Summary
Author of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (revised edition, Verso, 2006, as cited), invoked by David Lloyd for the argument that nationalism’s belief in a people’s historical destiny was not only ‘imagined’ but inseparable from the secularisation of the political sphere — the frame for Zionism as a European ethnic nationalist formation (Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, PDF p.6 / printed p.64).
Details
- “That belief, which, as Benedict Anderson most famously argued, was not only ‘imagined’ but also inseparable from the secularisation of the political sphere, was nonetheless accompanied by a quasi-religious belief in a deep, almost mystical link between people, land, and language, a belief that descended from the cultural politics of Herder through the more virulent Germanic nationalism of Fichte” (PDF p.6 / printed p.64, citing Anderson, pp.9-36; note 9 also cites Elie Kedourie’s Nationalism (1960) for the genealogy from Herder and Fichte).
Related pages
Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of Palestine/Israel, Zionism, Messianism