Exodus Benedict Anderson

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ExodusAuthor(s): Benedict AndersonSource: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Winter, 1994), pp. 314-327Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343913

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Critical

Inquiry

Winter

1994 315

real

places,

as it

were-but

acts of

imagination

that would never

have

occurred to

a

young

minister's wife

in

seventeenth-century

Gloucester-

shire or Surrey. They are, in a way, getting ready to be "English" exactly

because

they

are

in

Massachusetts,

not

in

England,

and are so because

they

bear for

Mary

the traces

of her

"English"

people's

agricultural

la-

bors. But we can also

guess

that

up

till the

point

of

her

abduction she

had

thought matter-of-factly

about cattle

as

cattle and fields as fields.

Her

"nationalizing"

moment comes

when,

in

the

power

of the

Narragansetts,

she

is

torn

out of the

quotidian

and-right

in

the

very

midst of her native

Massachusetts--finds

herself

in

fearful exile.

She

struggles

along

a

path

that

becomes

English

at the exact

juncture

where she

is sure she

may

not

lie down and die upon it. When she is finally ransomed and returns to

her

community

of

origin,

her "nationalist" frisson vanishes.

For she has

managed,

more

or

less,

to come home. But this home

is

Lancaster;

it

is

not

(yet)

America.

The

paradox

here

is

that we

today

can

without much trouble read

Mary

Rowlandson as American

precisely

because,

in

captivity,

she

saw

English

fields

before

her.

Acton

was on the mark

when

he

wrote,

two

hundred

years

later,

that

"exile

is the

nursery

of

nationality.'"2

On the other side of the

Atlantic,

Mary

Rowlandson's narrative was

published within a year of the Massachusetts first edition and proved very

popular,

accumulating thirty

editions

over the

eighteenth century.3

A

rap-

idly growing reading public

in

the

recently

united

kingdom-Mary

was

captured

two

decades before Scotland-was

becoming

aware

of anoma-

lous

English-writing

women who had never been to

England

but who

could

be

dragged through English

fields

by

"savages."

What were

they?

Were

they

really

English?

The

photographic negative

of "the

colonial,"

the

non-English Englishwoman,

was

coming

into view.

Because the

Spanish

conquests

in

the Caribbean and southern

Amer-

icas had

begun

a

century

before

permanent English

settlements in the

2.

John

Dalberg-Acton,

Essays

in

the

Liberal

Interpretation

of

History,

ed. William H.

McNeill

(Chicago,

1967),

p.

146.

3. See

Nancy

Armstrong

and

Leonard

Tennenhouse,

The

Imaginary

Puritan: Literature,

Intellectual

Labor;

and the

Origins of

Personal

Life (Berkeley,

1992),

p.

204

and the

references

there cited.

Benedict Anderson is the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor of Interna-

tional Studies at Cornell

University

and a

citizen of Eire. He is

the

author

of

Java

in

a

Time

of

Revolution

(1972),

Imagined

Communities:

Reflections

on

the

Origin

and

Spread

of

Nationalism

(1983;

revised and

expanded

edition

1991),

In

theMirror:Literature nd Politics n

Siam

in theAmerican

Era

(1985),

and

Language

and

Power:

Exploring

IndonesianPolitical

Cultures

(1990).

He

is

currently

at work on a book about

nationalisms

in

the Philippines.



316 BenedictAnderson

Exodus

North,

non-Spanish Spaniards began

to loom

up very early. Already

in

1612,

the

madrile~toDominican

theologian

Juan

de la

Puente

was

writing

that "the heavens of America induce inconstancy, lasciviousness and lies:

vices characteristic of

the Indians and which the

constellations make char-

acteristic

of

the

Spaniards

who are born

and bred

there."

4

The creole was

being

invented

figuratively,

later to be realized

culturally

and

politically.

We can see

here-especially

if

we recall

the

century-long rage

at

de

la

Puente made

possible by

the

quiet two-way

hiss of

print

across the Atlan-

tic-the real historical

origins

of the

"native,"

a

persona

that

persists

un-

der sometimes

other

names

well into our own

times,

in

Europe

as

much

as

anywhere

else.

For the native is, like colonial and creole, a white-on-black negative.

The nativeness of natives is

always

unmoored,

its real

significance hybrid

and

oxymoronic.

It

appears

when

Moors, heathens,

Mohammedans,

sav-

ages,

Hindoos,

and

so

forth

are

becoming

obsolete,

that

is,

not

only

when,

in

the

proximity

of

real

print-encounters,

substantial

numbers of

Viet-

namese

read, write,

and

perhaps speak

French but also when

Czechs do

the

same

with German

and

Jews

with

Hungarian.

Nationalism's

purities

(and

thus also

cleansings)

are

set to

emerge

from

exactly

this

hybridity.

What set all these

engines

in

motion? To

put

it a bit

differently,

what

made

Mary

Rowlandson's-and in due course

London's--unstable

En-

glishness

possible?

The

simple

answer is

capitalism,

the

institutions of

which enabled the

transportation,

from

the mid-sixteenth

century

on,

of

millions of

free, indentured,

and enslaved

bodies across thousands

of

miles of water. But the

materialities of this

transportation-ships,

fire-

arms,

and

navigational

equipment-were

guided by

the

mathematically

inspired

Mercatorian

map

and

the

vast,

accumulating knowledge

stored

and disseminated

in

print.

It was

also

through

print

moving

back and

forth across the ocean that

the

unstable,

imagined

worlds of

En-

glishnesses

and

Spanishnesses

were created.

