International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 204

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
the world) a positive possibility. 85 The growth of print languages (and commodities)
‘unified fields of exchange below Latin and above spoken vernaculars’, gave a sense
of antiquity, through fixity, to the print language which would be important for
subjective ideas of nation, and created culturally central ‘languages -of-power’. 86
The vernacular newspapers and novels that, more and more, came to be sold, were
the key print commodities that made new forms of consciousness and subjecti vity
possible.
Anderson argues that nationalism, while owing a lot to historical forces in
Western Europe, first became a political reality under the leadership of creoles in
the Americas. The glass ceiling faced by talented creoles in the colonies is pos ited
as a key factor in the development of nationalist opposition alongside the
publication of provincial newspapers. 87 Opposition to colonialism was what made
the cultural imagining of the nation important politically. Once established,
nationalism ‘became “modular”’, capable of being transplanted, with varying
degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social terrains, to merge and be
merged with…a wide variety of political and ideological constellations.’ 88 Anderson
goes on to describe the later “waves” of nationalism, including European
nationalisms and twentieth century anti-colonial nationalisms.
Both the State and popular movements around the world could make use of
the national “model” for their own purposes. In The Spectre of Comparisons,
Anderson argues that collective subjects (including nations) are formed by unbound
serialities (exemplified by print mediums such as newspapers, and by references to
open categories like “worker” or “citizen”) and by bound serialities (exemplified by
the counting of ethnic categories in a census). 89 On the one hand, there is popular
nationalism, seen in revolutions where the State is virtually disabled and where
unbound seriality is dominant, and on the other is what Anderson calls ‘official’
nationalism, which is promoted by the State and is in line with dominance of the
bound seriality. 90 As well as allowing for analysis of contemporary nationalisms, the
distinction between bound and unbound seriality is an important methodological
clarification of how we should understand the process by which nationalism
originated and spread. With the notion of seriality, there is no ontological
distinction between the original historical national model and its replicas around
the world; none should be evaluated in terms of authenticity or against the first
historical nationalisms. 91 As a (modern) cultural phenomenon, nations should be
judged by their style (historical particularities, official/popular) rather than their
85

Ibid., 42-3. Note: ‘it would be a mistake to equate this fatality of linguistic diversity with that common
element in nationalist ideologies which stresses the primordial fatality of particular languages…The essential
thing is the interplay between fatality, technology and capitalism.’
86
Ibid., 44-5.
87
Ibid., 57.
88
Ibid., 4.
89
The Spectre of Comparisons : Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World., 29.
90
Language and Power : Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia., 95-7.
91
Andrew Parker, "Bogeyman: Benedict Anderson's "Derivative" Discourse," Diacritics 29, no. 4 (1999)., 43.

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