![]() ![]() “ I must be the only one writing about nationalism who doesn’t think it ugly. ![]() Do we agree with Anderson’s definition of the nation?ĭuring an interview at the International Literature Festival in Stavanger, Anderson makes the case for nationalism as a positive force: ![]() No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind…It is imagined as sovereign because the concept was born in an age in which the Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm…Finally, it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may occur in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.7). ![]() “The nation is imagined as limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations. Benedict Anderson is best known for his work regarding Nationalism in his book Imagined Communities.Īnderson defines the nation as, “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign…It is imagined because 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” (Anderson, B., 1983, p.6). ![]()
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