Nationalism’s invented antiquity structurally aligns with modern autobiography’s inner premises

Evidence

The origin of the second ‘appendix’ was the humiliating recognition that in 1983 I had quoted Renan without the slightest understanding of what he had actually said: I had taken as something easily ironical what was in fact utterly bizarre. The humiliation also forced me to realize that I had offered no intelligible explanation of exactly how, and why, new-emerging nations imagined themselves antique. What appeared in most of the scholarly writings as Machiavellian hocus-pocus, or as bourgeois fantasy, or as disinterred historical truth, struck me now as deeper and more interesting. Supposing ‘antiquity’ were, at a certain historical juncture, the necessary consequence of ‘novelty’? If nationalism was, as I supposed it, the expression of a radically changed form of consciousness, should not awareness of that break, and the necessary forgetting of the older consciousness, create its own narrative? Seen from this perspective, the atavistic fantasizing characteristic of most nationalist thought after the 1820s appears an epiphenomenon; what is really important is the structural alignment of post-1820s nationalist ‘memory’ with the inner premises and conventions of modern biography and autobiography. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the core concept that nations imagining themselves ‘antique’ is the necessary narrative consequence of novelty, not mere forgery — a key toolkit term.
• XREF: This structural insight about invented shared memory and necessary forgetting will scaffold readings on how colonial/national subjects construct origin stories. — connects to: Resurgent nationalism fuses invented tradition with narcissistic minor-difference resentment.; Nationalism is modern in fact but ancient in claim, universal and particular — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 35; Nationalist memory retroactively invents the very nations it claims to remember — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 118 (+2 more)

Related

• Resurgent nationalism fuses invented tradition with narcissistic minor-difference resentment. (similarity 0.85)
• Nationalist antiquity arises necessarily from novelty (similarity 0.82)
• Nationalist memory retroactively invents the very nations it claims to remember (similarity 0.81)
• The awakening trope explained the anomaly of Europe’s late nationalism by claiming antiquity (similarity 0.79)
• Nationalism is modern in fact but ancient in claim, universal and particular (similarity 0.79)
• Nations claim antique dynasties to disguise their modern provenance. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Nationalism is modern in fact but ancient in claim, universal and particular #expands (0.78) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 35