The essential nexus of

long-distance

transportation

and

print capi-

talist communications

prepared

the

grounds

on

which,

by

the end

of the

eighteenth century,

the

first nationalist

movements

flowered.

It

is

striking

that

this

flowering

took

place

first

in

North America

and

later

in

the

Cath-

olic,

Iberian colonies to the

south,

the

economies of all of which

were

pre-

industrial.

Nothing

underlines

this

process

better than the fact

that

in

the

second half of the

eighteenth century

there were more

presses

in

colonial

North America

than

in

the

metropole.

So

it

was

that

by

1765,

in

the words

of Michael Warner,

"print

had come to be seen as

indispensable

to

politi-

cal

life,

and

could

appear

to

such men as Adams to be the

primary agent

of world

emancipation.

What makes this

transformation of the

press par-

ticularly

remarkable is

that,

unlike

the

press

explosion

of the

nineteenth

4.

Quoted

in D. A.

Brading,

The

First

America:

The

Spanish

Monarchy,

Creole

Patriots,

and

the Liberal

State,

1492-1867

(Cambridge,

1991),

p.

200.



Critical

Inquiry

Winter

1994

317

century,

it involved

virtually

no

technological

improvements

in the

trade."5

These facts in themselves strongly suggest the untenability of Ernest

Gellner's

argument

that industrialism

was

the historical

source of

national-

ism's

emergence.6

(One

might

add

that

most

of

the

zones in which

early

nineteenth-century European

nationalisms became

visible-say

Ireland,

Greece,

Hungary,

Poland,

and

Bohemia-were

those

most innocent of

"industrial

progress.")

Nonetheless,

industrialism

did,

at a later

stage,

be-

come

of

signal

importance

for the

spread

and transformation of national-

ism,

first

in

Europe,

afterwards

in

Asia and Africa. It did

so

by creating,

directly

and

indirectly,

new

types

of

exile.

In his bizarre 1847 novel, Tancred, r TheNew Crusade,Benjamin Dis-

raeli observed that "London is

a

modern

Babylon."7

In this

oxymoron,

the echoes of a

captivity

narrative are as loud as

those

of a

proverbial

trope

for

luxury

and

corruption.

It

sprang quite logically

from

the cele-

brated subtitle

of

Sybil,

or The

Two

Nations,

which Disraeli had

published

two

years

earlier.

Deepening

industrial

capitalism

had

by

then

created

within a

single, very

small

territorial

state-smaller,

if

we

exclude Ire-

land,

than

Pennsylvania

and New York combined-"two

nations,"

how-

ever,

that in

no

way

corresponded

to

any

putative

ethnic

or

religious

communities. When Friedrich Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842 and

began

his studies of the

condition

of

the

working

class,

George

Stephen-

son had

preceded

him.

The world's

textile

capital already

had

a

railway

station. The locomotive had

begun

its

world-historical mission of trans-

porting

millions of rural

villagers

into

urban

slums,

a mission

scarcely

less

epochal

than that which the transatlantic

sailing

ship

had

performed

over

the

preceding

three

centuries.8

Only

a

minority

would return

to end their

5. Michael

Warner,

TheLetters

of

the

Republic:

Publication

and thePublic

Sphere

n

Eighteenth-

Century

America

(Cambridge,

Mass.,

1990),

p.

32.

6. See Ernest

Gellner,

Nations and Nationalism

(Ithaca,

N.Y.,

1983).

7.

Benjamin

Disraeli,

Tancred,

r

The

New Crusade

1847;

London,

1894),

p.

378;

hereaf-

ter abbreviated as

T

Regarding

his

England

and his

Europe

as

mortally

threatened

by

Enlightenment

rationalism,

bourgeois

commercialism,

and the

heritage

of the

French Revo-

lution,

the

young

Lord

Montacute sets off

in

his

yacht

for the

Holy

Land,

seeking

spiritual

revival

in

"the

only portion

of the

world which the

Creator

of

that world

has

deigned

to

visit"

(T,

p.

421.)

This

quest

leads

him into

proto-T

E.

Lawrence

political

adventures

in

Palestine and

Lebanon,

in

which

he

is

guided by

wise,

courageous

Hebrews and

from which

he

has to

be

rescued

by

Mum and

Dad,

the

Duchess and Duke of

Bellamont. What is

espe-

cially striking

about the novel

is

the manner in

which the

Jewish

Disraeli,

Anglicized

at

his

father's orders

by

baptism

into the

Church of

England

at the

age

of

thirteen,

discovers his

"ethnicity"

in

Babylonian

exile.

Montacute,

immensely

rich, aristocratic,

ur-English

but,

as

it

were,

spiritually

Jewish-Disraeli

repeatedly

insists

that

Christ and the

Apostles

were all

Jews-is

a

hilariously

snobbish

self-projection

of the

future

Conservative

prime

minister of

the United

Kingdom.

8. How

quickly

this

profane

mission was understood is

entertainingly

shown

by

the

conversation

in

Tancred

n

which the

hero

suggests

to

Lady

Bertie and

Bellair that she

and

her

husband

join

him

on a

pilgrimage

to

Jerusalem:



318

Benedict

Anderson

Exodus

days

in

those

cemeteries

where

the rude

forefathers

of the

hamlet

slept.

How the

novel

experience

of

industrial life

radically

transformed

their

lives and how this transformation made them, as it were, available for

nationalism

is

splendidly

described

by

Gellner,

but his

description

should

be read

under

the

sign

of

exile.

It was

beginning

to

become

possible

to

see

"English

fields" in

England-from

the

window of a

railway

carriage.

