I decided to revisit Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities after first reading it in graduate school nearly two decades ago. I was a student of literature, and I accepted Anderson’s relevance to my literary studies curriculum just as I accepted the relevance of Derrida, Foucault, or Lacan. Only years later, after reading more scholarship on the origins of the nation-state, did I begin to ask why Anderson was admitted to the canon of literary studies while the scholars he addresses—his fellow political scientists and historians—were left out. (Anderson mentions Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Anthony Smith, and Tom Nairn. Of these names, only Hobsbawm was known to me in graduate school.)

I have a few theories:

First, Anderson’s account of nationalism privileges language, which is something literary scholars love. He describes most early European nationalisms as linguistic (or vernacular) nationalisms. Anderson emphasizes “the primordialness of language, even those known to be modern. No one can give the date for the birth of any language. Each looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past.” Language—particularly the vernaculars that gained prominence during the rise of print culture—connects us to an otherwise imperceptible past. When linked with nationalism, language offers an illusion of permanence, of a nation that has always existed. Most people don’t question their nationalism—some people are willing to kill or die for our nations—because they operate under the illusion that nations are transhistorical. In Anderson’s account, this is especially true in Europe, where print culture (and the rise of vernaculars) occurred alongside the political structures that produced the nation-state.

In his afterword to the 2006 edition, Anderson summarizes his account of vernacular nationalism: “the force of vernacularization…, in alliance with print-capitalism, eventually destroyed the hegemony of Church Latin and was midwife to the birth of nationalism….” This kind of argument is right up an English professor’s alley.

Of course, English professors tend to ignore Anderson’s other two accounts of nationalism, what he calls creole nationalism (e.g., those New World nationalisms that formed around geographical and administrative boundaries, not vernacular language) and official nationalism (which Anderson also calls “Russification,” because official nationalism was so effectively instituted throughout the Russian Empire to coopt linguistic nationalism’s populist energy).

Second, Anderson is clearly influenced by post-Marxist thinkers like Walter Benjamin, who are already gods in the pantheon of literary theory. The 1983 edition ends with a quote from Benjamin. Catnip for English profs.

Third, you have the role of post-colonialism in Anderson’s model. Post-colonial studies were revolutionizing English studies when Imagined Communities appeared. (Edward Said’s Orientalism was published in 1978, five years before Imagined Communities.) Implicit in all of this is a critique of capitalism and imperialism, the twin heads of the beast that English professors always imagine themselves slaying. Anderson writes:

[Nineteenth century models of nationalism] helped to give shape to a thousand inchoate dreams. In varying combinations, the lessons of the creole, vernacular and official nationalism were copied, adapted, and improved upon. Finally, as with increasing speed capitalism transformed the means of physical and intellectual communication, the intelligentsias found ways to bypass print in propagating the imagined community, not merely to illiterate masses, but even to literate masses reading different languages.

After reading Anderson and several other theorists of the nation, I've concluded that nationalism often gets a bad rap. Ever since the German nationalism of the Third Reich and other right-wing (and sometimes left-wing) nationalisms of the past hundred years, we tend to associate nationalism with racially-charged, violent chauvinism. Anderson untangles this association: “The fact of the matter is that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.” Granted, when nationalism becomes too tied to linguistic identity, national projects can easily adopt racist ideologies (as Anderson noted in an above quote, language seems primordial and outside history, and so it easily pushes the nation-state outside history, too). But nationalism is not necessarily chauvinistic.

More sophisticated accounts of the emergence of nation-states have appeared since Imagined Communities. Still, from what I can tell, it remains a touchstone of a specific moment in the conversation about the origins and structure of nationalism.