While nationalism is decidedly not racist, inherently, it has, at times, been associated with extreme ethno-nationalism, as in the cases of Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. It almost always masks prior internal differences and conflicts even in its more grassroots and organic forms, as a necessity in order to enable us to “imagine” ourselves as sharing something significant in common. For Anderson, it is enabled, historically, by the widespread existence of print media and the increasingly widespread occurrence of reading (initially, newspapers). A nation, according to Benedict Anderson, is a “spiritual unity.” It is a tendency of cultural imagination to conceive of one’s self as part of a larger whole of people whom one will never, personally, meet. He explained why each of these factors is limited in its ability to unify and keep together the people(s) of a nation. He also explained that Race, Language, Religion, Community of Interests, and Geography were ways that Europeans at the time (and historically) often thought about the nation and what it holds as a common, unifying factor. audience by Benedict Anderson and others, “ Qu’est-ce qu’une nation?” or “ What is a nation?” In this lecture, Renan famously stated that a nation is a “soul” or “spiritual principle” in which what we choose to remember in common and what we choose to forget in common are the paramount defining factors. In 1882, Ernest Renan addressed this question in his speech, made famous to the U.S.
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