Benedict Anderson

The defining, best-selling book on the history, origins and development of nationalism What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.

Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism

Imagined Communities

The definitive, bestselling book on the origins of nationalism, and the processes that have shaped it. Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson’s brilliant book on nationalism, forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. Since then it has sold over a quarter of a million copies and is widely considered the most important book on the subject. In this greatly anticipated revised edition, Anderson updates and elaborates on the core question: what makes people live and die for nations, as well as hate and kill in their name? Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the ‘imagined communities’ of nationality, and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kinship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of secular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time and space. He shows how an originary nationalism born in the Americas was adopted by popular movements in Europe, by imperialist powers, and by the movements of anti-imperialist resistance in Asia and Africa. In a new afterword, Anderson examines the extraordinary influence of Imagined Communities, and the book's international publication and reception, from the end of the Cold War era to the present day.

An intellectual memoir by the author of the acclaimed Imagined Communities Born in China, Benedict Anderson spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where he immersed himself in the growing field of Southeast Asian studies. He was expelled from Suharto's Indonesia after revealing the military to be behind the attempted coup of 1965, an event which prompted reprisals that killed up to a million communists and their supporters. Banned from the country for thirty-five years, he continued his research in Thailand and the Philippines, producing a very fine study of the Filipino novelist and patriot José Rizal in The Age of Globalization. In A Life Beyond Boundaries, Anderson recounts a life spent open to the world. Here he reveals the joys of learning languages, the importance of fieldwork, the pleasures of translation, the influence of the New Left on global thinking, the satisfactions of teaching, and a love of world literature. He discusses the ideas and inspirations behind his best-known work, Imagined Communities (1983), whose complexities changed the study of nationalism. Benedict Anderson died in Java in December 2015, soon after he had finished correcting the proofs of this book. The tributes that poured in from Asia alone suggest that his work will continue to inspire and stimulate minds young and old.

A Memoir

A Life Beyond the Boundaries

Carlos Sardiña Galache

Ramon Guillermo

“From his landmark works on nationalism and Southeast Asia to his writings on the Philippines, Anderson has greatly enriched Philippine studies. With work erudite, wide-ranging, and energetically written, he has given to the Philippines visibility in the world of transnational scholarship. His recent essays in New Left Review and Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination—and now the present volume—are not only eye-opening but a joy to read. More than an incursion into scholarship, reading Anderson is an intellectual adventure.” —Resil B. Mojares

ayon sa nasasabi sa mga casulatan luma sa Kastila

Ang Diablo sa Filipinas

Qu'est-ce qu'une nation, et qu'est-ce que le sentiment national qui fait que des individus s'identifient corps et âme à d'autres individus qu'ils ne connaissent pas et ne connaîtront jamais ? Dans ce classique de l'historiographie anglo-saxonne, Benedict Anderson montre que l'adhésion à l'idée de souveraineté nationale n'a rien de naturel. Les sociétés traditionnelles étaient bien incapables de la concevoir, quelle que fût la force de leurs attachements ethniques ou territoriaux. L'auteur analyse les facteurs historiques dont la conjonction - comme celle de l'émergence du capitalisme marchand et de l'invention de l'imprimerie - a permis la naissance de ces singulières " communautés imaginées " que sont les nations. Convoquant une riche gamme d'exemples, du Brésil à la Thaïlande en passant par l'Europe centrale et l'Amérique latine, l'auteur étudie l'interaction complexe entre la logique populiste et démocratique du nationalisme et les stratégies des régimes impériaux et dynastiques à la fin du XIXe siècle. Ecrit dans un style élégant teinté d'une ironie typiquement britannique, l'ouvrage d'Anderson - traduit dans toutes les grandes langues européennes - offre à la fois le plaisir d'un certain raffinement intellectuel et l'utilité d'une introduction originale à un thème trop souvent traité de façon superficielle.

réflexions sur l'origine et l'essor du nationalisme

L'imaginaire national

Comunità immaginate. Origini e diffusione dei nazionalismi

With remarkable scope and in scrupulous detail, Professor Anderson analyzes the Indonesian revolution of 1945. Against the background of Javanese culture and the Japanese occupation, he explores the origins of the revolutionary youth groups, the military, and the political parties to challenge conventional interpretations of revolutionary movements in Asia. The author emphasizes that the critical role in the outbreak was played not by the dissatisfied intellectuals or by an oppressed working class but by the youth of Indonesia. Perhaps most important are the insights he offers into the conflict between strategies for seeking national revolution and those for attaining social change. By giving first priority to gaining recognition of Indonesian sovereignty from the outside world, he argues, the revolutionary leadership had to adopt conservative domestic policies that greatly reduced the possibility of far-reaching social reform. This in-depth study of the independence crisis in Indonesia, brought back to life by Equinox Publishing as the first title in it's Classic Indonesia series, also illuminates the revolutionary process in other nations, where wars for independence have been fought but significant social and economic progress has not yet been achieved. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benedict Anderson is one of the world's leading authorities on South East Asian nationalism and particularly on Indonesia. He is Professor of International Studies and Director of the Modern Indonesia Project at Cornell University, New York. His other works include Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism and The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World.

Occupation and Resistance, 1944-1946

Java in a Time of Revolution

An account of the lesser-known connections that comprise late-19th-century politics and culture draws on the complex intellectual interactions of two forefront Filipino writers and places particular attention on the relationships between European military anarchists and the Americas and the anti-imperial uprisings of Cuba, China and Japan. Original.

