Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

The novelistic format of the newspaper assures them that somewhere out there the ‘character’ Mali moves along quietly, awaiting its next reappearance in the plot. The second source of imagined linkage lies in the relationship between the newspaper, as a form of book, and the market.

the eighteenth century marks not only the dawn of the age of nationalism but the dusk of religious modes of thought.

differing passages created by the rise of absolutizing monarchies, and, eventually, Europe-centred world-imperial states. The inner thrust of absolutism was to create a unified apparatus of power, controlled directly by, and loyal to, the ruler over against a decentralized, particularistic feudal nobility.

Documentary interchangeability, which reinforced human interchangeability, was fostered by the development of a standardized language-of-state.

almost precisely simultaneous consumption (‘imagining’) of the newspaper-as-fiction.

If in the jocular-sophisticated fiction of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe the trope ‘our hero’ merely underlines an authorial play with a(ny) reader, Marco’s ‘our young man,’ not least in its novelty, means a young man who belongs to the collective body of readers of Indonesian, and thus, implicitly, an embryonic Indonesian ‘imagined com

void as these tombs are of identifiable mortal remains or immortal souls, they are nonetheless saturated with ghostly national imaginings.2 (This is why so many different nations have such tombs without feeling any need to specify the nationality of their absent occupants. What else could they be but Germans, Americans, Argentinians . . .?) The cul

What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity.18

newspaper-readers of Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and Bogota, even if they did not read each other’s newspapers, were nonetheless quite conscious of their existence. Hence a well-known doubleness in early Spanish-American nationalism, its alternating grand stretch and particularistic localism.