Literature Review #3

 Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

About the Author 


Benedict Anderson was born on August 26, 1936. He had Anglo-Irish father and English mother. Benedict received schooling in California. Benedict Anderson graduated from the University of Cambridge with high honours. He was also awarded a Ph.D. in government by Cornell University in 1967. He was most famous for this book, Imagined Communities. 


Citation 

Anderson, Benedict Richard O'Gorman. Imagined Communities: 

Reflections On the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. E-book, London: Verso, 2006, https://hdl-handle-net.proxy.libraries.rutgers.edu/2027/heb.01609. Accessed 1 Mar 2021.


Summary 

Benedict Anderson develops the concept of imagined communities in nationalism. The community that he describes is of a nation where people believe that they are part of the community. Entrepreneurs were printing in local languages in order to maximize circulation. He calls nationalism an anomaly because of its dominance in the world.  This book explores the reason why a nation needs to become popular and is powerful. 


Key terms 

Imagined Community - members of community will never know most of their members, yet they feel like a community.

Nationalism - Every person belongs to a nation, yet every nation is distinct from another.

 

Quotes 

“I propose the following definition of the nation: it is an imagined political community-and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (page 5) 


“the fellow members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of the communion...Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined.” (page 6) 


“Finally, it is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may occur in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.” ( page 7) 


Value 

This book will be an asset to my research paper because it can be used to prove that the college has become an imagined community where we don’t know everyone in it. I can further elaborate on it by first - generation college students feel like they do not belong to this community. This book can be used to prove the point that I try to make in my final paper. 


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