Fanon on National Consciousness

The purpose of this entry is to help you navigate through FrantzFanon’s chapter on National Consciousness and help you get ready for classroom discussion.

Fanon wrote this book in the three-year period in which he helped lead the psychiatric hospital in colonial Algiers, and as he wrote articles for revolutionary papers, and collaborated with the Algerian resistance. He did not have the assistance of an editor, the service of a computer or the disposal of a vast library (or the Internet for that matter). He engendered this work while he slept about four hours a day, hardly ate, and was under constant surveillance.

This is a work of painstaking pondering that comes from the meeting of considerable intellectual sweat, and hardcore, real-life political experience. At its heart, this chapter is a poignant demonstration of profound compassion for the unprivileged.

As an intellectual that trusted the people, Fanon main interest was to share with the Africans, who were on the brink of catapulting from colonialism, what he already knew about being a postcolonial, and what he thought will happen in the near future; all through the eyes of history. In fact, the Latin American past hanged predominately in Fanon’s head. Most Spanish America had over a century of postcolonial experience already, and Fanon wanted all Africans to avoid the pitfalls rendered clear through Western Hemisphere’s history.

Fanon objective was clear. He wanted to help deliver the promises of nationalism and avoid the “crude and fragile travesty of what might have been”. He had come to the conclusion that the hope of the postcolonial nation was not foreign investment or better relations with wealthy countries, but the mobilizing of its “revolutionary capital, which is the people”. In other words, the national leaders will achieve true independence only by trusting their own people.

But the main obstacle to the promise of nationalism was in fact the national bourgeoisie. These were the wealthy nationals who wanted to run the country after the exit of the colonial government. The problem was that they could not “rationalize” popular action.

The bourgeoisie has been crippled by colonialism; they had no economic power, no imagination and no political will. They were merely invested in small businesses, agriculture, and the liberal professions. They had neither financiers nor industrial magnates. They were “not engaged in production, nor in invention, nor building, nor labor.” Unfortunately, this caste had become the intermediary for the economic forces of the richest countries, and had neglected their role as national enablers. Thus, they could not deliver real independence, which in turn explains why postcolonial nations remained hanging as colonial drapes.

Read this chapter with these questions in mind:

What was Fanon's problem with producing only raw materials, nationalizing industries, promoting tourism, competition with other poor countries (as opposed to cooperation), chauvinism and tribalism?

Pay close attention at Fanon’s relentless assault on the national bourgeoisie. What was his problem with this “little greedy caste”? On the other hand, what is the responsibility of a strong bourgeoisie?

How do religious revivals may fuel racial rivalries?

What is the meaning of this phrase: “a racism of contempt: it minimizes everything it hates”?

How could African unity be achieved? What are the problems with a single party? What are the (harmful) pillars of regimes in underdeveloped countries?

Explain Fanon’s ideal: intellectuals collaborating with the masses against the national bourgeoisie.

What is the role of political party?

How Brasilia might have been a good example?

Note the industrialization and development against nature.

What was Fanon’s mood towards the plight of the African women?

What was his take regarding obscure language? And what does the unyielding black market said to him?

For Fanon, what produces the wealth of the rich? And what is the role of the education of the masses?

What are the pitfalls of youth’s pastimes, sports and national consciousness, and the quest for heroes?

What can the army bring to the construction of the nation, and what are the dangers of having the army involved in politics?

What do you find useful and revelatory in Fanon’s long essay?

Fanon ended the chapter with something that we may find controversial. He thought that a nation that is just coming out of colonialism should cultivate a sense of strong nationalism before developing social consciousness. In other words, people should feel united and develop a feel for national responsibility before demanding social justice. What do you think of this?

Postcolonial Ecofeminism (Robert J. C. Young)

You would not come to this class to read and learn about what you would normally get from standard media. So, the title of Monday’s discussion should not be a complete surprise. Its newness may require that you would read and meditate about these issues more carefully than you would with more familiar topics. These types of topics, nevertheless, would surely help you appreciate the human experience on the other side of nationalism.

You already know that in this context postcoloniality means the people’s ambivalent experience and subordinate position even after independence from a colonial power. In other words, it is that state in which a former colony has nominal sovereignty because the former master (or new foreign ones) has not left entirely or has taken on new forms of domination. The struggle for freedom, thus, continues, not so much by pushing the foreign away, but in redefining the social structures that continues to promote inequality and subordination, which colonialism donated to the new nation (“inherited from colonialism”).

But what do ecology and feminism have to do with postcoloniality?

Robert J. C. Young’s challenge in chapter 5 is simply asking us to appreciate the perspective of the women who struggled against colonial and later postcolonial domination in India and other parts of Asia and Africa. Their experience is not totally transferable to other postcolonial female experiences because each group had faced different set of trials and had had different types of needs. Rather, it is the overarching theme of resisting a modern patriarchal nationalism that puts them together in the same crowd.

