Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America María Gabriela Nouzeilles Castro-Klarén, Sara, and John Charles Chasteen , eds. Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. 252 pages. Beyond Imagined Communities offers a useful and wide-ranging collection of essays written by historians and literary and cultural critics on the formation and development of national identities in Latin America in the nineteenth century. To varying degrees, all contributions imply a critical reassessment of the theoretical approach to nationalism put forward by the British historian Benedict Anderson in his influential book Imagined Communities (1983; 1991). The title is telling in the sense that it underlines the authors' explicit desire to go "beyond" Anderson's work while at the same time adopting it as their starting point. Thus, even though the book acknowledges the theoretical value of Anderson's overall interpretation of nationalism, and above all of his definition of the nation as an imagined community, it strongly questions both the chronology and the cause-and-effect account offered by Anderson to explain the emergence of nationalism in the Spanish American colonies. Neither the itineraries of colonial bureaucrats like in Indonesia, nor the circulation and reading of newspapers like in the United States, the authors argue, can explain Latin American collective identities. They concede that there was an essential link between reading and writing and nationalism, but object to Anderson's suggestion that such practices were relevant before independence and independently of nation-building. In this sense, as a whole, Beyond Imagined Communities embraces what Eric Hobsbawn and Ernest Gellner called the modernist position among existing theories of nationalism. Such a position views the nation as a cultural artifact, and nationalism as an entirely modern principle which holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. According to this logic, nation and nationalism are dual phenomena, constructed essentially from above by political and cultural elites. Besides chronology and causality, Beyond Imagined Communities also takes issue with other aspects of Anderson's approach, mainly its excessive reliance on printed materials, its lack of attention to sexual and racial dynamics, as well as its failure to acknowledge the highly controversial nature of Latin American identity politics. The volume consists of a general introduction and eight substantial essays. Although it is presented as the result of an interdisciplinary dialogue between historians and literary critics, it is hard to appreciate the benefits of the exchange. To begin with, the book is strictly divided along disciplinary lines. The first part, entitled "The Historians," includes pieces written by historians preoccupied with the transition from colony to nation-building. In all cases the essays forcefully question, by presenting counter-evidence, Anderson's account of Latin American nationalism. The second part, entitled "The critics," comprises essays written by [End Page 514] literary and cultural critics, mostly focused on the second half of the nineteenth century. In contrast with the historians, the critics are less preoccupied with the historical accuracy of Anderson's theory, and more interested in the cultural practices and discourses that help to shape Latin America's national "imagined communities" from above. Although a more explicit interdisciplinary dialogue would be desirable, both the array of analytical approaches offered by the authors and the range of countries and archival sources covered by both sections are certainly remarkable. Historian John Chasteen has written a very useful introduction in which he skillfully reconstructs the complex racial and ethnic dynamics that characterized Latin American colonial societies on the eve of independence. He also offers a background to the editorial project that the book sustains, and a useful summary and critique of Benedict Anderson's theoretical account of the emergence of modern nationalism in the Americas. In his essay, "Forms of Communication, Political Spaces, and Cultural Identities in the Creation of Spanish American Nations," historian François-Xavier Guerra refutes Anderson's argument on the role of newspapers in the late colonial period, and shows instead how both printed and handwritten texts helped shape national consciousness after independence. Contrary to Anderson's assertions, affirms Guerra, Spanish American national communities were...