Imagined Britain: Cultural Identity and the Nation-State

Introduction: Conceptualizing Britain as a Nation-State

Imagined Communities, Beyond Imagined Communities, and The Island Race allow us to conceptualize Britain as a derived nation-state — one whose formation mirrors that of any state, especially one with a long history of colonization.

Anderson's Framework: Nationalism and the Imagined Community

Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson, offers the following definition of nationalism: it is an imagined political community, imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. It is imagined because members will never know most of their fellow members, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. It is limited because it has finite, though elastic, boundaries beyond which lie other nations. It is sovereign because it came to maturity at a stage of human history when freedom was a rare and precious ideal. And it is imagined as a community because it is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.

In Britain's case in particular, cultural awareness developed and accelerated into nationalism. Capitalism and the book publishing industry, according to Anderson, contributed to this nationalistic fever.

From about the middle of the 19th century there developed "official nationalism" in Europe. These were responses by power groups threatened with exclusion from the most popular imagined communities — for example, in Russia, England, and Japan. They were a means of combining naturalization with the retention of dynastic power. The model of official nationalism was also followed by states with no serious power pretensions at all, but whose ruling classes felt threatened by the worldwide spread of nationally imagined communities — for example, Siam and Hungary.

In essence, according to Anderson, nationalism sometimes developed as a reaction to nationalism abroad. The community was imagined into existence by the presence of another community, not because of any natural need or internal progression.

Nation-ness is "natural" in the sense that it contains something unchosen and uncontrolled — much like gender, skin color, and parentage. It has an aura of fatality embedded in history. Here, Anderson conjures images of Walter Benjamin. It is not, however, the source of racism and anti-Semitism. Racism erases nation-ness by reducing the adversary to his or her biological physiognomy. Nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations whose origins lie outside of history — indeed, outside of nationalism. The dreams of racism actually have their origins in ideologies of class rather than those of nation, like so many of society's other ills.

Anderson also argues that revolutions — such as those in Vietnam, Kampuchea, and China — are contemporary exhibits of nationalism, but this nationalism is the heir of two centuries of historic change and "progress." Nationalism has undergone a process of modulation and adaptation according to different eras, political regimes, economies, and social stratification structures. As a result, the "imagined community" has spread to every conceivable contemporary society.

Census, map, and museum, Anderson writes, profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion. The census created identities imagined by the classifying mind of the colonial state. The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one — and only one — extremely clear location. The map also worked on the basis of a totalizing classification. It was designed to demonstrate the antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial entities. It also served as a logo, instantly recognizable and visible everywhere, that formed a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalism being born — a dynamic particularly evident in the United Kingdom. The museum allowed the state to appear as the guardian of tradition, and this power was enhanced by the infinite reproducibility of the symbols and maps of tradition.

Beyond Imagined Communities: Critiques from Latin America

The essayists in Beyond Imagined Communities challenge Anderson's neat constructions. They focus mainly on Latin American communities, borrowing extensively from Anderson's work on Britain and the post-colonials.

How did the nationalisms of Latin America's many countries — elaborated in everything from history and fiction to cookery — arise from their common backgrounds in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, and from their similar populations of mixed European, native, and African origins? Beyond Imagined Communities, through its various essays, discards one answer and provides a rich collection of others.

These essays began as a critique of Anderson's argument in Imagined Communities. Anderson traces Latin American nationalisms to local circulation of colonial newspapers and the tours of duty of colonial administrators, but the essays in this collection argue for the limited validity of Anderson's postulations.

Instead, Beyond Imagined Communities shows how more diverse cultural influences shaped Latin American nationalisms. Four historians examine social situations: François-Xavier Guerra studies various forms of political communication; Tulio Halperín Donghi, political parties; Sarah C. Chambers, the feminine world of salons; and Andrew Kirkendall, the institutions of higher education that trained the new administrators. Next, four critics examine the production of cultural objects: Fernando Unzueta investigates novels; Sara Castro Klarén, archaeology and folklore; Gustavo Verdesio, suppression of unwanted archaeological evidence; and Beatriz González Stephan, national literary histories and international expositions.

The basic theories traceable through these essays are that capitalism was not the only cause of nationalism, that book publishing and newspaper circulation were not as influential as Anderson claims, and that communities did not develop simply as a reaction to the existence of nationalist communities elsewhere. Rather, nationalist communities were more intrinsic to a human need — in the Latin American nations just as in Britain and the post-colonial world. They were necessities rather than reactionary responses.

Conclusion: Moving Beyond Imagined Communities

In general, Anderson's worldview in Imagined Communities does not give enough credence to the fact that nationalism is far more than reactionary; it is natural and essential, and a pervasive development over time that has steered the course of history from England to Latin America. A more modern view of nationalism is far more successful, as demonstrated in Wilson's work. Indeed, we need to move "beyond" imagined communities to truly understand our world and its communities.