The section titled “Gender Politics in India” illustrates how notions about traditional roles for women are hard to reject. Even Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the great reformer who appropriated ‘feminized’ modes of struggle, came at times to reinforce, instead of reject, conventional Hindu and puritanical Victorian concepts of women and femininity. Young vindicated Gandhi, though, by showing that he genuinely realized that women’s politics were more radical than most nationalism. It argued for equitable relations between men and women, sustainable connections to the land, and a life-style and medicine that encourage collective health. These are the contributions of postcolonial women and their politics.

In “Gender and Modernity” Young threw us several ideas about modernity that could easily mystify if you fail to pay close attention. On the one hand he wrote technology and a politics of egalitarianism defines modernity. On the other, he asserted that (mythical) cultural nationalists and their obsession for a fabled past, where women stayed at home and were submissive, is all part of modernity. But his more interesting contribution, by far, was that there are several types of modernities, that there are different types of Third World modern experiences, and that even the West represent a diversity of modernities (think about how different is New Zeeland from the U.S.). The best explanation of modernity, however, is Young’s, and it appears in this section: the interaction of the West with the Rest.

Women’s struggle for equality and sustainability is the epitome of the postcolonial predicament according to the section “Women’s Movement after Independence.” While nationalist movements sought desperately to present a unified face during the conflicts against the direct colonial rule, after impendence, the same nationalists (i.e., Religious nationalisms) who preached equality and freedom tried relegating women to submission. Since the role of women actually degenerated with the “nation,” postcolonial feminism had been at the forefront of a “politics of egalitarianism that supports diversity rather than the cultural uniformity demanded for nationalism.” (99)

The section “Feminism and ecology” shows how “macho” nationalism continued with the same colonial politics of exploitation. It reinforced the same old social hierarchy; it exploited workers, women and the environment. Like the colonial government, the new nations colonized forests and minds in responses to market-oriented and scientific notions of the time. This brought deforestation and desertification to local economies and otherwise clean ecosystems.

All of this colonization was for the short-term commercial values of the marketplace, “trying to control nature just as patriarchy tries to control women.” (102) Women, however, because of their experience as cultivators and family enablers possessed repositories of knowledges about balances in nature and the effects of ecological disruptions. It is no wonder, then, that it were women activists who began the Chipko (tree huggers) movement and developed a philosophy of politics that resisted centralization, corruption and exploitation. Instead, they promoted justice, self-sufficiency, and empowerment of local knowledges.

In the section “What makes postcolonial feminism ‘postcolonial’?,” Young asked if postcolonial feminism amounted to a separate strand within postcolonial thought. His answer was simply no. In this section Young addressed the malleability of postcolonial theory by explaining how feminism is at its core, and thus inseparable. It is also applicable to a wide variety of politics, and even though they might not include obvious gender perspectives, they all work from the same paradigm: the pursuit of collective justice and equality. These struggles may be waged inside the nation or in exile, as the examples of Radia Nasraoui and Gisèle Halimi shows.

In the last section, “The untouchables: caste,” Young readily admitted that postcolonial struggle is not limited to the legacy of the colonies. There are older vices that plagued modern society. In the Indian example, we see the caste system, which is much older than the British colonial government. The plight of the Dalits is its most explicit case injustice. “A quarter of the Indian population is made of such Dalits.” And they do most of the menial jobs, and live segregated from the rest, with little access to anything we normally see as good from modernity.

In class I want you to think seriously about the meaning of feminism and its opposite, namely, patriarchalism. How women’s social position as historically close to the land and responsible for sustaining families shaped their politics differently to that of men.

You should also ponder over the dark side of macho-nationalism, its insistence on cultural uniformity. Most importantly, I expect you to deliberate on the reasons and causes of nationalisms continuing with the same unfair hierarchies imposed by colonial rules, and with the exploitations inaugurated by the colonial masters.

How do you fit Young in Benedict Anderson's frame of thought? What parts correspond, even if slightly, and what elements are diametrically apart?

Sara Chambers's Letters and Salons

Letters and Salons

Beyond woman’s comprehension

We have stories about heroines, but not much about women thinking about the nation because their ideas were less public than their actions and whatever they wrote have been left out of literary canons. Though the record is hardly there, women were a cornerstone in the construction of national communities in LA. Sáenz, Sánchez, and Arriagada show that through correspondence and friendship, women played an important role as mediators.

Like Benedict Anderson thought, the writing and reading was a catalyst to the imagination of nations, but in the women’s case, it was through the writing and reading of correspondence, and through the socialization in salons. In this way women became intermediaries working toward national unity, and occasional critics of the excess of masculine-driven nationalism.

They were pioneers because the stereotype and the society’s drive was to mold women to the subordinate role of domesticity. Women who publicly thought were ridiculed and demonized. The only positive tendency of domesticity was that women were trained to raise loyal and virtuous citizens.

Even other women writers who published on feminine journals advocated the idea of domesticity for women while, contradictorily, violating themselves such a role by publishing their work. It was on the more private arena of letters that middle-class and elite women vented their frustration more freely.

This study relies mostly on unpublished documents in the form of letters. These letters could not be considered strictly private since they were also meant to be read in public and shared with others.

Sara C. Chambers add an important twist to (or challenge) Anderson’s thesis of the imagined community not only be including women in the creation of the national, but also by arguing that the imagination process happened through social interactions at smaller and tangible communities of “writers, readers, conversationalists, and political conspirators.”

The author does not make the connection directly, but her insistence in the fact that males’ leaders focused on the abstract while women focused on the concrete relationships of friends may be one of the most important contribution of this study since for most people who were not elite male, this was exactly the case.

Sáenz developed its sense of patriotism for Ecuador not from an abstract idea, since she had lived most of her life in Peru and Colombia, but from her personal acquaintances and from her exilic perspective. It is interesting that despite her being the most politically educated and democratically oriented of the three she still supported a military leader who sought to change the constitution to expand his tenure in power. Her contribution was not limited to influencing Simón Bolivar and Juan José Flores, but one that helped create a sense of national identity that favored order over other merits.

Sánchez’s, like Sáenz, spent time in exile, but differently from Sáenz, this augmented her patriotism because she revolved around like-minded people. Moreover, since she did not have competing (provincial) loyalties, as Sáenz had, and Argentine’s early national history was simpler than that of Ecuador and Colombia, it was easier for her to imagine an Argentine that was more homogenous than that of Sáenz. Still, her sense of national identity was rooted in her relationships with other Argentines, and not in any abstract idea of the nation.

Arraigada was the least euphoric patriot of the three. She lived in a southern isolated province, and this isolation may have influenced the way she imagined the nation. It was because she had the least of friends that her extended network did not yield a broader vision of the nation. This distance from the locus of power, however, allowed her to make a more critical appraisal of Chile than the other two writers. Chambers thought that her choice of reading, the romance novel, may have also influenced her lack of strong attachment to the new nation.

All three women, Chambers argued, are not representative of their class, but they are neither unique. This means that through her lives we can get an insight into the role of women in the formation of early national identities. It was not their radicalism that put these women apart, but how they managed to carve a niche of substantial independence in order to affect politics and ideology that make them special to history. Their ideological contribution was the argument that tolerance and negotiation was better than confrontation and personal ambitions.

Editing your paper: Anderson's last chapters

These are rephrased comments I shared with one of your classmates about his essay. They may help you all as you rework your own.

Another encouraging fact of your essay is that you are trying to make a unitary entity around an issue (with subcategories), and not a fragmented outline with the different themes found in the chapters. This is the way to go: to gather all the data around one single issue and make sense throughout the essay based on it (thesis). I see your intention and attempt, but, as you alluded in your email, it needs serious work. This means that you have to think hard about the way you organize your essay around a single issue or concern.

It is usually helpful to begin with a sort of question or problem. For example, what IS Anderson’s main contribution in chapters 8 to 11 to the understanding of the creation of nations? There must be something in these chapters (Patriotism and Racism, The Angel of History, Census, Mao and Museums, Memory and Forgetting) or at least of key group of issues, which you could put together that would be the heart of your essay. As soon as you have that center, your essay will flow easier and smoother.

Let me give you a recap of what we have seen yet and how the last chapters may fit within the broader view.

Anderson’s book follows the modernization argument (“we are progressing and becoming better, thus, the present is mostly better than the past.” You can imagine why I would have problems with this assumption) in explaining the creation of nations. This means that for Anderson nations developed as a necessary component of industrial society, though neither "economic interest, Liberalism, nor Enlightenment could, or did, create in themselves the kind, or shape, or imagined community" (65).

Differently from others who have written about nationalism, Anderson stressed the impact of culture and the role of print capitalism in developing new nations. In regards to culture Anderson contended that pre-national culture was a broad religious society (“imagined religious communities” like Mediaeval Christianity). Nations replaced this religious culture with their own distinctively imaginary national cultures (national hymns, and a plethora of new hallowed ceremonies), which gave citizens a rationale for dying for a nation (before people died mostly for their religious communities).

For Anderson print capitalism is at the core of his premise. According to him, print capitalism, publishing in vernaculars, was the catalyst in spreading consciousness of similar identities, and thus, creating, somehow involuntarily (in other words, it was not the intent of print-capitalism to create nations) these new national cultures.

Chapters 8 to 11 help the reader understand how these new national cultures become so effective in polarizing people. These chapters deal more specifically with the nations’ powerful love and attraction, and their specific and narrow interpretation of history, with the creation of new monuments and numbering of people.

Below are more links you may explore. The idea of reading these links is not to take-in everything they say. Instead, the idea is to allow what you find in these links to stimulate your thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities

http://www.lai.at/wissenschaft/lehrgang/semester/ss2005/rv/files/anderson.1983-1991.pdf

http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/anderson.htm

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Radhika-Desai/3085

Official Nationalism and Imperialism

The incompatibility between nationalism and imperialism.

