Print-capitalism made the nation imaginable through production, technology, and linguistic diversity
Evidence
It is quite possible to conceive of the emergence of the new imagined national communities without any one, perhaps all, of them being present. What, in a positive sense, made the new communities imaginable was a half-fortuitous, but explosive, interaction between a system of production and productive relations (capitalism), a technology of communications (print), and the fatality of human linguistic diversity. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 184
Categorization
- XREF: This is the core mechanism feeding the Islamophobia scaffolding — how collective identity becomes im-aginable. Connects to Anderson’s distinction from Orientalism’s construction of the Other, and to the imagined-community concept the field uses to read nationalist exclusion. — connects to: Technological and print-capitalism advances enabled imagining parallel lives across oceans — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 716; Novels and newspapers supplied the technical means to imagine the nation — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 87; Print-capitalism emerged to re-link fraternity, power and time after cosmology split from history — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 114 (+10 more)
- DEFINE: Defines ‘imagined community’ as made possible by the specific interaction of capitalism, print, and linguistic fatality.
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 184
Broader Connections
- Print-capitalism, not colonial administration, made nations imaginable
#corroborates(0.95) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 233 - Print’s fixity of language produced the image of deep national antiquity
#expands(0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 188 - National consciousness developed before mass literacy and print capitalism
#contradicts(0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 217 - Printing emphasized vernacular languages and divided the European intellectual mind
#expands(0.75) — Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication, 804