Summary
The representation of the nation in narrative literature, treated by Anna Bernard as both a reading and a writing practice whose paradigm cases — Anderson’s ‘old-fashioned novel’ and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children — fit Palestinian and Israeli literature badly (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.9, p.18-20).
Details
- Bernard begins from the nation as not just a locus of cultural identity but a political structure that can be held responsible for representing the interests of its citizens (PDF p.15).
- The idea is primarily associated with Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1999 [1983]), Jameson’s ‘Third-World Literature’ essay (1986) and Bhabha’s Nation and Narration (1990) (PDF p.15).
- The Anderson prototype — characters in “steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity” in ‘homogenous, empty time’ within a contiguous territory (Anderson, 1999, 25) — fails for Israel/Palestine: no ‘moment of arrival’, no agreed borders, journeys staking out contested territory, and internal boundaries between ‘second-class’ (Mizrahi, Ethiopian) and ‘third-class’ (Palestinian) citizens (PDF p.18-20).
- Fatigue with the idea in postcolonial studies stems from reading for the nation as theme, in Larsen’s “mock-expedition in search of national-allegorical correspondences” (2001, 173, quoted PDF p.26), and from a restricted post-independence Anglophone corpus (PDF p.26).
- Bernard restores the link between national narration and the state: the protagonist as citizen-protagonist, territory as bounded and administered, which leads to the Demographic imaginary (PDF p.42 / printed p.34).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, National allegory, Demographic imaginary, Benedict Anderson