Meanwhile,

exile of

another

sort was

emerging

from

the

very

wealth

that industrial

capitalism

was

producing

for

European

states. For

this

wealth

was

making

possible

the

spread

of a

centralized,

standardized,

steeply

hierarchical

system

of

public

education. E.

J.

Hobsbawm

reminds

us

that at the time

of Tancred's

publication,

on

the eve of

the

upheavals

of

1848, there were only 48,000 or so university students in all of Europe,

a

number

substantially

lower

than

the

current

enrollment at Ohio

State

University.9

But

in

the second

half of the

century,

ministries of

education

sprang

up

like

mushrooms

everywhere--Sweden

in

1852,

England

in

1870,

and France in

1882-and

children

began

to be

compelled

to mi-

grate

to

schools.'0

When

the

elderly

Filipino

Pedro Calosa

was

interviewed

in

the mid-

1960s and

asked to

compare

the

conditions of

that

time with those

of the

uprising

of 1931

that

he had led

against

American

colonialism,

he ob-

served with nostalgic satisfaction that "there were no teenagers" then."

For

this new

human

type-nomad

between

childhood

and

working

adulthood-was

then

only

beginning

to

emerge

from the

imperialists'

novel

apparatus

for mass

education.

More

generally,

however,

the teen-

ager

was,

from

the second half

of the

nineteenth

century,

the site on

which the state

imposed

its

standardized

vernacular.

Whether

this ver-

nacular was a

socially

valorized

dialect of a

language widely

understood

among

the state's

subjects

(say,

the

King's English),

or a

vernacular

deter-

mined from

among

a

multiplicity

of

vernaculars

(say,

German

in

Austria-

Hungary), the effect was typically to restratify and rationalize the social

and

political hierarchy

of

vernaculars

and

dialects;

all

the

more so

in

that

the new

education was

increasingly

linked

to

employment

possibilities

"That

can never

be,"

said

Lady

Bertie;

"Augustus

will never hear

of

it;

he

never

could be

absent more than

six weeks from

London,

he

misses his clubs so.

IfJerusalem

were

only

a

place

one

could

get

at,

something might

be

done;

if

there

were a

railroad

to it

for

example."

"Arailroad " exclaimed Tancred, with a look of horror. "Arailroad to Jerusalem "

"No,

I

suppose

there

can never be

one,"

continued

Lady

Bertie in

a

musing

tone.

"There

is no traffic."

[T,

p.

162]

9. See E.

J.

Hobsbawm,

The

Age

of

Revolution,

1789-1848

(New

York,

1962),

pp.

166-67.

10. A

characteristic

industrial side to

this

process

was

the

official

invention of

adult

education

in

this era.

11. "An

Interview

with Pedro

Calosa,"

in

David

Sturtevant,

Popular

Uprisings

n

the

Phil-

ippines,

1840-1940

(Ithaca,

N.Y.,

1976),

p.

276.



Critical

Inquiry

Winter

1994

319

and

opportunities

for social

mobility.

Small wonder

that

people

were

be-

coming

ever

more self-conscious

about their

linguistic practices

and

the

consequences of those practices. Quite often the effect was a kind of exile.

The more

a standardized

vernacular

ceased

to be

merely

the internal

language

of officials

and

became the

official

language

of

a

propagandiz-

ing

state,

the

more

likely

became

the

emergence

in

Old

Europe

of some-

thing

reminiscent

of the

creole

or native: the

not-really-German

German,

the

not-quite-Italian

Italian,

the

non-Spanish Spaniard.

As

in

the

Ameri-

cas,

a

kind

of unstable

negativity appeared.

Nothing,

therefore,

is less

surprising

than that

the nationalist

movements

which transformed

the

map

of

Europe

by

1919

were so often

led

by young

bilinguals,

a

pattern

to be followed after 1919 in Asia and Africa. How could a boy who learned

Czech

from

his mother and

German

from his

schooling

unlearn a Czech

that

had left no

contaminating

traces

on his

German-speaking

class-

mates? How could

he

not see

his

Czech

as

though

in

exile,

through

the

inverted

telescope

of

his German?

From the

perspective

sketched out

so

far,

one

might

be inclined to

view the

rise of nationalist

movements

and their

variable culminations

in

successful nation-states

as

a

project

for

coming

home from

exile,

for

the

resolution

of

hybridity,

for

a

positive

printed

from a

negative

in

the

dark-

room of

political

struggle.

If one

migrated

from a

village

in the delta of

the

Ganges

and went

to schools

in

Calcutta,

Delhi,

and

perhaps

Cam-

bridge;

if

one

bore the indelible

contaminations

of

English

and

Bengali;

if

one was

destined to

be cremated

in

Bombay,

where was one

intelligibly

to be

home,

where

could

one

unitarily

be

born, live,

and

die,

except

in

"India"?

At the

same

time,

for all the

reasons

just

detailed,

home as it

emerged

was less

experienced

than

imagined,

and

imagined

through

a

complex

of

mediations

and

representations.

At

the

simplest

level

this

imagining

occurred

through

visual

symbols

such as

flags, maps,

statuary,

micro-

cosmic

ceremonials;

at a more

profound

level,

through

"self-"

and

"rep-

resentative"

government.

The

ingenuity

of the

mechanisms of

popular

suffrage

seems

to me to lie

in the

double

duty they

perform.

