Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities Analysis

Benedict Anderson 's Imagined Communities is a modernist analysis of the origin, dissemination, and perseverance of nationalism, and serves as a convincing reminder of the force that nationalism has had and will continue to wield on the modern world. According to Anderson, the concept of nationalism was born in the 16th century and developed with the rise of print-capitalism. The new market for printed ideas made texts available in vernacular languages and in view of the older conceptions of the world, a world of dynasties and religious communities, a new form of social identity developed. Anderson discusses the construction of this identity (the nation) in terms of imagined community and real communities. An imagined community refers to Anderson’s concept that a nation is a socially constructed community, imagined by individuals who identify as a part of that group. He distinguishes this type of community from a real community by pointing out that imagined communities are not based …show more content…
He is deeply sympathetic to third-world liberation movements, and one of most remarkable parts of the book is actually the anti-colonial history it covers. However, Anderson’s assertion that nations “inspire love” conflicts with his thoroughly unromantic account of nationalism. He diminishes the citizen’s role from participant to consumer, who only (consciously) joins a nation by buying and consuming all of the printed texts in which it is imagined. This analysis reduces citizenship to a passive and contractual form of consumption, and Anderson also somewhat overlooks the prevalent illiteracy in modern nations. Anderson’s nationalist is a bourgeois consumer and reader, and those without wealth hold an uncertain place in his