Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.

• Author: Sears, Laurie J.

In the years since Anderson's Imagined Communities first appeared (1983) it has become a classic in several disciplines, bringing its author from the lesser known field of Southeast Asian studies into a brighter and broader academic limelight. The book displays Anderson's impressive erudition and especially his command of the literature on nationalism; the book traces nationalism's appearance in the eighteenth century New World--the important chapter retitled "Creole Pioneers" in the new edition--to its spread to Europe at the end of that century, and its subsequent appearance in Southeast Asia and other parts of the colonial world in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Anderson's ideas on nationalism have stood the test of time well, as the demise of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have followed in the wake of the Asian communist wars that inspired Anderson's original work. This demise may, in fact, have borne out Anderson's thesis, as many of the national communities put together in the devastated postwar world of the late 1940s, supported by the arms proliferation of the Cold War, seem to have been kept in place more by intimidating images of nuclear arsenals than by linkages of common interests or identifications.

One might attribute the rapidly growing academic interest in postcolonial studies to many of the ideas that Anderson put forward in 1983: the connections among consciousness, narrative, and nation; the growth of national textual communities from the interlinked worlds of journalism and fiction; and the intersection of these textual communities with changing perceptions of time. Two new chapters in the revised edition, the focus of the rest of this review, present fresh developments in Anderson's thinking about the permutations of national consciousness.

"Census, Map, Museum," chapter ten of the new edition, focuses on the important similarities between the colonial regimes that wielded power in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Southeast Asia and the nationalisms engendered by these European and American imperialisms, nationalisms whose leaders entrenched themselves in the old colonial power structures after World War II. Anderson discusses the categorizing impulses of the European adventurers and administrators in Southeast Asia as they confronted the "exotic" array of local flora, fauna, languages and peoples and attempted to count, classify, measure, record, and finally freeze them into suitable museum...