"'Come, let us build a Third Kingdom, and in this Third Reich, hey,
sisters, you will live happily; hey, brothers, you will live
happily; hey, kids, you will live happily; hey, you German
patriots, you will see Germany sitting enthroned above all the
peoples in this world.' How clever Hitler was, brothers and
sisters, in depicting these ideals!" Thus the late President
Sukarno of Indonesia, an anti-colonial leader, in a public speech
while accepting an honorary degree, and viewing Europe and its
history through an inverted telescope, as Europeans often regard
other parts of the globe. Strange shifts in perspective can take
place when Berlin is viewed from Jakarta, or when complex histories
of colonial domination strand what counts as the founding work of a
national culture in a language its people no longer read. The
"spectre of comparisons" arises as nations stir into self
awareness, matching themselves against others, and becoming whole
through the exercise of the imagination. In this series of profound
and eloquent essays, Benedict Anderson, best known for his classic
book on nationalism, Imagined Communities, explores these effects
as they work their way through politics and culture. Spanning broad
accounts of the development of nationalism and identity, and
detailed studies of Southeast Asia, the book includes pieces on
East Timor, where every Indonesian attempt to suppress national
feeling has had the opposite effect; on the Philippines, where it
is said that some horses eat better than stable-hands; on Thailand,
where so much money can be made in elected posts that candidates
regularly kill to get them; on the Filipino nationalist and
novelist Jose Rizal for whom "we mortals are like turtles-we have
value and are classified according to our shells;" and a remarkable
essay on Mario Vargas Llosa, detailing the fate of indigenous
minorities at the hands of the modern state. While The Spectre of
Comparisons is an indispensable resource for those interested in
Southeast Asia, Anderson also takes up the large issues of the
universal grammars of nationalism and ethnicity, the peculiarity of
nationalist imagery as replicas without originals, and the
mutations of nationalism in an age of mass global migrations and
instant electronic communications.
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