scotland: Explorations in Scottish Culture since the Enlightenment

This chapter tests the development of contemporary theories of the nation and of national identity — such as Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’ — against Scottish experience. It ... More

This chapter tests the development of contemporary theories of the nation and of national identity — such as Benedict Anderson's concept of ‘imagined communities’ — against Scottish experience. It attempts to tend forgotten elements of Scotland's cultural past, and to do so by focusing, in part, on the prominent place of intention in the development of modern Scottish thought, and on the nation as an outcome of intending. It interprets the models of gardening to which Ian Hamilton Finlay's work is connected which were always ‘elsewhere’ — that this was a Scottish garden tended by a ‘Scottish’ gardener, as incidental rather than fundamental; and if, as Finlay insists, ‘Garden sculpture ought to have roots, as garden plants do’, Finlay's own roots must be envisaged as reaching tentacularly beyond Scotland through European culture to classical sources rather than being rooted in Scotland itself.Less

Imagining the Demos: Sharing Identity in Feminist and Democratic Theory

Michaele L. Ferguson

in Sharing Democracy

This chapter critically examines the belief that commonality gives meaning and coherence to collective identities. The belief that groups only have coherence when their members share some thing in ... More

This chapter critically examines the belief that commonality gives meaning and coherence to collective identities. The belief that groups only have coherence when their members share some thing in common has led feminist theory into the twin dead ends of essentialism and anti-essentialism. Feminism’s example thus serves as a warning for democratic theory that political paralysis results from an insistence on locating the commonality that unites a collective. Drawing on Zerilli’s critique of feminist theory and Anderson’s account of how communities come to be imagined, this chapter develops an alternative account of how collective identities have meaning and coherence. Rather than arising from commonality, the resilience and meaning of identities is a product of active human imagining expressed in a variety of overlapping, competing, and not entirely contiguous intersubjective practices.Less

Taking Dumont to Southeast Asia

Ward Keeler

in The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma

Louis Dumont’s analysis of hierarchy in South Asia provides insight into how hierarchical assumptions inform social relations in Burma. Although Burmese society lacks caste, it still organizes ... More

Louis Dumont’s analysis of hierarchy in South Asia provides insight into how hierarchical assumptions inform social relations in Burma. Although Burmese society lacks caste, it still organizes everyone’s social relations on the principle that individuals enter into relationships because of their differences, and every relationship will place one person in a position of superiority, the other as subordinate. Benedict Anderson’s work on charisma in Java complements Dumont’s work by showing how assuming that power comes from above encourages people to subordinate themselves to concentrations of power. Marina Warner’s analysis of tales makes it clear that people who are structurally weak have no choice but to try to establish themselves as dependents of powerful others. Kapferer’s work in Sri Lanka provides further guidance for adapting Dumont’s analysis of hierarchy to other contexts outside India.Less

Discourses of Imperial Nationalism as Matrices for Early Modern Literacies

in Dido's Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France

This chapter examines ideologies of “imperial nationalism” as a second-order matrix for gendered theories of literacy and for gendered educational practices. It discusses evidence strongly supporting ... More

This chapter examines ideologies of “imperial nationalism” as a second-order matrix for gendered theories of literacy and for gendered educational practices. It discusses evidence strongly supporting Benedict Anderson's argument that capitalism would likely have remained a phenomenon of “petty proportions” had it not been preceded and accompanied by changes in the domain of language use. It explains that capitalism both needed and helped to produce the creation of print languages that were capable of dissemination through the market.Less

Popularity

Jed Rubenfeld

in Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government

The status of being an individual is known as individuality and that of being a person as personhood. There is no word to designate the status or condition of being a people. To fill this gap, ... More

The status of being an individual is known as individuality and that of being a person as personhood. There is no word to designate the status or condition of being a people. To fill this gap, popularity, which was once synonymous with democracy itself, can be used. According to commitmentarian democracy, a people, understood as an agent that exists over time and across generations, is the proper subject of democratic self-government. Commitmentarian democracy thus requires an account of popularity—that is, of what it means for persons to be a people. This chapter offers a rough working account of popularity. It comments on Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities, in which he talks about the imaginary quality of nations and national peoples. It also considers the distinction between two different understandings of nationhood and argues that speech-modeled popularity is the conception of popularity required by speech-modeled self-government.Less

