《Benedict Anderson#39;s Derivative Discourse》.pdf

BOGEYMAN BENEDICT ANDERSON’S “DERIVATIVE” DISCOURSE ANDREW PARKER Between life and death, nationalism has as its own proper space the experi- ence of haunting. There is no nationalism without some ghost. –Jacques Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism” Writing a mere decade ago about Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities , Timo- thy Brennan noted that “with the exception of some recent sociological works which use literary theories, it is rare in English to see ‘nation-ness’ talked about as an imagina- tive vision—as a topic worthy of full fictional realization. . . . Even in the underrepresented branch of Third World English studies, one is likely to find discussions of race and colonialism, but not the ‘nation’ as such” [47]. If these sentences appear astonishing today—if over the past ten years we seem to have done little else but regard the nation as an imaginative construction—our sense of surprise may help to register how rapidly and profoundly Anderson’s work has transformed the nature of literary and cultural studies. Viewing the modern nation primarily as an anthropological rather than political category, one that has less inherently to do with ideologies than with kinship, gender, and religion, Anderson argues in Imagined Communities for the irreducibility of mate- rial-cultural practices (what he memorably termed “print-capitalism”) in creating and sustaining the “imagined community” of a nation whose citizens maintain “deep attach- ments” to each other in the absence of face-to-face contact: “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” [6]. Part of what makes such communities national, Anderson suggests, is a shared experience of simul- taneity modeled on the spatio-temporal organization of newspapers and novels, for “these forms provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ th