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This study relies mostly on unpublished documents in the form of letters.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.