Resumen

ACREE, William. La sobrevida de una corriente emocional: un seguimiento del largo alcance de Comunidades imaginadas. Prismas [online]. 2023, vol.27, n.2, pp.289-297.  Epub 06-Dic-2023. ISSN 1852-0499.

The Afterlife of an Emotional Current: Following Imagined Communities’s Long Reach

Few authors manage to capture the core of their argument in a title so effectively as Benedict Anderson did forty years ago. And few books generate the gravitational energy that keeps them at the center of conversations for decades. The interpretive gift of Imagined Communities owes much to the book’s remarkable global scope and blend of anchor points such as print capitalism, linguistic nationalism, and the significance of imagining political connections. Still, other books on nationalism have channeled similarly salient elements like the inventions and maintenance of tradition, ethnicity and religion, or everyday politics, print media and popular culture icons through the ages to advance debates around collective identity both within and beyond Latin America. The staying power of Anderson’s book, though, comes from something these others do to a much lesser extent: capture the emotional underpinning of nationalism and link that emotional charge to storytelling through time as well as to social identity. Those bonds between ideology, identity, and narrative make it easy for readers to understand the durability of nationalism as a social, cultural, political, and economic force. They are also why Imagined Communities has outlived the shelf life of most every other book on nationalism and most studies with an academic bent, period, and why this has been true on a global scale. Here I want to follow a sketch of the long reach of Imagined Communities, weaving together some of my experiences as a student and scholar, with the ways I have observed my own students engaging nationalism over the past fifteen years. In short, though collective identity and nationalism in cultural history have had there ups and downs as focal points over the past decades, the afterlife of the emotional current Anderson tapped into is not going away anytime soon.

Palabras clave : Storytelling; Afterlife; Emotional charge; Identity; Community.

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