This is an entry for Anderson’s chapter, “Official Nationalism and Imperialism.” This may be his most thoughtful chapter yet. It feels long because it is long; and it is long because he made a sincere effort to evidence (though always on the shoulders of secondary sources) the historical arguments for this chapter’s thesis, namely, that the popularity of nationalism in the early 19^th century pressed the empires to appropriate it to avoid demise. Yet, since nationalism is incompatible with imperialism (his illustration of the thin skin over a large beast), it determined the destruction of old polyglot empires (in the case of Britain and Japan it was a radical transformation that rendered the monarch virtually useless). The emphasis here is on the Russian, Austrian-Hungarian, Ottoman, British and Japanese empires, and Hungarian and Siam's kingdoms.

Pay attention to the Pals and gastarbeiters (and compare it with the American Creoles), to the vernacular (again), to the program for education and greater political inclusion. How all these empires compare in regards to their official policy of nationalism? But, that seems contradictory: isn’t nationalism supposed to come from below? So, how this contradiction played a role in dismantling the empires? Is this a lesson to learn regarding the dangers of playing or trying to “manage” nationalisms from above?

On Familiar Grounds

The familiarity of Anderson’s argument might escape you among the many interesting stories about the falling and conquering national empires. But if you look carefully at familiar themes, concerns that the author continues to bring up, you may notice that the vernacular and the imagination cut across chapters.

In the previous chapter the new European nationalisms of the 19^th Century came into being because the bourgeoisie started reading, and this led to them imagining being part of a larger group of equals (the print media and capitalism). In this chapter the European Empires tried holding the nationalist tide by choosing a vernacular and elevating it to the status of state language. The reason for this was not simply as a reaction to nationalism, but for what could be seen as practical purposes. It seems ironic that the emperors that tried hard to make their empires work were the ones that ultimately sent their empires crumbling.

Look for example at the choosing of the German vernacular as the state’s language (the most logical choice for effective governance); it had the unintended effect of awakening all sorts of nationalisms among the Hapsburgs’ possessions, which ended breaking the empire (this chapter did not make reference to the 20^th Century, but it was this rivalry against the Germans in the former Hapsburgs’ possessions that set the stage for the bitter nationalist wars of the 20^th Century—the latest being the Balkan Wars, in which the U.S. troops were involved in the 1990s).

Imagination continued being the main and yet most subtle of Anderson’s proposition. In the previous chapter he argued that people began imagining a common nation with the reading of the vernacular; that national myths and legendary histories (which pretended to show readers that their nation was actually ancient) arouse the interest of people linked together by a vernacular, and led to the first stage in the formation of a nation.

In this chapter Anderson, again, showed how the way people imagined as a group itself, though they had not met each other, through the vernacular divisions created by imperial policies. In other words, the empires’ attempts to create state-languages forced imperial subjects to identify themselves with either the chosen imperial language, or with the ones left out.

The Newest of the New

The most original, and in my opinion, most important contribution of this chapter is appreciation of nationalism as a form of reaction to threats. With a broad comparative view Anderson gave its reader a clear sense of how the ruling classes took on the hobby of nationalism in order to maintain power and survive.

Though the Hanoverian (British), Romanovs (Russians), Hapsburgs (Vienna-Hungary) and Meiji (Japanese) converted, with varying degrees of success, to nationalism because of the threat of popular nationalism or external pressures, the most appalling example is that of the Magyar’s aristocracies. They resisted Vienna’s reforms for fear of losing power, and in turn created what today we could easily considered as fake nationalism.

The most unique and interesting case of nationalism from above, however, came from Siam (Thai). Chulalongkorn defended his kingdom from the same Western threats that had swallowed the entire continent of Asia (except Siam and Japan) with pure negotiation. He pitted European imperial powers against each other, and imported a politically powerless class of mostly Chinese, to work on his imperial projects.

But this political bonanza did not last long. After his death, Chulalongkorn’s son, Wachirawut, felt he had to promote a repressive nationalism against the second generation Chinese. He did not turn against the Westerners, but against the laborer immigrants that had established themselves there. This was the time, again, to promote the previous models (US and French) of nations, and enforce education, and the establishment of a state language.

Significant

We are starting to see the negative side of nationalism, particularly if it falls in the hand of a ruling or one with expansive pretensions (i.e. Japanese).

The heroic spirit of nationalism paints better memories when it is the engine behind an oppressed, ignored, and marginalized group. It is then seen, and often even justified as the case of the little guy against the mighty, David versus Goliath. It is then the case for asserting justice.

But, when an already powerful group harnesses the energy and creativity of nationalism, the destructive possibilities are countless. That is what the 20^th Century came to show.

Questions

What did Anderson mean with lexicographic revolution?

What is the link between this revolution and the imagined communities’ wish for territory?

What are the differences in forms of governance and risks between an absolutists (divinely appointed) monarchy, and a nationalist one?

What were the roles of Thomas Macaulay, and Sergei Uvarov?

What was the main risk that monarchs would have if they would try turning their empires into nations?

How Siam’s early nationalism differed from Japan’s?