Kidnapped Narratives: The Lost Heir of Henry Christophe and the Imagined Communities of the African Diaspora

in Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution

This chapter examines narratives of the kidnappings that haunted leaders of the Haitian Revolution as well as their families, with special emphasis on the families of Toussaint Louverture and Henry ... More

This chapter examines narratives of the kidnappings that haunted leaders of the Haitian Revolution as well as their families, with special emphasis on the families of Toussaint Louverture and Henry Christophe. It interprets these narratives as a paradigm for Haitian engagement with manuscript and print culture itself that repeatedly inscribes threats to speakers' basic autonomy and security, mapped over forced movement between metropolitan and colonial spaces. The chapter discusses the emblematic nature of kidnapping in the imagined communities of the African diaspora, arguing that the liminal and urgent depictions of kidnappings in the families of Louverture and Christophe vividly revisited the Middle Passage as a founding history of forced migration. Drawing on the work of Benedict Anderson, it explores how layers of African diasporan and Haitian revolutionary kidnappings intruded into the connection between novel and nation in the imagining of New World communities.Less

The Birth of Japanese as a National Language

Minae Mizumura

in The Fall of Language in the Age of English

This chapter examines the development of Japanese as a national language in the early twentieth century. It presents Minae Mizumura's three conditions that had enabled the rise of the Japanese ... More

This chapter examines the development of Japanese as a national language in the early twentieth century. It presents Minae Mizumura's three conditions that had enabled the rise of the Japanese language. First, Japan already had a written language that was quite mature and was held in high regard. Second, the nation enjoyed what Benedict Anderson called “print capitalism” during the Edo period, which enabled the written language to circulate widely. The third condition was the Japanese victory at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. The war held a symbolic meaning as it was the first time that a non-Western nation had defeated a Western power. Mizumura notes that the victory, which had been made possible through the modernization policies enacted through the Meiji Restoration in the late Edo period, established the Japanese language both in name and in practice. She also highlights the novel's critical role in spreading nationalism.Less

‘Dangerous Liaisons’: Gender Politics in the Contemporary Scottish and Irish ImagiNation

Stefanie Lehner

in Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives

Anne McClintock's postcolonial feminist point emphasises the intrinsically dangerous relationship between ‘gender’ and ‘nation’ in terms of constructions and practices of femininity and masculinity: ... More

Anne McClintock's postcolonial feminist point emphasises the intrinsically dangerous relationship between ‘gender’ and ‘nation’ in terms of constructions and practices of femininity and masculinity: a danger that has been largely overlooked in the body of work that could be identified as Scottish postcolonial criticism. The term ‘imagiNation’ draws on Benedict Anderson's understanding of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. The gendering of colonial discourse is designed to hold in place the norms of patriarchy by outlining a system of strictly regulated and rigidly differentiated gender roles. The period since the 1980s has witnessed in both Ireland and Scotland a growing insistence of female voices, addressing and exposing the silence and secrecies about issues of domestic violence, rape, incest and abuse, often committed within or condoned by patriarchal state institutions.Less

Cinematic Nation Building: Eisenstein's The Old and the New

Noël Carroll

in Engaging the Moving Image

This chapter begins with a suggestion presented by Benedict Anderson stating that the idea of a nation is in large measure imagined retrospectively. The Soviet Union offers an interesting ... More

This chapter begins with a suggestion presented by Benedict Anderson stating that the idea of a nation is in large measure imagined retrospectively. The Soviet Union offers an interesting counterpoint to this—that of a nation imagined prospectively. The Soviet Union literally had to be invented. As is well known, cinema was expected to play a crucial role in this process. Surely it was for such a purpose that Lenin anointed cinema the premier socialist artform. Many Soviet films of the twenties were devoted to consolidating a tradition for the new nation, commemorating its revolutionary founding in historical spectacles. Certain other films, however, looked primarily to the future, rather than to the past, in order to imagine what the Soviet Union could become.Less

