IC ch10 - Memory and Forgetting
Sunday, December 24, 2017
"new"-wherever place names represented a parallelism with "old"-wherever, not an inheritance or dominance over. Sibling rivalry, alongside
Connection to that other place, through language, religion, custom, and tradition, despite never having any hope of ever seeing the other populations with which the above facets of life are shared.
A necessary precondition to the simultaneity of cities was vast separating distance, the newer of which had to be well-established/permanent, as well as subordinate to the older. This made the gradual absorption of one unit into the other impossible, as they existed under entirely separate contexts (unlike Scotland into the UK).
The new settlement held dominance over their new place, and held a culture separate from (and hierarchically over) the organically-formulated native cultures.
No intention of overthrowing, simply survival and competition or co-survival (i.e., USA and UK). The conflicts didn't have accompanying fears of total extermination, as they were "among brothers" (white, christian, english- or spanish-speaking), reassuring a future relationship between the two parties.
US Revolution/Declaration of Independence was unprecedented, especially as a republican one, but once successfully executed, seemed entirely rational in example. Anderson suggests (192) that what was written in the Constitution was seen as "something of universal truth and value," and so was replicated and mimed. The French Revolution paralleled the American, and then soon the Haitian. (declaration had no mention of historical legitimacy of the new US, nor of an "American nation") These revolutions signaled a rupture history, as they began to form national identities rather than divisions within colonies (natives were now Peruvians).
The discipline of History was constituted from the growing global sense of sociopolitical simultaneity (the quote on 194 is worth rereading). As occurrances embedded themselves within history, they became objects - events - which could be handled: they could be picked apart, understood, contextualized, and replicated. As such, the events took their places on the genealogical branches growing skyward away from the nationalisms sitting at the trunk, supporting the historical lineage being created by nationalists for their own nationalisms. In further colonial fashion, largely-bourgeoisie intelligentsia were "awakening" to their own national heritages, opportunistically snatching regional vernaculars, historical events, and geographic gravitation as their own. Indeed, even the dead came back to speak on behalf of the nation as historians contorted history to suit their ends, including the people affected, regardless of the actual context. This rewriting spurned an indigenismo in South America, within which the "extinguished" indigenous populations spoke for the formation of national identities (they had been extinguished, after all).
Anderson mentions that the "brutal mechanisms of slavery ensured not merely its political-cultural fragmentation, but also very rapidly removed the possibility of imagining black communities in Venezuela and West Africa moving in parallel trajectory." (189) I keep going back to the uniqueness of the African American experience among these narratives of nationality, independence, and self-determination. The utter decimation of African communities by the Europeans steered humanity's destiny towards a duality of East and West, with little else to contest the definition of the future otherwise. I can only dream of what a world defined, in part, by a great African continent would have looked like. Or, in addition, one in which the Native Americans could have had a voice. I can only imagine that it would have been decidedly more complex, and perhaps less domineering. A global round table would have been so different from the slaughterhouse which served as crucible for our contemporary society.
On p190, Anderson mentions the European Chinese pogroms, which lasted until the mid eighteenth century (passed on to indigenous peoples). I wonder what this is all about.
Perhaps the greatest manipulation of history has been embodied in how nations remember/forget events central to their formation. Once the affectual aftermath of an event is lost to a previous generation, it can be put on the shelf tacked to the sociological wall by this special kind of memory. One can mention such occurrences and call to mind specific images and events, but their memorialization is an act unconsciously prohibited by one's membership to the nation. The psychological (and sociological) conception of the nation survives through this non/remembrance mechanism, forever stainless in the lens aimed backward along the timeline. Of course these events are known and recognized by nationalists, but they are not incorporated into the identity of the nation, nor the identity of the nationalist. For to do so would force the nationalist to confront their own limited conception of the nation as such, eroding the nationalist sentiment quite essentially. Perhaps the above formulation is too liberally-minded: Anderson suggests that the events that are remembered/forgotten are framed within the nationally-domestic context, as conflicts between co-nationalists. For example, the American Civil War is framed as a war between brothers within one union, not as two sovereign nation-states fighting over the right to command the South, which may be a more historically-objective documentation of the conflict, but which is "obligatory to forget" if one is to construct themself as an American (201).
[[Indeed, this type of propaganda is used in the opposite way as well: the Vietnam war was anything but. Framed as a "war" (as defined in the particularly isolationist fear-mongering American way), US citizens can rest easy knowing that their military is fighting the good fight, not slaughtering innocents on the behalf of greed and dominance. ]]
One must ask if the conception of other Americans as such is as true-blue as suggested in this sociological analysis. If Americans truly considered one another Americans, would we have white cops shooting - no. the nationalist conception necessitates both historical and linguistic bases. Though many progressives do, indeed, consider people of all ethnic backgrounds American so long as they occupy American soil long enough to prove it, many, especially "nationalists" (in this late, colloqial, definition of the word), consider an American to be white and English-speaking, and some consider a Christian background to also be necessary. Despite the nation's history as divided white ethnicities, whites see themselves as united, Black Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and even Native Americans simply don't have history on their side (at least in the popular and state-educational sense). Additionally, top-down policy in relation to housing, finance, and nearly every other arm of life, has systematically oppressed nonwhites in America (and, in some periods, some white ethnicities), creating rifts that were either never openly discussed, or which have since been non-remembered (forgotten, as has the Native American genocide and as has the racism after the Emancipation Proclamation). The class divisions set upon the citizens by their economic overlords have become so common that they have passed from view, unidentifiable, and, unfortunately, ascribed to lower classes as inherent: the welfare queen is just an example of Black welfare leeches, the meth addict just an example of the pointlessness of paying attention to the poor and/or mentally ill. The media, alongside racist, classist policy, have constructed, within the American identity, hostilities within the ranks of relatives. Given a clean slate (total amnesia, perhaps), would a factory worker have any reason to be hostile towards a custodian or foodservice worker? Without generations brought up under biased policy and slanted political banter, the economic numbers would speak so much more clearly, wouldn't they? The rich would be ousted for the ticks they are, the lower classes banding together to do so.
I find Anderson's literary examples to be examples of exoticized eroticization: the Black American is sexualized in the eyes of the white American, because he can more openly do so now, rather than mask it under the societal power dynamics embedded in slavery. Similarly, the Huck Finn example has an adult Black American acting as dog-on-a-leash (or Wookie, for a more current example) for the young white boy. The situation is more complex, especially given Finn's poverty, but society's view of the pair would clearly benefit one and disadvantage the other in the vast majority of cases (except, of course, in the eyes of the rich aristocracy). Anderson does mention this facet of the relationship (203), but fails to read the fascination of being "able" to be "friends" with a Black man "now," as opposed to under the oppression of Southern Antebellum, which would have made the white slave-sympathizer as much a pariah as a pink in the 1950s.
Anderson begins to discuss historical documentation, and I must wonder if the rise of nationalism, and its unique factors/enablers would have been possible if history had been documentable earlier. If, for instance, history had been written and dispersed earlier then the 95 Theses, could it be manipulated in the same ways? I think this is a necessary precondition for nationalistic conception, making it possible only in this era. Indeed, we have new ways of manipulating documented history, via media and the Internet.
The advent of the photograph, alongside the accumulation of various "documentary evidence" "simultaneously records a certain apparent continuity and emphasizes its loss from memory," creates a personhood, an identity (204).
History and documentation are, in and of themselves, manipulations.
Because there is no "originator," the biography of the nation must be written backwards in time, rather than linearly from a "birth." Thus, the … I don't follow his last point…
