Imagined Londons

Imagined Londons, edited by Pamela K. Gilbert; pp. ix + 257. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002, $54.50, $22.95 paper.

The title of this collection evokes Benedict Anderson's influential 1982 study of nationalism. According to Pamela Gilbert, "imagined Londons, like the imagined communities of nation, have enacted history as material entities" (2). There's a little syntactic blip here: I think "material entities" are meant to line up with "imagined Londons." "Imagined Londons" are presumably supposed to have the same historical force and presence as, say, England or France. With the possible exception, however, of Gilbert's own piece (on maps), a collectively written essay on "Diasporic Communities in the Global City," and, marginally, Angela Woollacott's investigation of Australian reactions to the Great Wen, the essays here do not uphold an analogy between London and the "imagined" nationstate. As Gilbert herself emphasizes, the pervasive assumption in the volume is that "there are no Londons other than those of the imagination" (1). In other words, London exists only insofar as it is perceived and represented by the efforts of many individuals and groups, over time. If we think back to Bishop Berkeley, we might well want to call this an idealist perspective; moreover, by dwelling on the apparently endless malleability of the city, Gilbert gives her idealism a somewhat romantic, occasionally solipsistic, intensity. Nothing could be more different from Anderson's deadpan account of how, in the imagined communities of the nation, everybody has to be -not only figuratively but literally-on the same page.

Outside of the observation that one can think of London in many different ways, I don't think this book gives, or could give, a plausible theoretical account of itself. On the other hand, how many essay collections succeed in such an endeavor? Here, as usual, it is safest to read...