Anarchists and the Anticolonial Imagination

The Age of Globalization

Fascinado pelas lutas anticoloniais, nas quais o nacionalismo surgia como a força de transformação que antecipava a possibilidade de uma nova comunidade, Anderson percebeu a sua dimensão utópica. A imaginação de uma comunidade não tinha necessariamente de recorrer a um passado mitificado, a uma cultura ancestral e a uma língua distinta, mas a um projeto cívico, inspirado no Iluminismo e imaginado por uma elite administrativa, que o capitalismo impresso do jornal e do livro disseminou por vastas parcelas da população. Comunidades imaginadas é uma obra central na apreciação do fenómeno histórico da formação e transformação das identidades nacionais e dos movimentos nacionalistas.

Comunidades Imaginadas - Reflexões Sobre a Origem e a Expansão do Nacionalismo - 2a Edição

Audrey Kahin

Over the past two decades there has been a continuing debate among Western scholars concerning the nature of Indonesian politics and the best approaches for understanding them. Several of the most important contributions to this debate were never published and others have gone out of print. Thus, it has been difficult for a new generation of students of Indonesia to be aware of the range of opinions and discussion in Western academic circles concerning the character of postrevolutionary Indonesian politics. For this reason, it appeared to us useful to bring together a series of articles that can provide a framework for understanding the evolution of these perspectives. Clearly, we could not include all the important contributions to the debate, and this selection has been made on the basis of the best representation of differing views over time. In general the pieces appear in chronological sequence in order to delineate more clearly the evolution of the debate. To maintain this chronological development we have also made no changes in the arguments as originally presented, nor, with one exception, permitted the authors to do so, even when they have altered their opinions since originally writing the essays. Passages, however, have occasionally been cut from published articles where they are too repetitive, or where they are not relevant to the major themes being presented here. All such omissions are indicated by a series of dots (...). Because of the continuing nature of the debate, the collection is being published as an Interim Report which we hope will stimulate further reactions and analyses.

Thirteen Contributions to the Debate

Interpreting Indonesian Politics

An intellectual memoir by the author of the acclaimed Imagined Communities Born in China, Benedict Anderson spent his childhood in California and Ireland, was educated in England and finally found a home at Cornell University, where he immersed himself in the growing field of Southeast Asian studies. He was expelled from Suharto’s Indonesia after revealing the military to be behind the attempted coup of 1965, an event which prompted reprisals that killed up to a million communists and their supporters. Banned from the country for thirty-five years, he continued his research in Thailand and the Philippines, producing a very fine study of the Filipino novelist and patriot José Rizal in The Age of Globalization. In A Life Beyond Boundaries, Anderson recounts a life spent open to the world. Here he reveals the joys of learning languages, the importance of fieldwork, the pleasures of translation, the influence of the New Left on global thinking, the satisfactions of teaching, and a love of world literature. He discusses the ideas and inspirations behind his best-known work, Imagined Communities (1983), whose complexities changed the study of nationalism. Benedict Anderson died in Java in December 2015, soon after he had finished correcting the proofs of this book. The tributes that poured in from Asia alone suggest that his work will continue to inspire and stimulate minds young and old.

A Life Beyond Boundaries

Murder and Progress in Modern Siam

The author of Imagined Communities draws out the story of a global anarchist and nationalist network. The exchange of ideas makes history as surely as the exchange of gunfire. The Age of Globalization (previously published as Under Three Flags) is an account of the unlikely connections that made up late nineteenth-century politics and culture. In particular, Benedict Anderson examines the links between militant anarchists in Europe and the Americas and the anti-imperialist uprisings in Cuba, China, and Japan. Told through the complex intellectual interactions of two great Filipino writers—the political novelist José Rizal and the pioneering folklorist Isabelo de los Reyes—The Age of Globalization is a brilliantly original work on how global networks shaped the nationalist movements of the time.

Monumental in scale and epic in development, cities have become the most visible and significant symbol of human progress. The geography on and around which they are constructed, however, has come to be viewed merely in terms of its resources and is often laid to waste once its assets have been stripped. The City in Geography is an urban exploration through this phenomenon, from settlement to city through physical geography, which reveals an incremental progression of removing terrain, topography and geography from the built environment, ushering in and advancing global destruction and instability. This book explains how the fall of geography in relationship to human survival has come through the loss of contact between urban dwellers and physical terrain, and details the radical rethinking required to remedy the separations between the city, its inhabitants and the landscape upon which it was built.

Renaturing the Built Environment

The City in Geography

Correspondence: Ben Anderson to A. Lucas; and Ben Anderson to Curtis Levy (film maker of 'Riding the Tiger'), Keith Foulcher . Press articles on Ben Anderson, book reviews by Ben Anderson. Letter from A. Lucas to Professor John Legge. Obituary, "Benedict Anderson, man without a country", New Republic, 14th December 2015.

Ben Anderson's Letters

The City in Transgression explores the unacknowledged, neglected, and ill-defined spaces of the built environment and their transition into places of resistance and residence by refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, the homeless, and the disadvantaged. The book draws on urban and spatial theory, socio-economic factors, public space, and architecture to offer an intimate look at how urban sites and infrastructure are transformed into spaces for occupation. Anderson proposes that the varied innovations and adaptations of urban spaces enacted by such marginalized figures – for whom there are no other options – herald a radical new spatial programming of cities. The book explores cities and sites such as Mexico City and London, the Mexican/US border, the Calais Jungle, and Palestinian camps in Beirut and utilizes concepts associated with ‘mobility’ – such as anarchy, vagrancy, and transgression – alongside photography, 3D modelling, and 2D imagery. From this constellation of materials and analysis, a radical spatial picture of the city in transgression emerges. By focusing on the ‘underside of urbanism’, The City in Transgression reveals the potential for new spatial networks that can cultivate the potential for self-organization so as to counter the existing dominant urban models of capital and property and to confront some of the major issues facing cities amid an age of global human mobility. This book is valuable reading for those interested in architectural theory, modern history, human geography and mobility, climate change, urban design, and transformation.

Benedict Anderson

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