In a Pomegranate Chandelier

BY T.J. Clark

LONDON  REVIEW OF BOOKS - Vol. 28 No. 18 · 21 September 2006

• Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism by Benedict Anderson
  Verso, 240 pp, £12.99, September 2006, ISBN 1 84467 086 4
• Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination by Benedict Anderson
  Verso, 224 pp, £14.99, January 2006, ISBN 1 84467 037 6

Writers only pretend to be embarrassed at the small fame a book sometimes brings them, but there is nothing assumed about the irritation they can feel at having a new line of argument, and a universe of unfamiliar examples, reduced to a single phrase. Great titles are especially dangerous. Imagined Communities is one of the greatest, and I shall be arguing that the cluster of concepts it sums up deserves still to be central to our thinking about the world. But it is understandable, and touching, that the first footnote to Benedict Anderson’s afterword to his new edition should read, in explanation of the trimming of the title in his text: ‘Aside from the advantages of brevity, IC restfully occludes a pair of words from which the vampires of banality have by now sucked almost all the blood.’
Night has fallen, and I gather my cloak about me. Part of the force of Imagined Communities as a title – as an idea – comes from the way the two words immediately set the reader wondering whether they are meant as oxymoronic, and if they are, with what degree of irony or regret. The words bring to mind the true strangeness, but also the centrality, of the human will to be connected with others ‘of one’s kind’ whom one will never meet, and never know. Connected with them in the present, by blood or language or difference from a common enemy (or combinations of all three); and connected through time by a shared belonging to something that seems to emerge from a steadier, thicker, more grounded past and be on its way to an indestructible, maybe redeeming future.

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