Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization

Kelly, John D.; Kaplan, Martha

ISBN 10: 0226429903 / ISBN 13: 9780226429908

Edité par University of Chicago Press - A Phoenix Book, Chicago and London, 2001

A propos de cet article

243 Pages Indexed. Nine of the first 13 pages and the back endpaper have extensive but light and erasible penciled notes. The remaining 233 pages are faultless. Illustrated with a nine page gallery of black and white photographs. In the year 2000, Fiji was the site of chaos: a coup d'etat; marital law; near civil war; local takeovers of police stations, factories, resorts, even military bases. Why has the social contract of the nation-state been unsustainable there? What is this social contract in real history, especially since World War II? This book reconfigures the issues for the anthropology of nations and nationalism, away from nationalism as the culture of modernity, toward the nation-state as an artifact of American power. Benedict Andersons's vastly influentiaal Imagined Communities led a generation of scholars to study, national imaginaries, print capitalism, shared memories and identities. Now this book offers an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's approach. The authors focus not on imagination but on legal, ritual, and electoral representation in the formation of comunities. They stress not modernity, but decolonizaiton. They track consequences not only of nationalist sentiments, but also of nation-state realities. Their emphasis is not on memory and identity, but on will and power. Fiji's story is one of legally entrenched racism and struggles for, against, and about democracy. Its dramatic crises reveall the force and ilimits of changing global poitical structures, empires to nation-states.

N° de réf. du vendeur 14061

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization
• Éditeur: University of Chicago Press - A Phoenix Book, Chicago and London
• Date de parution: 2001
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0226429903
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780226429908
• Reliure: Trade Paperback
• Édition: First Printing
• État de l'article: Fine

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

In 1983 Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities revolutionized the anthropology of nationalism. Anderson argued that "print capitalism" fostered nations as imagined communities in a modular form that became the culture of modernity.

Now, in Represented Communities, John D. Kelly and Martha Kaplan offer an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's depictions of colonial history, his comparative method, and his political anthropology. The authors build a forceful argument around events in Fiji from World War II to the 2000 coups, showing how focus on "imagined communities" underestimates colonial history and obscures the struggle over legal rights and political representation in postcolonial nation-states. They show that the "self-determining" nation-state actually emerged with the postwar construction of the United Nations, fundamentally changing the politics of representation.

Sophisticated and impassioned, this book will further anthropology's contribution to the understanding of contemporary nationalisms.

À propos des auteurs

John D. Kelly is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago, where he serves on the faculty board of the Human Rights Program. He is the author, coauthor, or coeditor of several books.

John D. Kelly is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of A Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji.

Martha Kaplan is an associate professor of anthropology at Vassar College and the author of Neither Cargo nor Cult: Ritual Politics and the Colonial Imagination in Fiji.