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A844 - Preparatory Reading

Book:

Anderson, B. (2016 Revised Ed.) Imagined Communities; reflections on the Origin and spread of Nationalism London, Verso.

How does it reflect on A843 themes?

The themes it resonates with are Identity, Otherness and the Subject, and Geographies and Institutions. If we start with the latter, BA’s view is that the institutionalisation of ‘imagined’ ethnic boundaries was performed through the mixed agency of political cartography, population ‘census’ and museums and that these created an imagined national identity set against the other of foreignness and migrancy. This links with the discussion of an art that aligns normative identity with central images and the creation of margins in which liminal identities from a dark past or threated present and future are cast. It is important here that images of a novel national identity projected onto the present are also given a substantive memorial past or significant myth of origin. Art can serve that role. The link of imagined communities to racism and gender bias can also be explored in terms of a notion of ‘nation’ in art and the creation of a national art.

How do I predict that it might foreshadow A844 themes?

Clearly intended for Section 1 and the study of the role of nationalism in the formation of an art and architecture that imaginatively constructs (together with a myth of re-creation of a past ideal now debased) a built and visible environment that embodies a notion of the ‘imagined community’. It will do so by creating otherness that it attempts to place as a threat to a heritage-in-the making.  It will reflect further on the function of national museums and monumentalism.

What are the books key themes and narratives?

1.       Preconditions of imagined communities are (p. 36): loss of a script language that embodied the TRUTH; decay of belief in a representative at the head of a human hierarchy, and; cosmology and history were becoming aligned rather than separated by a doctrine of transcendence.

2.       Historical time-space shifts involve Victor Turner’s notion of a ‘meaning-making experience’ conceived as a journey (p. 53).

3.       The arts are implicated in this journey in forming strong cognitive-emotional attachments aligned to places conceived to have a vertical synchronic relation to their history and future aspiration (141).

4.       Museums and memorising and monumentalism and sacralisation of places are fundamentally political acts (178, 181)

How does the book relate to the analysis of art and architecture?

Mainly indirectly through point 3 above. Art is seen as a means of making meaning – including the sacralisation of places and peoples and stories of origin. Architecture described as monumental plays with meanings associated with power, memory, security against threat. The nation will attempt to share its meanings with art and sometimes supplant them. It might attempt to create a boundary containing a taxonomy of the arts equated with its own assumptions.

Any other points!

I am happy to be surprised on this one.