Individually,

legislators

represent particular

interests, localities,

and

prejudices;

collec-

tively

and

anonymously,

as

Parliament,

Diet,

or

Congress, they represent

a

unitary

nation or

sovereignty.12

One

can

thus

see

why

nation-statehood

was so central to the

nineteenth-century

nationalist

projects

that

destroyed

the

huge,

polyglot,

imperial-dynastic

systems

inherited from the

age

of absolutism. For it was

felt both to

represent,

with its

characteristically

republican

institutions,

a

newfound

alignment

of

imagined

home and

imagined

homeowners

and

12.

Such

is the

general

pattern,

although

there are

significant

exceptions,

such as the

House

of Councillors

in

Japan

and

the

Senate

in

the

Philippines,

where all members are

elected

from a

single,

nation-wide

constituency.



320 Benedict

Anderson

Exodus

to

guarantee

that stabilized

alignment

through

the

organized, systematic

deployment

of

its

powers

and

resources. Hence

the

plausibility

of

the

Listian dream of the self-supplying national economy, guarded moatlike

by

the tariff.

Hence

too,

one

suspects,

the Listian

morphology

of

railway

systems, mapped

inward from

state

peripheries

toward

state

capitals

and

often marked

off,

zollverein

style,

at

borders

by

differential

gauges.'"

If this

surmise

is

right,

one

might

view

the

locomotive

along

with the

printed

newspaper

as

the material

points

ofjuncture

between the classical nation-

state

project

and

capitalism

at the

stage

of

primary

industrialism.

The

irony,

however,

is

that,

just

as this classical nation-state

project

was

coming fully

into its own with

the

formation

of

the

League

of Nations

in 1919, advancing capitalism was beginning to sap its foundations. As in

an earlier

age,

the most visible transformations took

place

in

the

areas of

transportation

and

communications. On

land,

motor vehicles increas-

ingly displaced

the

locomotive,

while the vast

proliferation

of macadam-

ized road

surfaces

on which

they sped

were never

gauge-calibrated

to

national frontiers.

In

the

air,

commercial

aviation

was,

with the

exception

of

a

few

very

large

and

rich

nations

like

the United

States,

primarily

trans-

national from its earliest

days.

One flew

to

leave

or

to return

to

one's

nation-state rather

than to move about

within

it,

and "national

airspace"

had only a short plausible life before the advent of the satellite made it

obsolete. The

pace

and

thrust

of

these

changes

is

vividly

demonstrated

by

the statistics

on

the admission of

nonimmigrant

aliens into

historically

immigrant

America:

1931-40

1,574,071

1941-50

2,461,359

1951-60

7,113,023

1961-70

24,107,224

1971-79 61,640,389

1981-91

142,076,53014

(The

1930s were the first

decade

in

which

nonimmigrants

outnumbered

immigrants,

and

they already

did

so

by

a ratio

of

three to

one.)

Radio

brought

even illiterate

populations

within the

purview

of

the

mass

media,

and its

reception

was

never

effectively

limited to nation-state

audiences.

No

newspaper

could ever

hope

to

command the

range

of

planetary acolytes that became available to the BBC or the Voice of

13. To

be

sure,

at

least some

railway systems,

such

as that of

Germany,

were substan-

tially

mapped

for

strategic

military

purposes.

Differential

gauges

promised

to

bring

one's

own

troops

rapidly

to one's

threatened

borders and

at the

same

time

block

the

enemy's

railway

penetration.

14.

Information

Please

Almanac,Atlas,

and

Yearbook,

987

(Boston,

1987),

p.

787,

and

Infor-

mationPlease

Almanac,

Atlas,

and

Yearbook,

993

(Boston, 1993),

p.

830. These tables lack

fig-

ures

for

1980,

which

probably

were somewhere between

eight

and nine million.



Critical

Inquiry

Winter1994 321

America.

Subsequently,

the

telephone

and

telex, film,

television,

cassettes,

video

recorders,

and the

personal computer

accelerated and

enormously

magnified nearly everything that radio had initiated.

These

developments

have had and will continue to have vast conse-

quences

precisely

because

they

are

integral components

of

the transna-

tionalization

of

advanced

capitalism

and of

the

steepening

economic

stratification

of the

global economy.

As

things

now

stand,

less than

25

percent

of the world's

population appropriates

85

percent

of

world

in-

come,

and the

gap

between rich and

poor

is

steadily widening.

Between

1965

and 1990 the difference between

living

standards

in

Europe

and

those

in

India

and

China

increased from a ratio

of

forty

to one

up

to

seventy to one. In the 1980s, over 800 million people-more than the

population

of the United

States,

the

European Community,

and

Japan

combined--"became

yet

more

grindingly poor,

and one

out

of three chil-

dren went

hungry."15

Yet,

thanks to

the

airplane,

the

bus,

the

truck,

and

even the old

locomotive,

this

inequality

and

misery

is in all

senses closer

to

privilege

and

wealth

than

ever before. Hence

migration

has

moved

not,

as in earlier

centuries,

outwards to

peripheries

in

the New World

or

the

Antipodes

but inwards toward the

metropolitan

cores.

Between

1840 and

1930,

about

37,500,000

immigrants,

overwhelm-

ingly from Europe, came to the United States; approximately 416,000

per

annum on

average.

In

the

1970s,

the annual

figure

was almost

500,000

and

in

the

1980s

almost

740,000;

80

percent

of the

newcomers

came from the "Third

World."

16

Paul

Kennedy

notes

that some

demogra-

phers

currently

believe

that

as

many

as 15 million

immigrants

will enter

America

in

each of the next

three

decades,

that

is,

at an annual

average

rate

of 1.5

million,

double that of the

1980s.17

Western

Europe

absorbed

over

20

million

immigrants

in

the three decades

between the end of

World

War II

and the

oil

crisis

of

the

early

1970s.

