Printing the American revolutions erased their messy realities into clean blueprints

Evidence

In much the same way, the independence movements in the Americas became, as soon as they were printed about, ‘concepts,’ ‘models’, and indeed ‘blueprints.’ In ‘reality’, ‘Bolívar’s fear of Negro insurrections and San Martín’s summoning of his indigenes to Peruvianness jostled one another chaotically. But printed words washed away the former almost at once, so that, if recalled at all, it appeared an inconsequential anomaly. Out of the American welter came these imagined realities: nation-states, republican institutions, common citizenships, popular sovereignty, national flags and anthems, etc., and the liquidation of their conceptual opposites: dynastic empires, monarchical institutions, absolutisms, subjecthoods, inherited nobilities, serfdoms, ghettoes, and so forth. (Nothing more stunning, in this context, than the general ‘elision’ of massive slavery from the ‘modal’ USA of the nineteenth century, and of the shared language of the ‘modal’ Southern republics.) Furthermore, the validity and generalizability of the blueprint were undoubtedly confirmed by the plurality of the independent states. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 313

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘elision’ of slavery from the modal USA parallels how mass exclusion gets written out of national self-narratives — directly relevant to race-thinking and the imagined community.