Page 149 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 140

Contemporary Cultural Theory

for example (Gellner, 1997; Nairn, 1977; Nairn, 1997a), away from
formal, philosophical systems of thought and towards the needs
and aspirations of intelligentsias, understood as particular,
historically specific social groupings.
Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities considerably
advanced this line of argument through its focus on the specific
nexus connecting intellectuals to the printing industries. Anation,
he wrote, ‘is an imagined political community...imagined as
both inherently limited and sovereign’ (Anderson, 1991, p. 15).
Nations are imagined in a very particular way, moreover: as
passing through a homogeneous empty time in which simul-
taneity is indicated only by temporal coincidence in terms of clock
and calendar. This is a distinctly modern type of imagination,
he observed, the technical preconditions for which are provided
by the novel and the newspaper. Print-capitalism has thus
been central to the rise of nationalism: the capitalist publishing
industry, driven by a restless search for markets, assembled the
multiplicity of pre-modern vernaculars into a much smaller num-
ber of print-communities, each of which prefigured a modern
nation. Anderson himself identified four main waves of nation-
alism: first, early American nationalism, in which language per
se was irrelevant, but in which printer-journalists, producing
self-consciously ‘provincial’ as opposed to ‘metropolitan’ news-
papers, powerfully shaped the development of national
consciousness; second, European popular nationalisms centred
on middle-class reading coalitions, which mobilised the popular
masses in opposition to the polyvernacular dynastic state; third,
the official nationalism of those polyvernacular dynasties that
sought, through ‘Russification’ or ‘Anglicisation’, to impose a
nationalism from above; and last, those anti-imperialist nation-
alisms in which an intelligentsia educated within the confines
of the colonial educational system came to imagine and later
constitute the colony itself as a nation.
Insofar as the former Soviet Union and the continuing United
Kingdom could each be construed as successors to the nineteenth-
century polyvernacular dynastic state, then Lithuanian and Welsh
nationalisms can be understood as contemporary variants of
nineteenth-century European popular nationalism. The more

140