The nation is conceived in language, not in blood

Evidence

Yet such choruses are joinable in time. If I am a Lett, my daughter may be an Australian. The son of an Italian immigrant to New York will find ancestors in the Pilgrim Fathers. If nationalness has about it an aura of fatality, it is nonetheless a fatality embedded in history. Here San Martín’s edict baptizing Quechua-speaking Indians as ‘Peruvians’ – a movement that has affinities with religious conversion – is exemplary. For it shows that from the start the nation was conceived in language, not in blood, and that one could be ‘invited into’ the imagined community. Thus today, even the most insular nations accept the principle of naturalization (wonderful word!), no matter how difficult in practice they may make it. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 552

Categorization

• DEFINE: The nation defined as language-based, not blood-based, is Anderson’s decisive counter to racial-nationalist naturalism — a foundational definitional move.
• XREF: This is the pivot the chapter builds racism against: blood-versus-language is precisely the axis later Islamophobia readings use to show how Muslims get excluded as ‘unassimilable’ despite language being open. — connects to: Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation.; The nation is a construct, not a unit for social analysis; Language, not sight, is the primary organ of patriotic attachment — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 582 (+8 more)

Related

• Language, not sight, is the primary organ of patriotic attachment (similarity 0.84)
• Early American nationalisms did not depend on language difference (similarity 0.80)
• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry (similarity 0.80)
• The nation emerges as a new subject of history distinct from the State (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Shared language and culture do not constitute belonging to a nation. #corroborates (0.95)
• National consciousness forms through language and literature, not only through shared ancestry #corroborates (0.95)
• Language, not sight, is the primary organ of patriotic attachment #exemplifies (0.85) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 582
• The nation is a construct, not a unit for social analysis #expands (0.80)
• The nation is an imagined, limited, sovereign political community #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37
• Language and culture cannot confer national belonging without shared experience #qualifies (0.75) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 572