(The

figure

would have

been much higher had it not been for the helpfulness of Stalin's iron

curtain.)

But

in

the latter

part

of

the 1980s the numbers have

swelled

and

will

probably

do

so

at

least

through

the 1990s. Of

Germany's

79

million

inhabitants,

5.2

million

(7

percent)

are

foreign

immigrants;

for France

the

figures

are 3.6

(7

percent)

out

of

56

million;

for

the

United

Kingdom,

1.8

(2

percent)

out of 57

million;

for

Switzerland,

1.1

(16.3

percent)

out

of

6.8 million.18

(Even

insular,

restrictive

Japan

is

said to

have

a million

15.

Perry

Anderson,

A

Zone

of Engagement

(London,

1992),

p.

353. See as

well the

sources there cited.

16.

"Immigration,"

The New Funk and

Wagnalls

Encyclopedia,

25

vols.

(New

York,

1945-

46),

19:6892;

The

WorldAlmanac

and Book

of

Facts,

1992

(New

York,

1992),

p.

137.

17.

See Paul

Kennedy,

"The American

Prospect,"

New York eview

of

Books,

4

Mar.

1993,

p.

50.

18. See

"In

Europe's Upheaval,

Doors Close to

Foreigners,"

New York

Times,

10

Feb.

1993,

pp.

Al,

A14.

Note that these

figures

do not

include

an

estimated

25

million

political

refugees

around the

world,

mostly living

in

squalid, "temporary" dwellings

outside

their

homelands.



322

Benedict

Anderson

Exodus

or so

legal

and

illegal

alien

residents.)

And

the economic

and

political

implosion

of

the

Soviet Union is

already

moving

people

in

a

way

that no

fin-de-sieclecontinental system can stem.

At

the same

time,

the

communications

revolution of

our time

has

profoundly

affected the

subjective

experience

of

migration.

The

Moroc-

can

construction

worker

in

Amsterdam can

every

night

listen to

Rabat's

broadcasting

services and

has no

difficulty

in

buying pirated

cassettes of

his

country's

favorite

singers.

The

illegal

alien,

Yakuza-sponsored,

Thai

bartender

in

a

Tokyo

suburb

shows his Thai

comrades karaoke

video-

tapes just

made

in

Bangkok.

The

Filipina

maid in

Hong Kong

phones

her

sister

in

Manila

and

sends

money

electronically

to her

mother in

Cebu. The successful Indian student in Vancouver can keep in daily

touch

with her

former Delhi

classmates

by

electronic mail.

To

say

nothing

of an

evergrowing

blizzard of faxes.

It is as

if,

were

Mary

Rowlandson

alive

today,

she

could

see,

in

her

small

apartment

bedroom,

in

perfect

electronic

safety

on

the screen

beyond

her

toes,

"truly"

English

fields

and cattle.

But of

course the

meaning

would

have

changed

completely,

not least

because she can

only

see

what the

masters of

the screen

choose

to let her

see. Her

eye

can

never

gaze

more

widely

than

its frame.

The "En-

glishness" of the fields comes not from within her but from a narrating

voice

outside her.

More

concretely,

consider

the

well-known

photograph

of the

lonely

Peloponnesian

gastarbeiter

itting

in

his

dingy

room

in,

say,

Frankfurt. The

solitary

decoration on

his wall is

a

resplendent

Lufthansa

travel

poster

of

the

Parthenon,

which

invites

him,

in

German,

to

take

a

"sun-drenched

holiday"

in

Greece. He

may

well

never

have seen

the

Parthenon,

but

framed

by

Lufthansa the

poster

confirms

for him

and

for

any

visitor

a

Greek

identity

that

perhaps

only

Frankfurt has

encouraged

him

to assume.

At the same

time,

it reminds him

that

he is

only

a

couple

of air hours from Greece, and that if he saves enough Lufthansa will be

glad

to

assist

him

to have a

fortnight's "sunny

holiday"

in

his

heimat.

He

knows

too,

most

likely,

that he

will then

return

to exile

in

Frankfurt. Or

is it

that,

in

the

longer

run,

he

will find

himself in

brief

annual exile in

the

Peloponnese?

Or

in

both

places?

And

what about his

children?

Before

turning

to

the

political

consequences

of

this

broad sketch

of

post-1930s

nomadism,

two

smaller

but

important

related

effects of

post-

industrial

capitalism

need

briefly

to be

underscored.

Consider the

two

most

widely prevalent,

quite

modern

official

documents of

personal

iden-

tity: the birth certificate and the passport. Both were born in the national-

ist

nineteenth

century

and

later

became

interlinked.

It

is

true

that

in

the

Christianized

regions

of

the world

the

registration

of

births

long

pre-

ceded the rise of

capitalism.

But these births were

recorded

locally

and

ecclesiastically

in

parish

churches;

their

registration,

foreshadowing

im-

minent

baptisms, signified

the

appearance

of

Christian souls in

new cor-

poreal

forms. In

the

nineteenth

century,

however,

registration

was taken



Critical

Inquiry

Winter1994

323

over

by

states

that were

increasingly

assuming

a national

coloring.

In

in-

dustrially preeminent

England,

for

example,

the

registrar

general's

office

was created only in 1837. Compulsory registration of all births, whether

to

be followed

by baptisms

or

not,

did

not come

until 1876.

Identifying

each

baby's

father

and

place

of

birth,

the state's certificates created

the

founding

documents

for the infant's

inclusion

in or exclusion from

citi-

zenship

(through

jus sanguinis

or

jus

soli).

