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The
oversight is a result, perhaps, of Anderson’s strange, tenacious attachment to
the idea of the nation. Waving aside “progressive, cosmopolitan intellectuals,”
who point out the violence and racism of nationalism, Anderson instead focuses
on how “nations inspire love.” The “cultural products” of nationalism, he tells
us, “show this love very clearly,” whereas it is exceedingly rare to find “nationalist
products expressing fear and loathing.” It’s an assertion that beggars belief. Perhaps
the most famous nationalist epics and novels are, indeed, works of love, but it
requires little effort to find the extraordinary bodies of nationalist
literature riven with hatred for the other; determined to protect the purity of
the nation from contamination. The Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, for instance, penned
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in the heat of World War I, a 600-page
screed directed against French civilization. Richard Wagner’s operas—nationalist
art if ever it existed—are laboriously racist and antisemitic. No one would
seriously think to claim that organized religions are essentially peaceful
because they inspire “love,” yet this is precisely what Anderson suggests of
nationalism.

Perhaps
it should not surprise us, then, that Imagined Communities remains
strangely blind to the violence of nationalism and, especially, to the
ideological interlocking of nationalism and racism. Indeed, in the roughly 10 pages that address racism, Anderson argues, “The dreams of racism actually have
their origin in the ideologies of class, rather than in those of nation.”
While “nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies,” he contends in a
slipshod sleight of hand, “racism dreams of eternal contaminations.” He
suggests that racism developed only in the nineteenth century out of
aristocratic pretensions and the “official nationalism” sponsored by Europe’s monarchs.

These
are passages no serious historian would write today, and they’re indicative of
just how little mainstream scholars thought about race and racism a half-century ago. We know now (if we didn’t then) that modern racism was
already present in the earliest European colonization and offered grounds for
the multitude of crimes committed against Indigenous peoples. Indeed, Anderson
even cites examples of such racist thought early in the text! We know that the
specific forms of anti-Black racism that have flourished in Western countries—especially
in the United States—are a direct product of the system of chattel slavery
(which Anderson leaves virtually unmentioned). And slavery provided, of course,
the economic foundation of early European colonialism. The notion that the
conjoined spread of capitalism and nationalism—both of which were amply wrapped
up in colonialism—had nothing to do with racism is risible. The fact of the
matter is, nationalism and racism are twinned forms of meaning-making
characteristic of the modern world, and it is no accident that they both came
of age in the twentieth century.