National development narratives require actively rendering some citizen communities invisible

Evidence

If the idea of the modern nation-state is sustained by producing imagined communities, it also involves actively producing unimagined communities. I refer here not to those communities that lie beyond the national boundaries but rather to those unimagined communities internal to the space of the nation-state, communities whose vigorously unimagined condition becomes indispensable to maintaining a highly selective discourse of national development. Narratives of national development are partial narratives that depend on energetically inculcated habits of imaginative limit, habits that hide from view communities that inconvenience or disturb the implied trajectory of unitary national ascent. Assaults on a nation’s environmental resources frequently entail not just the physical displacement of local communities, but their imaginative displacement as well, indeed on the prior rhetorical and visual evacuation of those communities from the idea of the developing nation-state. This imaginative work of expulsion typically predates the arrival of the police, the dogs, the lorries, the bulldozers, and the engineers. Thus the direct violence of physical eviction becomes coupled to an indirect bureaucratic and media violence that creates and sustains the conditions for administered invisibility. The result is what I have called spatial amnesia, as communities, under the banner of development, are physically unsettled and imaginatively removed, evacuated from place and time and thus uncoupled from the idea of both a national future and a national memory. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 424

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘unimagined communities’ and ‘spatial amnesia’ as the chapter’s core paired concepts.
• QUESTION: The phrase ‘unimagined communities’ deliberately inverts Benedict Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ — worth chasing how far this inversion is meant to be a direct answer to Anderson.
• XREF: connects to: The map can create a national community where none previously existed — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 668; Smart-city narratives mask extractive data capitalism by rendering the unconnected invisible. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 460; National narratives can erase the very groups they annihilated (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• National narratives can erase the very groups they annihilated #expands (0.85)
• Smart-city narratives mask extractive data capitalism by rendering the unconnected invisible. #epitomizes (0.80) — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection, 460
• Framing natives as uncivilized precludes their equal citizenship. #epitomizes (0.78) — , Stephanie B. Martens - Civilization and…, 86
• The autonomous-citizen ideal renders group-based injustice and reparations invisible #epitomizes (0.75) — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 381
• The map can create a national community where none previously existed #contradicts (0.72) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 668
• Civilization is the project of rendering violence invisible and virtual #expands (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 234