Geographic isolation limited the imagined simultaneity needed for continent-wide nationalism.
Evidence
At the same time, we have seen that the very conception of the newspaper implies the refraction of even ‘world events’ into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers; and also how important to that imagined community is an idea of steady, solid simultaneity through time. Such a simultaneity the immense stretch of the Spanish American Empire, and the isolation of its component parts, made difficult to imagine. Mexican creoles might learn months later of developments in Buenos Aires, but it would be through Mexican newspapers, not those of the Rio de la Plata; and the events would appear as ‘similar to’ rather than ‘part of’ events in Mexico. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 238
Categorization
- DEFINE: Introduces simultaneity as a core requirement of the imagined community, explaining why print alone is insufficient without shared temporality.
- XREF: connects to: The nation is an imagined, limited, sovereign political community — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 37; Material interests and Enlightenment ideas alone could not shape nationalist imagined communities. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 241
Related
- Material interests and Enlightenment ideas alone could not shape nationalist imagined communities. (similarity 0.81)
- The local resists globalization from within, with no fixed political content (similarity 0.79)
- National communities bore no determined relation to existing political borders (similarity 0.79)
- Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance (similarity 0.79)
- Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable (similarity 0.78)