![]() ![]() But the last two times I re-read Imagined Communities, I was struck more by his focus on the idea of what he and others term “simultaneity.” That is idea of what a reader (or generally, a person) conceives of the temporal dimensions of the social world. ![]() The standard two-word summary of Imagined Communities is “print capitalism.” This is shorthand for Anderson’s argument that the spread of mass literature in vernacular languages, motivated by the capitalist impulse to sell penny dreadfuls to as many people as possible, created the idea of a community united by a common language. Every time I read it I discover something new, or remark upon a flippant turn of phrase or a spicy footnote that I hadn’t noticed before. I recently assigned Imagined Communities for the N-th time in my own class, and I was struck-once again-by how dense it is. ![]() At Om Ben’s memorial service, my colleague Isaac Kramnick called it the “second-most important book ever written by a Cornell faculty member.”* And it’s a standard entry on any syllabus dealing with nationalism and national identity. It was one of only two books that I was assigned to read in multiple classes in college. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of them. ![]()
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