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Imagined Communities: Reflections on e Origin and Spread of Nationalism. By BENEDICT ANDERSON. Revised edition. London: VERSO, 1881. Pp. xv+224. $45 (cloth); $14.95 (paper).
In the years since Anderson's Imagined Communities first appeared (1983) it has become a classic in several disciplines, bringing its author from the lesser known field of Southeast Asian studies into a brighter and broader academic limelight. The book displays Anderson's impressive erudition and especially his command of the literature on nationalism; the book traces nationalism's appearance in the eighteenth century New World--the important chapter retitled "Creole Pioneers" in the new edition--to its spread to Europe at the end of that century, and its subsequent appearance in Southeast Asia and other parts of the colonial world in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Anderson's ideas on nationalism have stood the test of time well, as the demise of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union have followed in the wake of the Asian communist wars that inspired Anderson's original work. This demise may, in fact, have borne out Anderson's thesis, as many of the national communities put together in the devastated postwar world of the late 1940s, supported by the arms proliferation of the Cold War, seem to have been kept in place more by intimidating images of nuclear arsenals...