A pronominal ‘our’ in fiction silently constitutes an imagined community that excludes outsiders.

Evidence

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 community.’ Notice that Marco feels no need to specify this community by name: it is already there. (Even if polylingual Dutch colonial censors could join his readership, they are excluded from this ‘ourness,’ as can be seen from the fact that the young man’s anger is directed at ‘the,’ not ‘our,’ social system.) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 107

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows the linguistic micro-mechanism (a possessive pronoun) through which an embryonic imagined community is constituted.
• XREF: Prefigures how inclusion/exclusion works in nationalist and religious media publics. — connects to: Identity is constituted through exclusion of what it is not; A novelist’s shifting pronoun use silently enacts the Islam-versus-West divide.

Broader Connections

• A novelist’s shifting pronoun use silently enacts the Islam-versus-West divide. #exemplifies (0.82)
• Identity is constituted through exclusion of what it is not #expands (0.75)