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Imagination and Imagery: Filipino Nationalism in the 19th Century

Vicente L. Rafael
–for Carol Dahl

Benedict Anderson has written perceptively on nationalism as a cultural artifact (11-15).

Like all artifacts, it is overdetermined, reducible neither to an ideological effect nor to a pathological symptom of modernity. Instead, ideas of nationhood are informed by paradox and contradiction. For example, Anderson points out that despite their relatively recent invention, nations are thought to be quite archaic and timeless.

In the same way that a nation is conceived to be both contingent and natural, it is also regarded as simultaneously universal”–in the modern world, everyone can, should, will “have” a nationality as he or she has a gender”–and particular “such that by definition, “Greek” nationality is sui generis” (14).

To see nationalism as a c