(He

or

she was no

longer

born

in

the

parish

of

Egham

but

in

the United

Kingdom.)

The

passport, prod-

uct

of the vectoral

convergence

of

migration

and

nationalism

in

an indus-

trial

age,

was

ready

to

confirm the

baby's political

identity

as

it

passed

into

adulthood.

The nexus of birth certificate and passport was institutionalized in

an era

in

which women had

no

legal

rights

to

political

participation

and

the

patriarchal

family

was

the

largely unquestioned

norm. But

in

our

time

all this

has

radically changed.

When the

League

of Nations

was

founded-and

female

suffrage

was

coming

into its own-the

ratio

of

di-

vorces

to

marriages

in

the United

States was

about one to

eight;

today

it

is

virtually

one to

two. The

percentage

of

babies born to

never-married

mothers

has increased

spectacularly

from

4.2

percent

in

1960

to

30.6

percent

in

1990.19

The intranational

as well

as international nomadism

of

modern life has also contributed to making the nineteenth-century birth

certificate

a sort

of counterfeit

money.

If,

for

example,

we read

that

Mary

Jones

was born

on

25

October 1970

in

Duluth,

to Robert

Mason and

Virginia

Jones,

or even

Robert and

Virginia

Mason,

we cannot

noncha-

lantly

infer that

she was conceived

in

that

same

Duluth,

was

brought up

there,

or lives there

now.

We have no idea whether

her

grandparents

are

buried

in

Duluth, and,

even

if

they

were,

we

have few

grounds

for

sup-

posing

that

Mary

will

some

day

be buried

alongside

them.

Is

Virginia

still

a

Mason? Or

a

Jones?

Or

something

else

again?

What

are

the

chances

that

Mary

has much

beyond periodic

long-distance

telephone

contact

with either

Robert

or

Virginia?

How

far is she

identifiable,

also to

herself,

as a

Duluthian,

a

Mason,

or a

Jones?

The counterfeit

quality

or,

shall we

say,

the

low market

value of the

birth certificate

is

perhaps

confirmed

by

the relative

rareness of its for-

gery.

Conversely,

the

huge

volume

of

passport

forgeries

and the

high

prices

they

command

show that

in

our

age,

when

everyone

is

supposed

to

belong

to

some one of the United

Nations,

these

documents

have

high

truth-claims.

But

they

are also counterfeit

in

the sense that

they

are less

and less attestations of

citizenship,

let alone of

loyalty

to a

protective

nation-state,

than of claims to

participation

in

labor markets.

Portuguese

and

Bangladeshi

passports,

even when

genuine,

tell us little about

loyal-

ties or

habitus,

but

they

tell us

a

great

deal about

the relative likelihood

19.

Data drawn

from

Bureau

of the Census

figures

cited

in

The World

Almanacand Book

of

Facts,1992,

pp.

942,

944.



324

Benedict

Anderson

Exodus

of their

holders

being

permitted

to seek

jobs

in

Milan

or

Copenhagen.

The

segregated

queues

that all of

us

experience

at

airport

immigration

barricades mark economic status far more than any political attachments.

In

effect,

they

figure

differential

tariffs on

human labor.

Let

me

now turn

finally

to the

political

realm.

The

processes

expli-

cated above

may

be

unraveling

the classical

nineteenth-century

national-

ist

project-which

aimed for

the fullest

alignment

of

habitus, culture,

attachment,

and exclusive

political

participation-on

at least two

distinct

but related

political

sites.

The

first site is more or

less

congruent

with the

postindustrial

cores.

During

the

nineteenth and

early

part

of the

twentieth centuries the

so-

called countries of immigration-the Americas, primarily, but also the

antipodes-had

a

remarkable

capacity

to naturalize

and nationalize their

millions

of

immigrants.

The

names

Galtieri,

Eisenhauer,

Fujimori,

Van

Buren,

O'Higgins,

and

Trudeau tell the tale.

But the birth

certificate then

had

a

primarily

political significance,

as

we can see from

the

constitu-

tional

proviso

that

United States

presidents

be born

inside that

nation's

borders. One

was, thus,

an

American

or one was

not.

Furthermore,

mili-

tary

participation

in

the service of a

state other

than the

United States

was

subject

to the

legal

sanction of loss of

citizenship,

not that this was

always rigidly enforced. When did this regime begin to weaken? Perhaps

in

our

epochal

1930s,

when

Americans

were

permitted

to

join

the

Inter-

national

Brigade

in

the

Spanish

Civil War?

Or

in

the

later 1940s when

Americans were

tacitly

permitted

to

participate

in

the defense of

the

in-

fant state of Israel?

But these breaks

in

the

established rules

were,

I

think,

permissible precisely

because of a

confidence

that these

extralegal

affairs

were minor

matters,

concerning

unimportant

people

with

rather low visi-

bility.

Besides,

the Americanness

of the

Americans

involved was never

seriously

in

question.

These

conditions

began

to

change,

however,

after

the middle of the 1960s. Andreas Papandreou started life as a Greek citi-

zen,

became an

American

citizen,

and

then,

when

opportunity

beckoned,

became

again

a

Greek citizen

and

prime

minister of Greece. A

certain

protocol

is still

evident

in

his

progress.

But what are

we to make of

the

1993

Cambodian

presidential

candidacy

of

self-made

Long

Beach

mil-

lionaire Kim

Kethavy?

In

the solemn

words of the New York

Times,

he

"carries

an

American

passport.

...

The

offices of his

campaign

headquar-

ters bloom with American

flags.

(Under

American

immigration

law,

Mr.