Language and models in the formation of nations

As the one before, this entry is meant to serve my students as a launching pad to an enriching reading experience. Here I will comment on Anderson’s chapter 5, Old Languages, New Models, and will offer a set of questions that would hopefully help my students arrive at the classroom prepared for discussion. Reading this entry, however, will not suffice. You will need to carefully read the chapter in order to make sense of this entry and to engage others in the classroom.

My initial caveats first.

1) The historian may find Anderson frustrating because, even though for the most part he focused on the 19^th Century as the historical period that gave birth to the modern notion of a nation, he moved through time without the same painstaking concern that historians commonly have. Historians prefer to attend matters in chronological order because we are anxious about historical details, and want to learn how earlier events had an impact on what followed.

That is not to say that Anderson did not acknowledge the power of sequenced events; he did in fact, by recognizing that the unpopularity of the ancient Latin in Europe opened the door to vernaculars, and that the realization that Europe and Western Culture was not that unique set the stage to notions of equality. But he still came across as a scholar who is more concerned in proving his thesis than in allowing the historical data to shape the theory. An example of this was when he assumed that modernity came to all Europe at once, or when he moved from American nationalisms in the 19^th Century back to European Proto-nationalisms of the 16 to 18^th Centuries.

2) For someone, like me, who have worked hard to overcome the damaging effect of Eurocentric thinking and have come to realize, in its own skin, the destructive results of the ideology of progress, I find Anderson’s liberal use of the terms “backward” and “advanced” really irritating. It seems to be a malaise with him. In the previous chapter (Creole Pioneers) he made subtle condescending remarks about Spanish-America when repeatedly he referred to the region as a-historical: nothing really happened there, and everything was calm and in stupor.

In this chapter (5^th) he referred to groups of people like Bulgarians, and Celts (i.e., Irish and Scottish), in other words, those who were not French and English, as backward. This implies as if the developments that were happening in Britain and France (i.e., increasing pollution, labor abuses, increasing dependence on mechanization and a love affair with imperialism) were actually encouraging signs of advancement. Writing “history” in this way has a violent effect on the minds of the readers because it “normalizes” and “reifies” those forms of categorization. It requires a healthy dose of energy and critical thinking to come out of Anderson’s book without looking at those people as lesser than, or as greater than.

Remember that other structural criticism of Anderson’s thesis will come at the end of the book.

The thrust of Anderson’s argument

This chapter argues for a concept of a nation formed around the development of an increasingly wider readership and the expansion of middle classes, or bourgeoisies throughout Europe (In the previous chapter he already have argued for a different type of nation-ness among the American Creole, which happened in the US between 1776 and 1782, and in most of Colonial Spanish America from 1808 to 1820s).

The bourgeoisie radically transformed the map of Europe from the 1820s to the 1920s.

From one perspective, Anderson’s argument is very tight. After the 1500s, the rise of the vernacular came hand in hand with the proliferation of for-profit presses. Secular as well as religious books, pamphlets and journals (similar to what today would be “newsletters”) rushed into the markets. And who consumed these publications? First, it was the educated elite, but then an increasing number of people began reading more. And who were they?

It was the bourgeoisies, who had the money, the interest and the need to read. Can you imagine an illiterate bourgeoisie? Asked Anderson. Impossible. Indeed, this was the first vernacular imagined community, according to Anderson. Middling groups within a specific vernacular territory, who would have no other form of connection among themselves (as opposed to the nobility, which would be linked to each other through marriages and interest in government), learned of each other existence through the print-media, and thus, imagined itself as part of a community that went beyond their local village or burg (city).

But the practice of community-imagining did not produce a global bourgeoisie’s nationalism. It became national because the presses were not multi-lingual. They published in the vernacular, and thus, the English bourgeoisies came to see itself differently from the French one (they lacked the links that often connected the English to the French nobility). Additionally, new state apparatuses began establishing state-languages out of the vernacular, and this completed the formation of an imagined community: one that read and was ruled by the same vernacular.

Essential to Anderson’s argument is the astonishing growth of the middle class (a sign of the spread of capitalism). Its members became “missionaries of nationalism” (spreading the model), and forced the nobility to new governing terms, namely, the nation, with its quasi-religious symbolism and rituals.

Therefore, Anderson’s argument is inseparable from Eric Hobsbawm’s claim that the bourgeoisies dethroned the old nobility (ancient-regime) and forced the arrival of the industrial and capitalist modernity in the 19^th Century. Anderson, however, added to Hobsbawm’s thesis the notion of an imagined community linked through reading vernacular and through education.

With education came not simply the ability to read the vernacular, and thus, the connection to an imagined community of vernacular-speakers, but an “awakening” of everything local and national. Anderson provided examples of the Ukrainians, Finish, and others “awakening” to their nationalities through the reading of vernacular literature and the “realization” of a “national” history.

But, what role would the lower classes, workers and illiterate peasants have in this nation created by the well-read bourgeoisie? They were mostly not readers, so their loyalty to the bourgeoisie’s nation could be seriously doubted. This is where the promotion of education and public schools come to play such an important role in the creation of these new nations. The more that a people reads, particularly myth-laden nationalistic literature, the more they become a nation.

