Like celebrities who ‘need no introduction’, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (hereinafter IC) should need no review. After all, it is one of the most widely cited works in its field and such academic ubiquity is surely review enough. Indeed, no single phrase occurs as widely and frequently in the literature on nationalism as ‘imagined communities’. That it is not always attributed to its original creator is testimony to its pervasive acceptance and adoption. However, I am probably not alone in having long felt a certain unease with IC: not on individual points, though many of these have been criticized (see Ozkirimli, 2000, for a convenient summary of the principal criticisms of IC), but with slippages between its stated aims and arguments and their real logic. My unease was recently heightened when I tried to place IC – the conjuncture in the development of nations and nationalisms at which it intervened and the contribution it made – within a larger historical perspective.
Access full article at Radhika’s Academia.edu page
Photo by Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
