Is Imagined Communities one of the All-TIME 100 Best Nonfiction Books? TIME thinks so. Check it out.

Imagined Communities

By Ishaan Tharoor | August 30, 2011 | +

Author: Benedict Anderson

Year Released: 1983

One of the most important meditations on what it means to live in a modern nation, Benedict Anderson’s 1983 Imagined Communities explores how often far-flung, disparate sets of people willingly embraced new national identities in the 20th century. Anderson, a British historian and professor at Cornell, details the means by which we come to think of the modern nation-state as “a deep [egalitarian] comradeship” despite the fact that social and economic inequalities remain, often as bad as in earlier ages of sovereign kings and monarchies. The short explanation involves the tools of the modern capitalist world, media in particular. The first wave of national newspapers, for example, provided a kind of “extraordinary mass ceremony” in which countless people in towns and farmhouses consumed the same information at the same time. Imagined Communities remains the most clear-eyed tract on how people came to see themselves as “national” beings, an identity that Anderson and scholars since have shown relies on far greater fictions than truths. Of course, it’d be interesting to hear what Anderson might say now about what’s happening to the idea of the nation in the far more fragmented age of globalization and the Internet.

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Related Topics: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

Melissa

Reblogged this on Swamp of Boredom and commented:
I’m reblogging this for my own reference and also to share with my readers (all 34 of you;)). Since the release of the 1001 Books App on Tuesday, I’ve been book list crazy. Since I like non-fiction – especially non-fiction centered on historical events and people, not so much current people – and have read a couple of excellent non-fiction books in the last year (Only Yesterday, Empire of the Summer Moon) I wondered if there was a list of recommended non-fiction books. Of course there is. I found one from the Guardain (UK) that is, obviously, geared towards British readers and that, unlike Time’s list, encompasses all non-fiction ever written. This list from Time consists of books only since Time began publishing, 1923. There are a few that don’t interest me at all and the biography choices focus too heavily on women and African Americans, IMO, but overall the list is excellent.
Enjoy!