There is no space in Anderson’s hermetic argument for a nation without a common language and a large literate population. So, the nationalist-missionaries more successful were those who could find ways to convey the message to the illiterate masses and could spark among them enthusiasm for education. He gave examples of ineffectual nationalists who failed to convince the masses to assail the power of the nobles. The masses, then, preferred to support the status quo and “killed gentlemen.”

Questions:

Why is the rise of the vernacular so important in the appearance of the nation?

What are the roles (more than one) of capitalism in the production of the modern nation?

How did Anderson’s arguments fit within Hobsbawm’s Marxist historicism?

What roles did the education of the masses played in the creation of nations?

Considering the factors Anderson gave in this chapter for the creation of nations in the 19^th Century, what types of nations could you picture in your mind? How are these nations that Anderson has been trying to describe?

Do you sense some sort of classism and paternalism toward the non-elite and non- bourgeoisie in Anderson argument? If so, how and why?

The Creole Consciousness

My Senior Seminar Class is studying about Nation Building in the 19^th Century Caribbean. The emphasis will be on Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Haiti’s national ideologies of the time. But before arriving to the writings of the leaders and intellectuals of these countries we are studying some major works on nationalism and histories of the period.

The purpose of the following entry is to serve as a commentary and an introduction to the reading of chapter 3 and 4 of Anderson’s Imagined Communities. This is the 1991 edition reprinted by Verso in 2006. The chapters’ titles are 3) The origins of National Consciousness, and 4) The Creole Pioneers (follow this link for a more comprehensive overview of Anderson and his book).

We should begin by acknowledging that despite any limitation of Anderson’s thesis (and that of his many propositions), he has forced the scholarly community to reframe the idea of nationalism and nation-building, and help us reconsider many aspect of political and anthropological history, which used to be taken as given. At the end of this book we will read and study a few reviews that have criticized, and by doing so, have dig deeper into the subject, giving us a clearer view of the enigmatic historical process of nation-building.

As with all major works that purported to offer broad explanations of deep historical process, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities is rigged with problems and critical historical errors. However, his concepts still illuminate, and his propositions challenge us to both accept and accept partially, and/or to contest them. And in order for us to develop healthy and honest postures of our own regarding his statements on nationalism we need to first read the original and learn his positions directly from him.

Wikipedia has an entry on him that may serve you as an introduction, but keep in mind that this entry (as with everything in Wikipedia) is an ongoing form of knowledge, and we are supposed to soon supersede it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_Communities

Sample of a Protestant pamphlet. Heavy use of printing, in the form of publications like this one, was a common Protestant strategy during the Reformation.

In the Third Chapter, Anderson’s main focus was on the development of the Print Media in conjunction with Capitalism as the propeller of proto-national consciousness. Look carefully at how he explained that both, Print Media and Capitalism, laid down the foundations for a collective sense of imagined community, which slowly came to supplant the Imagined Sacred Community—meaning: the Catholic community at large. Keep clearly in mind the period of time in which this is happening: the slow end of Feudalism, the birth of the “early modern age,” at the turn of the Renaissance, and the beginning of the exploration age and the beginning of absolute monarchies in Europe—he assumed that you would be familiar with the bare-bones of World and Western History.

Absolute monarchs believed that they owned their political powers to divine appointment rather than to common people wishes.

Become familiar with the meaning and significance of vernaculars, class differentiation and religious rivalries in Europe, the end of the “sacred imagined community,” and what he termed as “unselfconscious” processes (I will ask about this in class).

In the Fourth Chapter, Anderson tried hard to explain that not everything of importance in World History has happened only in Europe (in the 1991’s Preface he mentioned how horrified he was to notice how most people in Europe had ignored this chapter when he published it first in 1983, so in 1991 he renamed it as such: “Creole Pioneers,” to make greater impact). It were the Creoles, American-born Spanish and British descendents, which first created modern nations. Why and how come? These are the two most important questions he tried to answer in this chapter, and by doing so, he gave the reader a crash-course in comparative colonial history of the Americas (Spanish and British Colonial Americas).

As you read this chapter, keep in mind the differences and similarities of both histories (south and north), and how the issue of race, and distance (separation of the Atlantic, for example), made such an impact in creating a new group, which could be seen as a class and as an ethnic group: The Creoles. Take into account, also, how the late Bourbon administration in Spain, an enlightened monarchy, tried to make the empire more efficient and by doing so it pushed the American Creoles aside and helped create a sense of nationalism in colonial Latin America—which is somehow similar to what happened in British America (try noticing the way Anderson belittled the Spanish Empire).

Come prepare to class to discuss these issues, to produce your own questions and answer new ones.

The Case for a Green and Global Caribbean History

We should consider studying Caribbean History from an environmental and global perspective because the region is just part of a whole, and only as such could we make better sense of it. Should a student attempt to study a relatively “short” history, say about 500 years, of any given region without first firmly being acquainted with the histo ry of the world, such student will invariably develop a terribly incomplete and unclearview of that region’s past.

