1. Tips for Succeeding in Spring Don’t fall behind in the reading! Annotate! Take better notes! Ask questions if you don’t understand the arguments! Find your own interests and pursue them!

2. Anti-Foundationalist Theories of Nationalism Benedict Anderson and Imagined Community

3. Anti-Foundational/Scandal of “origins” Conventional Scripting: “We, as a people, comprise a nation, and experience feelings of nationalism because we all share X…” X = – “The people” (conceived of as sharing ethnicity or heritage) – “political values” (i.e., the rights of the individual, freedom) – “God” (fate, destiny) – “History” (“In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”) I have titled these theories (Anderson and Derrida) as “anti- foundational” because they reject these origins or foundations They reject the idea of the nation as an empirical reality

4. Reversing the Logic of “Foundations” Why is Anderson’s account of nationalism so different from others I have read? – It’s not about people who have something in common, its about people figuring out how to think of themselves as having something in common. – It’s not about how a particular group of people liberated themselves and became a nation. Instead, it is a story of groups figuring out how to define themselves in relation to others (community as a system of difference).

5. Reversing the Logic of “Foundations” Why is Anderson’s account of nationalism so different from others I have read? (Familiar) Difference in Questions – Empiricist-Idealist – Who are these people that they came to see themselves as a nation? – Cultural Materialist – What were the material conditions that allowed these people to collectively imagine themselves as a nation?

6. Reversing the Logic of “Foundations” “Nationalisms invent nations” (6) – Feelings of community and common identity do not follow as a consequence of the “obviousness” of the nation – Rather, feelings of community and common identity are a precondition for nations as effective political entities “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6) – All communities are imagined! – National community as a “cultural artifact” – a form of imagination that has a public life and a history

7. Anderson (other points) Nationalism is a “modern” phenomenon – “Grows up” with print-capitalism, secular science, and Enlightenment philosophy (“don’t forget the novel!” – Watt; “and expressive realism!” - Belsey) – Has a relatively recent history, despite the tendency of nationalist histories to encompass earlier periods as their own – “turning chance into destiny” Nation/Nationalism begins in “culture” – The cultural forms of “national consciousness” precede the actualization of the nation as a geographic or political agent – Before there could be a nation, print capitalism created the possibility of imagining it

8. Pre-modern/Modern “Imagined Community” Religious/DynasticNationalistic