Nations construct their biographies backwards through time from an originary present
Evidence
Nations, however, have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural. Because there is no Originator, the nation’s biography can not be written evangelically, ‘down time,’ through a long procreative chain of begettings. The only alternative is to fashion it ‘up time’ – towards Peking Man, Java Man, King Arthur, wherever the lamp of archaeology casts its fitful gleam. This fashioning, however, is marked by deaths, which, in a curious inversion of conventional genealogy, start from an originary present. World War II begets World War I; out of Sedan comes Austerlitz; the ancestor of the Warsaw Uprising is the state of Israel. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 748
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The inversion of genealogy — deaths starting from an originary present, WWII begetting WWI — is a genuinely paradigm-sifting way to see how national memory works; resists one-sentence summary.
- XREF: Connects to Hobsbawm and Ranger’s ‘invented traditions’ and to Ernst Renan’s ‘What is a Nation?’ on forgetting as constitutive of nationhood. — connects to: Shifting from a lost golden age to a future reconciliation fundamentally reorders literary history. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 369
- SEED: Essay angle: why does every nation’s founding myth require ‘first deaths’ — the martyrs who come before the state — and what happens when a nation lacks them?