Nationalism emerged from printed shared narratives, not shared acquaintance

Evidence

Benedict Anderson (1991) may not immediately strike us as the most relevant thinker when it comes to understanding the productive function of imagination in our speculative moment. His Imagined Communities was written in 1983, a decade after the major oil crisis of 1973, in a climate characterized by the rise of political and economic conservatism (and the “final defeat” of postwar Keynesianism) and fast-­pace financialization taking hold worldwide. Against the current of contemporaneous analyses, Imagined Communities offered a powerful theory of nationalism, showing how the imaginary forms it takes are intrinsically connected to capitalism’s brick-­and-­mortar reality. First, Anderson developed his thinking to analyze the historical birth of nationalist movements in the colonized Americas, which, as he argued compellingly, emerged out of the development of a nascent, print-­based capitalist economy. Class, ideology, and material grievances of course mattered in the anticolonial struggle. But, for Anderson, the germinating nation-­state was first and foremost imagined through shared national narratives circulated in print media, novels, and newspapers. In his famous words, the nation was thus imagined as a community by people who never knew, met, or heard of each other. Imagination is here not to be confused with “fancy” or “fantasy.” … Imagining is instead seen as a generative force that brings forth new social forms, relations, and ways of thinking, all of which would have otherwise been unthinkable. In short, imagining, for Anderson, is the process of both producing and relating to the world around us. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 124

Categorization

• XREF: Confirms Anderson’s imagined-communities thesis as the book’s theoretical scaffold; connects the reader’s finance work to theories of social imagination (Durkheim, ritual). — connects to: Nationalism arises from print capitalism’s imagined communities, not from class or material grievance alone — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living With…, 83; Popular nationalism reproduced exclusion by demanding linguistic uniformity — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 386; Nationalist ideologies emerged against the backdrop of prior large cultural systems (+5 more)
• DEFINE: Distinguishes imagining from mere fancy or fantasy in Anderson’s sense — a generative force producing new social forms.

Broader Connections

• Nationalism arises from print capitalism’s imagined communities, not from class or material grievance alone #corroborates (0.95) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 83
• Print capitalism’s sacral-vernacular split enabled nationalist imagination #expands (0.92) — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 90
• Nationalist ideologies emerged against the backdrop of prior large cultural systems #expands (0.80)
• Later European nationalisms differed from American ones in print-language centrality and visible models. #qualifies (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 284
• Nationalism originated in the New World colonies, not in Europe’s ethnolinguistic movements #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 22
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference #qualifies (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 212
• Popular nationalism reproduced exclusion by demanding linguistic uniformity #qualifies (0.75) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 386
• Contemporary literary fiction mediates speculative community as print did nationalism #expands (0.72) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 405