This is so because neither history happens nor it is understood in a vacuum. The Caribbean owes its existence, its names and its history to what happened before “written history” (prior to 1400s) and to what happened around the world afterward as much as what happened in the Caribbean itself. In other words, it is part of a milieu (context); what environmentalists would call a “historical ecosystem.”

When the word “Caribbean” is invoked, images of sugar, slavery, pirates, and tourism would come to most people’s minds. But, even while these terms fail miserably to encompass the wholeness of the region, either past or present, they are in every sense the product of global forces interacting in the region. So, the specific makes sense solely within the broad, and the general only adds up with the particular.

Sugar became the foremost cash-crop in the Caribbean not because people there wanted to consume excesses of it. In fact, it had little to do with the wishes of the locals and lots with the intentions of the colonial masters. Even though the sugar cane was first cultivated in India many centuries ago the Europeans found it most convenient to plant it in their nearest tropics to satiate their growing sweet addiction. Indeed, a scandalously close look at the production of sugar in the Caribbean reveals the foreignness of its industry, and yet, its impact in the region is literally immeasurable.

Enslaved Africans too arrived in the Caribbean by and large as a result of Europeans’ commercial convenience. They were neither looking forward to the “middle-passage” as a recreational trip nor were they happy at the sight of the islands’ shorelines. European merchants, instead of creating slaving plantations in Africa, where well-armed natives firmly controlled the land, found it easier to ship slaves to the Caribbean, which they controlled (against the Native Americans’ will, of course).

It is true that pirates in the Caribbean were named Buccaneers because they learned to cook meat from locals. This in itself may flaunt them as the personification of Caribbeanness. Then again, they were actually foreign- born who had come to the region with a foreign requisition on behalf of a global task. Yes, they turned up in the Caribbean chiefly to help destroy the mighty Spanish Empire at its weakest spot. And since they had been, as a rule, disinherited individuals in Europe they had no better place

to make a name for themselves. Therefore, in a twist of irony, European social and imperial histories would certainly help understand pirates in the Caribbean.

Similarly, tourism in the Caribbean has become the most important industry in the region, but not because the people there are innately servile and had nothing better to do. It has been, instead, in large measure because the unstoppable economic forces from the industrialized world. Their push has help determined these places as the most suitable for “first-world” countries’ overworked middle-class to once a year let off steam. So, the extremely popular Caribbean tourism owes its success to its pristine beaches as much as it does to the economics shaping the labor history of the industrialized West.

Perhaps no influence on the Caribbean has been more significant than simply its natural milieu and the way humans have related to it, in other words, its geography and environment. The powerful and dry trade winds, which initially seek out the arctic flowing from the South Atlantic, are soon thrust toward the Caribbean islands by the blustery weather of the Sahara Desert streaming west. The sandy currents pierce the Caribbean archipelago from the bottom to enter the Mexican Gulf where it heats even more. It then exits warm and gasping for the North Atlantic, squirting through the Florida Straits at 2-5 knots. At this speed it squeezes out from between the coast of Florida and the island of the Bahamas, as an uncontainable monster, swiping first through the Havana harbor, and producing one of the world’s greatest ocean currents, namely, the Gulf Stream.

This powerful stream, which has for many centuries warmed the otherwise cold Europe, had also pushed back frustrated European sailors from reaching the Americas. No wonder lost fishermen and daring sailors prior to 1492 never returned. It took a brainy yet holy fool like Christopher Columbus to find out about the foyer which the Saharan breeze unlocks a few hundred miles south of Europe. As he suspected it, after reaching the Canary Islands the wind flowing west irremediably drove Columbus four times towards the Caribbean islands.

It must have felt like a modern highway in a Ferrari. But for those attempting an entrance through the north, it was not until the 1600s, when the European navigational technology could face against the challenge of the ocean winds that Europeans would attempt to cross the North Atlantic. It was then, more than a century after Columbus, that northern Europeans began colonizing the American northern hemisphere—what today is the United States and Canada. So, the Caribbean opened up the European experiment in the Americas thanks, but no thanks, to its environment and the way people related to it.

And now, I will make perhaps a controversial argument. Global History as it is commonly presented in popular university courses is already obsolete. This is so neither because the traditional White men of history are irrelevant, nor because women and other ethnicities are not being included in the global narrative. They are, sometimes. Instead, it is because the more we learn about science and nature the more we learn about how human history is ultimately shaped by the interaction with the environment. Up to just recently, history courses overlooked this cardinal point. We should attempt to correct the flaw by addressing the subject of global natural history from the outset.

As important as world history, the history of the Caribbean is also vital to understand the histories of the Atlantic, North America, Africa, Europe and Latin America. These groups of islands and the continental shores that embrace these waters have been enormously influential in most historical developments concerning the four continents around the Atlantic Ocean. The people who have inhabited the Caribbean have been affected and have affected profoundly the events in Latin America, North American, Europe and Africa. So, the study of Caribbean History would help us learn more about ourselves and others in reference to global history as well as to the present.