Kethavy

would

probably

be

forced to

give

up

his

United

States

citizenship

in the unlikely event that he

won.)"20

Everything here is indicative: Mr.

Kethavy's

citizenship

is in

parentheses

and the

newspaper

of

record

thinks that

he

will

only "probably"

be

forced to

give

it

up

if

he

becomes

20.

"For

the Cambodian

Vote,

a Fourth of

July

Flavor,"

New

York

Times,

17

Feb.

1993,

p.

A4.



Critical

Inquiry

Winter1994

325

Cambodia's

president. Nothing suggests

that the

Times

of the 1990s

finds

anything

odd

or

discomforting

in

the

behavior

of Mr.

Kethavy-or

of

the American government. After all, American citizens Milan Panic and

Mohammed

Sacirbey

have

recently

served as

premier

of

Serbia

and

Bos-

nian ambassador to the

United

Nations,

while Rein

Taagepera

ran

unsuc-

cessfully

for

president

of Estonia from a tenured

professorship

within

the

University

of

California

at Irvine. Nor is this a

uniquely

American

phenomenon;

the Canadian citizen

and

computer

systems capitalist

Stan-

islaw

Tyminski

ran

against

Lech Walesa for the

presidency

of Poland.

The

other side

of

this coin is the recent

emergence

in

the United

States and other older nation-states of an

ethnicity

that

appears

as

a

bas-

tard Smerdyakov to classical nationalism's Dmitri Karamazov. One em-

blem of

the

American

variant is

perhaps

the

espionage

trial of

Jonathan

Pollard

a

few

years

back. In the

age

of classical

nationalism,

the

very

idea

that there could

be

something praiseworthy

in

an American citizen's

spy-

ing

on America

for

another

country

would have seemed

grotesque.

But

to

the substantial number of

Jewish-Americans

who felt

sympathetic

to

Pollard,

the resentful

spy

was

understood

as

representing

a

transnational

ethnicity.

What else could

so

subversively

blur American

and Israeli citi-

zenship?

Another emblem

is

the colossal nonblack audience

magnetized

in 1977 by Alex Haley's TV miniseries "Roots." (The final episode was

watched

by

an

astonishing

36,000,000

households.)

The

purpose

of the

program

was to counter

melting pot ideology by underlining

the continu-

ous

"Africanness" hat

Haley's

ancestors

maintained as it were

despite

heir

Americanization. There can be little doubt that the

popularity

of "Roots"

owed much to this

transposable

theme,

given

the

rush,

especially

during

the

1980s,

of

thoroughly

American

youngsters

to

lobby

for various

ethnic

studies

programs

at universities

and

their

eagerness

to

study languages

that their

immediate

parents

had so

often

been determined to abandon.

Out of these and other impulses has emerged the ideological program of

multiculturalism,

which

implies

that a

simple

nineteenth-century

version

of Americanism

is

no

longer adequate

or

acceptable.

The shift

from,

say,

American

through

Armenian-American

through

Armenian-American

is

being

accentuated both

by

the

general

revolution

of

transportation

and communications discussed

earlier,

and

by

the re-

cent

disintegration

of the Soviet Union and

Yugoslavia.

Cleveland,

for

example,

contains

more

people

of

Slovene descent than does

Ljubljana,

and now

that

Slovenia

has

become

an

independent

state,

being

Slovene

in Cleveland, and in the United States, assumes a heightened signifi-

cance. Such ethnicities

typically

share

a

strongly

fictive character

with

"Roots." We can

easily

be

amused

by

the

determinedly

"Irish"

Bostonian

who knows no

Irish

literature,

plays

no Irish

sports, pays

no

Irish

taxes,

serves

in

no Irish

army,

does not vote

in Irish

elections,

and

has

only

holiday conceptions

of the Old

Sow

as she is

today.

It

is less

amusing,



326

BenedictAnderson Exodus

however,

to reflect on

the

fact that the

visible

presence

of

gays

and

lesbi-

ans at

St.

Patrick's

Day

celebrations

in

Cork has done

nothing

to

temper

the passions surrounding sister celebrations in New York.

In

Europe

comparable

tendencies

are

at

work and

may

even be ac-

centuated within the

European

Community

by

economic

integration

and

the

free movement of labor. The

National

Front,

Le Pen's

movement,

and

the

rise

of

right-wing

extremism

in

Germany

are

all

signs

of the "ethnici-

zation"

process.

21

For

the

thrust of their

propaganda

is

essentially

to draw

a

sharp

line

between

the

political

nation and

a

putative original

ethnos.

Even

if

a black

in

the United

Kingdom

was born

there,

went to schools

and

university

there,

pays

taxes

there,

votes

there,

and

will be buried

there, for the National Front he or she can never be genuinely English.

Similarly

in

Le Pen's

imagination,

France is

today teeming

with

aliens,

not

immigrants

still

carrying Algerian passports,

but

"non-French" citizens

of

political

France. We could thus conceive of

him

looking

out

of

the window

of a

railway

carriage

and

seeing

not

fields,

not

even

"French

fields,"

but

"dammit,

French fields."

In

these movements

racism is a

very

strong

ele-

ment,

but

I

think the

racism will

prove

in

the

longer

run to be less

im-

portant

than

ethnicization

as

Europeans

circulate more

massively

around

Europe.

The second type of political consequence of all the rapid changes I

have

been

discussing

concerns

the

migrants

themselves. Not least

as

a

result of the

ethnicization of

political

life

in the

wealthy, postindustrial

states,

what one can call

long-distance

nationalism is

visibly

emerging.

