This model of creole communities offers one of four ‘models’ that come to influence later nationalist movements and ideas of nations. Undermining the idea that the nation was both an essentialist category and of European origins, Anderson argues that the earliest nations and nationalist movements emerged in ‘creole communities’-descendants of white European settlers in the North and South Americas.
This possibility to envision parallel and plural realities connected individuals to other individuals to form a concept of an ‘imagined community.’Īnderson’s second contribution is the historical argument regarding the models of nations and nationalisms. It is through the emergence of print-capitalism-the technological, mass production of newspapers and the novel and the spread of vernacular print languages-that individuals could think of themselves and relate to others in different ways. Material conditions and rationalist perception of ‘homogenous empty time’ created the structures where individuals could conceptualize themselves as part of an ‘imagined community.’ The imagined community is one in which members will not know most of their fellow members, is finite with limited boundaries, sovereign power, and a community of fraternal, horizontal comradeship. The 17th and 18th century witnessed the demise of previous forms political bodies that were shaped by a sacred language, sacred cosmology and dynastic power, and sense of historical temporality shaped by cosmology. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is a new, modern phenomenon. Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.
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