Imagining the Imperial Mediterranean 1

Josephine Crawley Quinn

in Polybius and his World: Essays in Memory of F.W. Walbank

Polybius' interweaving (symploke) of the history of different regions from his starting point in 220 BC is an ideological as well as a literary strategy. Benedict Anderson's work on how concepts of ... More

Polybius' interweaving (symploke) of the history of different regions from his starting point in 220 BC is an ideological as well as a literary strategy. Benedict Anderson's work on how concepts of simultaneity across the progress of empty or homogeneous time can shape national identity, itself drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, offers valuable insight into simultaneity in Polybius, whose symploke draws the Mediterranean world into a historical community of Greeks and Romans: the use of synchronisms, and the chronological structure of Olympiads play a key role in this process. While the progress of the History charts Rome's increasing power, the structuring of time according to Greek practice may be seen as a small mode of resistance to Rome's sway, with her achievements being cast within an overall structure that was Greek. Though Polybius maps Rome's rise to power over time, he also charts alternative conceptions of space and time within his work.Less

Another Problem

Edin Hajdarpasic

in Whose Bosnia?: Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840-1914

This chapter explores the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires and their appropriation of nationalist cultural forms. These processes show how the states, often perceived as being “anational” or ... More

This chapter explores the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires and their appropriation of nationalist cultural forms. These processes show how the states, often perceived as being “anational” or “supra-ethnic,” created patriotic programs in Bosnia and made crucial contributions to the proliferation of nationalist politics. Ottoman and Habsburg sponsorship of print media in Bosnia, particularly journals like Nada, is indicative of the priorities and procedures of imperial patriotic projects. Prof. Benedict Anderson emphasized newspapers as an essential factor in fostering new “imagined communities” across the world. Similarly, Jürgen Habermas’ account explains how large-scale structural transformations gave rise to “the public sphere” as a social domain where public opinion is formed. The nation and the newspaper, then, appear inextricably linked; the emergence of a public sphere was simultaneously the emergence of nationality.Less

Going Online to go ‘Home’: Yizkor Books, Cyber-Shtetls, and Communities of Location

Rachel Leah Jablon

in Connected Jews: Expressions of Community in Analogue and Digital Culture

This chapter focuses on online yizkor and Cyber-Shtetls that give access to the places where Jewish life once flourished and are otherwise inaccessible due to the Holocaust. It discusses how ... More

This chapter focuses on online yizkor and Cyber-Shtetls that give access to the places where Jewish life once flourished and are otherwise inaccessible due to the Holocaust. It discusses how communities of the online yizkor and Cyber-Shtetls draw attention to changes in contemporary Jewish identity formation and the mediation of Jewish social connection in the digital age. It also explores how online yizkor books and Cyber-Shtetls that give people who are searching for 'home' a place to go and provide space that they occupy on the web as a surrogate for the real thing. The chapter mentions Benedict Anderson, who argues that the metropolitan daily newspaper represents a convergence of market capitalism and print technology that emerged at the start of the Industrial Revolution. It discloses the resulting 'communities of location' that are salient in Jewish life and culture that the Yiddish described the people who come from one geographic place as landsman.Less

“They’ll Be Rockin’ on Bandstand, in Philadelphia, P.A.”: Imagining National Youth Culture on American Bandstand

Matthew F. Delmont

in Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia

This chapter examines how the convergence of commerce and community through American Bandstand led to the emergence of the national youth culture. Building on Josh Kun's notion of “audiotopia” and ... More

This chapter examines how the convergence of commerce and community through American Bandstand led to the emergence of the national youth culture. Building on Josh Kun's notion of “audiotopia” and Benedict Anderson's concept of “imagined communities,” it considers how American Bandstand's producers articulated a vision of national youth culture that incorporated different teenagers in different parts of the country but excluded black teenagers from the program's studio audience. It also explains how American Bandstand established Philadelphia as the locus of this national youth culture by drawing extensively from the creative abilities of the city's youth. Finally, it shows how American Bandstand emerged as the afternoon site of the nation's youth, including working-class Italian-American teenagers from Philadelphia.Less