This

type

of

politics,

directed

mainly

toward

the

former

Second and

Third

Worlds,

pries

open

the classical nation-state

project

from

a

differ-

ent direction.

A

striking

illustration is the fateful recent destruction of the

Babri

mosque

in

Ayodhya,

which

has

plunged

India into

her

biggest

crisis

since Partition. The

dismantling,

which

was

carefully

planned

and

in-

volved extensive rehearsal and training by retired military and police

personnel,

was

officially sponsored by

the Vishwa Hindu Parishad

(World

Hindu

Council),

which "raised

huge

sums of

money

from its

supporters

in

North America and

Britain."22

Needless to

say,

the

vast

majority

of

such

supporters

are

Indians

living

overseas.23

Many

of the

most

uncom-

21.

The

Lega

Lombarda

of

the

late

1980s,

now

the

Lega

Nord,

while not

strictly

analo-

gous

to

these

movements,

nonetheless

shows that

something

close

to

ethnicization can break

down

even

a

supposed

core nation.

For

the

Lega's

attitudes

to

southern Italians are

often

rabidly

contemptuous,

as if the

latter were

of

another,

lesser breed.

22. Praful

Bidwai,

"Bringing

Down the

Temple: Democracy

at Risk in

India,"

TheNa-

tion,

25

Jan.

1993,

p.

86.

23.

The numbers of such

people

are

very

substantial. The total

figure

for

South

Asians

outside South Asia is close to 8.7

million. The breakdown

is as

follows:

Europe

1,482,034

(of

which

1,260,000

are

in

the United

Kingdom);

Africa

1,389,722;

Asia

1,862,654

(of

which

1,170,000

are

in

Malaysia);

Middle

East

1,317,141,

mostly

in

the Gulf

states;

Latin America

and

the

Caribbean

957,330

(of

which

730,350

are

in

Guyana

and

Trinidad);

North

America

728,500

(of

which

500,000

are in the

United

States);

and the Pacific

954,109

(of

which



Critical

Inquiry

Winter1994

327

promising,

fanatical

adherents of an

independent

Khalistan do not live

in

the

Punjab

but

have

prosperous

businesses in

Melbourne and

Chicago.

The Tigers in Jaffna are stiffened in their violent struggles by Tamil com-

munities

in

Toronto, London,

and elsewhere all

linked

on

the

computer

by

Tamilnet.

Consider the

malign

role of

Croats

not

only

in

Germany

but also

in

Australia

and North America in

financing

and

arming

Franco

Tudjman's

breakaway

state

and

pushing

Germany

and Austria into a

fate-

ful,

premature

recognition.

It

would

obviously

be a

mistake

to assume

that

long-distance

nation-

alism

is

necessarily

extremist. There

were

substantial

numbers of

Filipi-

nos

outside the

Philippines

who

contributed,

not from

political

exile,

to

the struggle against Marcos; the Philippine economy today is heavily de-

pendent

on

remittances sent

in

by

such

people

from

the

Gulf,

Italy,

Saudi

Arabia,

England,

California,

Hong

Kong, Japan,

and

Spain.

Financial

and other

support

for

the

democracy

movement that

culminated

in

the

Tiananmen

Square

massacre

also came from

many

Chinese

not

resident

in

China and

often,

indeed,

citizens of

other states.

Nonetheless,

in

general, today's

long-distance

nationalism

strikes

one

as

a

probably

menacing

portent

for

the future.

First of

all,

it is

the

product

of

capitalism's

remorseless,

accelerating

transformation of all

hu-

man societies. Second, it creates a serious

politics

that is at the same time

radically

unaccountable. The

participant rarely

pays

taxes

in

the

country

in

which he

does his

politics;

he is

not

answerable to

its

judicial system;

he

probably

does not

cast even an

absentee

ballot

in

its

elections

because

he

is a citizen in

a

different

place;

he

need not fear

prison,

torture,

or

death,

nor need his

immediate

family.

But,

well

and

safely positioned

in

the First

World,

he can

send

money

and

guns,

circulate

propaganda,

and

build

intercontinental

computer

information

circuits,

all of

which can

have

incalculable

consequences

in

the zones

of their

ultimate

destina-

tions. Third, his

politics,

unlike those of activists for

global

human

rights

or

environmental

causes,

are

neither

intermittent nor

serendipitous.

They

are

deeply

rooted

in a

consciousness

that his exile is

self-chosen

and

that the

nationalism he

claims on

E-mail is also

the

ground

on

which an

embattled ethnic

identity

is to

be

fashioned

in

the

ethnicized

nation-state

that he remains

determined to

inhabit. That same

metropole

which mar-

ginalizes

and

stigmatizes

him

simultaneously

enables

him

to

play,

in

a

flash,

on

the other side of

the

planet,

national hero.

839,340

are

in

Fiji).

Professor

Myron

Weiner

kindly

informs

me

that

although

this

table

counts South

Asians,

the

major

areas of

emigration

have

long

been

inside the

present

bor-

ders

of

India. He also

believes the

figures

to

be too

conservative: for

example,

the recent

United

States census shows

the Indian

population

in

America to

be close to

900,000.

Most

likely,

in

his

estimate,

the true total for

Indians

living

overseas is

between

11

and

12

million.

See

Colin

Clarke,

Ceri

Peach,

and Steven

Vertovec,

"Introduction:

Themes

in

the

Study

of

the

South

Asian

Diaspora,"

in

South

Asians Overseas:

Migration

and

Ethnicity,

d.

Clarke,

Peach,

and

Vertovec

(Cambridge,

1990),

p.

2.

Exodus Benedict Anderson

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