Whose Imagined Community?

Abstract

The trouble was that the moral-intellectual leadership of the nationalist elite operated in a field constituted by a very different set of distinctions – those between the spiritual and the material, the and the outer, the essential and the inessential. That contested field over which nationalism had proclaimed its sovereignty and where it had imagined its true community was neither coextensive with nor coincidental to the field constituted by the public/private distinction. The result is that autonomous forms of imagination of the community were, and continue to be, overwhelmed and swamped by the history of the postcolonial state. Nationalism is viewed as a dark, elemental, unpredictable forge of primordial nature threatening the orderly calm of civilized life. The colonial state, in other words, is kept out of the inner domain of national culture; but it is not as though this so-called spiritual domain is left unchanged.

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