Introduction

Arthur Asseraf

in Electric News in Colonial Algeria

This introductory chapter defines ‘news’ and presents the context of colonial Algeria. Using the example of news of the Tunisian invasion of 1881 in Algiers, it shows how news circulated through a ... More

This introductory chapter defines ‘news’ and presents the context of colonial Algeria. Using the example of news of the Tunisian invasion of 1881 in Algiers, it shows how news circulated through a variety of media, forming a complex news ecosystem. This ecosystem challenges standard theories of media put forward by scholars from Marshall McLuhan to Benedict Anderson. The introduction then explains the formation of a deeply divided society within colonial Algeria, placing the history of information within the wider historiography on colonial Algeria. The chapter concludes with a consideration of sources for a history of news, explaining how the colonial surveillance archive can form a useful entry point because surveillance was part of the news circulation system.Less

Who Speaks for Mary?

Joseph P. Laycock

in The Seer of Bayside: Veronica Lueken and the Struggle to Define Catholicism

This chapter frames the Baysiders as neither normative Catholics nor a schismatic or deviant group: Instead, they represent an active and ongoing conversation about where the core values of Catholics ... More

This chapter frames the Baysiders as neither normative Catholics nor a schismatic or deviant group: Instead, they represent an active and ongoing conversation about where the core values of Catholics lie. The global Catholic polity features diverse practices and competing ideas of what it means to be Catholic. As such, Catholicism is an “imagined community”—in the sense described by Benedict Anderson—meaning that ongoing conceptual work is needed to regard it as a single, unified tradition. The reforms of Vatican II alienated traditionalists and reopened questions about what it means to be Catholic. While claiming deference to Church authorities, the Baysiders resisted reform and attempted to redraw the definitional boundaries of Catholicism using the authority of prophecy, sacred space, and embodied rituals. They have continued to offer such resistance for over forty years, demonstrating the agency of lay Catholics in defining their own tradition.Less

White and White and Read All Over

Felix Harcourt

in Ku Klux Kulture: America and the Klan in the 1920s

This chapter examines the place of the Ku Klux Klan in the history of newspaper publishing, and how the press culture of the 1920s helped expand an imagined community (in the formulation of Benedict ... More

This chapter examines the place of the Ku Klux Klan in the history of newspaper publishing, and how the press culture of the 1920s helped expand an imagined community (in the formulation of Benedict Anderson) of cultural Klannishness. While newspapers like the New York World and Hearst publications profited from attacking the Klan, many other publications chose to either implicitly or explicitly endorse the Invisible Empire. With the exception of many black, Jewish, and Catholic publications, the Klan’s astute use of public relations and the power of newspaper advertising over editorial independence meant positive coverage in much of the nation’s press. At the height of the Klan’s power, the group’s vigilantism took a back seat to newspaper reports about festivals and charitable works.Less

Conclusion

Carla J. Mulford

in Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire

Benjamin Franklin was America’s first Atlantic world intellectual. Inquisitive, energetic, and competitive, he learned about and was proud of his British family and intellectual heritage, British ... More

Benjamin Franklin was America’s first Atlantic world intellectual. Inquisitive, energetic, and competitive, he learned about and was proud of his British family and intellectual heritage, British political history, and British culture. From the time of his youth, Franklin embraced a set of values that he attempted, across his long life, to speak about, refine, and implement. Franklin originally conceived of himself a loyal Briton, but beginning in the 1750s, he began to see the futility of gaining a fair hearing and representation for Americans in Parliament. From the 1750s onward, Franklin began to conclude that the colonies could do without the complicated system of British politics and political intrigue, without a system of taxation depriving Americans of their rights of representation, not to mention their productivity and commerce, and without the demeaning and begrudging subjection so frequently thrust their way. If any American could have gained the colonies a fair hearing, Franklin was the man to do so. That he did not succeed in gaining the attention of Britons in England only confirmed what he had known for many years: British Americans could make it without Britain.Less