The 88 and David Minge

In 1825 David Minge (“meengee”), who must have been about 17 years-old, took all the way to Baltimore. That was some trip if you

consider that he had to get on a comfortless carriage in his Virginian North Bend plantation, cross through swampy Charles City to get to Richmond, and travel to Charlottesville, and then Manassas on very bumpy roads, to perform next a last leap over several miles of Maryland small farms and spots of wilderness before finally arriving to Baltimore. The harbor was not as attractive as it is today, but the city was almost as livable as Richmond, which he was very familiar with. So, why would he have wanted to journey all the way to Baltimore?

David was a teenager with lots of power now. He had just earned a degree from the College of William and Mary, the most reputable university in the South. David was healthy and strong—he was going to live a full life of 76 years—and was handsome and well spoken. David ancestors had been eating well since they arrived in Virginia from Wales in the 17^th Century, and were well connected with the southern high society. To anybody in t

he street he would have looked like a privileged gentry’s male in his prime, a bit humble, but well-dressed and refined, with a charming southern accent. What a catch. But he did not come to Baltimore seeking a bride nor was he looking to the liberal north for a casual tryst.

Though it was obvious from the distance that David was not like your average White male, his charm and bearing were the least of the surprises for the Anti-Slavery radical Benjamin Lundy, who a few years before had come himself all the way from Ohio to Baltimore to broaden the reach of his diehard activist paper, “The Genius of Universal Emancipation.” There was something else that was going to splash on Lundy’s face like fresh water on a desert.

David had just inherited 90 slaves in addition to lots of cultivated land in arguably the best location in Virginia: The Tidewater, where the nutrient-filled water of the James River makes a broad opening toward the sea. It was the perfect location for plantations because the land was fertile enough to plant practically anything. It was at Richmond’s waterway entrance to the ocean and thus could move along cash-crops to virtually any place in the long chain of Atlantic trade networks.

And the Tidewater region was the perfect place for plantations that depended on slave labor because there were no mountains, caverns or hiding place, but small swampy dots easily enclosed by headhunters. It was also near to one of the least cosmopolitan and most conservative cities of the union, Richmond. Whites from all social classes were engaged in imposing the social order based on race differentiation. In other words, with nowhere to escape, the enslaved had to submit or find other less intimidating forms to resist the system.

David could be cocky, then. His future could be as one of his ancestors who had served in the House of Burgesses, state assemblies, and in the Federal Government. But he came to Baltimore not to talk with commercial agents or bankers, but to visit Lundy’s unrem

arkable office, from where his paper emanated like today’s current online blogs—yes, Lundy was like an activist blogger. The question still stands: what would this young fortunate man wanted to do in Baltimore?

He had come all the way from the South to liberate the enslaved Blacks he had just inherited. Why would he do that? In what manner was he going to free them? What were the repercussions of his act?

The Great Divide: The first steps in the fabrication of the Eurocentric “me” and the non-White “other.”

It was during the third decade of the 16^th century, in the midst of the European Renaissance and of the religious Schism, which non-Catholics prefer to call The Protestant Reformation. Leo Africanus, a man that toddled the worlds of the Christian West and Africa, who was between Christianity and the Islam, published then the first modern ethnographic work about Africa. Since he knew both Europe and Africa well, and had been both Christian and Muslim, he could interpret both universes fairly well. In his effort to “explain” Africa to the European mind he emphasized the similarities: how both were not that different (though some critics have correctly made him responsible of helping in "creating" the false concept of "Africa" as a particular place).

But as the European world expanded beyond its original physical borders, and Europeans saw themselves masters of the rest, they found Africanus's description of the African person insufficiently disparate. There should be more striking differences between the Christian and the Muslim, between the civilized European and the barbaric African. The African and the European, no matter how pale the former would be, should be fundamentally distinct, different in kind, and altogether entirely dissimilar. Otherwise, how could you justify the swelling number of slaves being transported from Africa to the Americas, and some even taking residence as subservient individuals in marginal sectors of European cities? How can you call yourself a "master of equals"? That title did not ring attractive. Enter the Spanish adventurer and writer, Luis del Mármol Carvajal, with a revised edition of the Description of Africa. The first part came out in 1673 (BTW, there is no entry for Mármol in the English Wikipedia as of today).

Differently from Africanus, Mármol stressed the differences between the African, who is more African as he becomes darker, and the European, who is more European as he is more refined, Christian, and of course, lighter. In a recent article Mar Martínez Góngora tells us that Mármol helped initiate the imperialistic discourse, which Edward Said studied, that consisted in circulating a series of knowledges, real and imaginary, about the “Orient.” In other words, this is arguably our first Orientalist. I am not going to spoil the reading of this article, just to encourage you to read it. It is in Spanish, though, but a very readable one. Let me know if you would like a copy.

Mar Martínez Góngora, “El Discurso Africanista del Renacimiento en La primera parte de la descripción general de África de Luis del Mármol Carvajal,” Hispanic Review (spring 2009): 171-189.