Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • Re-Reading Imagined Communities for the 1000th Time

    Some books just stick with you. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism is one of them. It was one of only two books that I was assigned to read in multiple classes in college. At Om Ben’s memorial service, my colleague Isaac Kramnick called it the “second-most important book ever written by a Cornell faculty member.”* And it’s a standard entry on any syllabus dealing with nationalism and national identity.

    I recently assigned Imagined Communities for the N-th time in my own class, and I was struck—once again—by how dense it is. Every time I read it I discover something new, or remark upon a flippant turn of phrase or a spicy footnote that I hadn’t noticed before. This time was no different.

    The standard two-word summary of Imagined Communities is “print capitalism.” This is shorthand for Anderson’s argument that the spread of mass literature in vernacular languages, motivated by the capitalist impulse to sell penny dreadfuls to as many people as possible, created the idea of a community united by a common language. But the last two times I re-read Imagined Communities, I was struck more by his focus on the idea of what he and others term “simultaneity.” That is idea of what a reader (or generally, a person) conceives of the temporal dimensions of the social world. Writes Anderson,

    What has come to take the place of the mediaeval conception of simultaneity-along-time is, to borrow again from Benjamin, an idea of ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ in which simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar.

    I won’t pretend to have nailed down what specifically this distinction is,** but the idea is that mass vernacular fiction did not simply create a common experience of people-like-me-reading-things-that-only-we-can-read but also that the nature of the mass market novel shifted people’s cognitive map from a medieval to a modern form. That’s much more than just “print capitalism.”

    The other thing that I noted is Anderson’s gleeful recitation of racial epithets, designed to make the point that

    it is remarkable how little that dubious entity known as ‘reverse racism’ manifested itself in the anticolonial movements.

    He writes in a footnote

    I have never heard of an abusive argot word in Indonesian or Javanese for either ‘Dutch’ or ‘white.’ Compare the Anglo-Saxon treasury…

    and then goes on to list them. This is wonderfully interesting for two reasons. First off, in his posthumously published memoir, Anderson not only talks about the common “abusive argot word” in Indonesian for “white” (= bule) that everyone knows, but also he claims to have invented it as a derogatory term for Caucasian person.***

    Second off, it is interesting because Caroline Hau—a very fine author of both fiction and nonfiction—recently gave a lecture at Cornell entitled “For Whom Are Southeast Asian Studies” in which she urged us to remember the audiences for whom our books are written. In Anderson’s own telling, Imagined Communities is for an English audience. Not English-speaking, but specifically from England. Perhaps that explains why one would argue such an odd and plainly untrue thing? Hard to say. But a Southeast Asian audience would happily supply him with the treasury of colonial racial epithets for colonizers.

    NOTES

    * Here is the winner for Kramnick’s most important Cornell faculty book.

    ** Anderson cites Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and Walter Benjamin for these ideas.

    *** He claims to have coined the term in the 1960s, to be clear, so the timing does not work (Imagined Communities is from 1983). As colorful as that linguistic history might be, I think he is plainly incorrect.

  • What Does it Mean to be “Western” in the Netherlands? [Updated]

    Some time ago I wrote about the curious case of Japanese colonial subjects in the Dutch East Indies. The interesting observation is that

    After concluding a Treaty of Trade and Navigation in 1896, the Netherlands and Japan recognised each other as most favoured nations, and subsequently the Tokyo government pressed the Dutch to accord its migrants in their colonies the same legal status as Europeans. In 1899, Japanese citizens in the Indies acquired European status…

    Today I learned two more interesting facts about the regulation of identity in the Netherlands today, and how the Netherlands government conceptualize what it means to be from the West.

    First, when the Netherlands government conceptualizes migrants as being from the West or not, it continues to follow the precedent set in the Indies back at the turn of the last century.

    Due to their socioeconomic and cultural position, people from Indonesia and Japan residing in the Netherlands are considered as having a ‘western’ migration background. These are mainly people born in the former Dutch East Indies and expatriates employed by Japanese companies with their families.

    Not only does the Netherlands government maintain the idea that Japanese are “not like” other non-Europeans, it also applies that standard to anyone from Indonesia. It is somehow meaningful that this principle of “the former colonial subject is Western, like us” does not apply to, say, Suriname, although I’ll leave it to a specialist on Netherlands politics to explain how that has come to be and what it means.

    Second, what it means to be a cultural minority in the Netherlands:

    Student from a cultural minority defined by the Dutch Ministry of Education as someone meeting one of the following criteria:

    • belongs to a Moluccan group;
    • at least one parent or guardian originally comes from Greece, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Cape Verde, Morocco, Portugal, Spain, Tunisia or Turkey
    • at least one parent or guardian originally comes from Suriname, Aruba or the Netherlands Antilles;
    • at least one parent or guardian originally comes from another non-English speaking country outside Europe, except Indonesia
    • at least one parent or guardian was admitted as a foreigner under article 15 of the Aliens Act.

    Here we see a bunch of knotty problems in distinguishing among former colonial subjects. Someone from the Moluccas (Maluku) is from a cultural minority background, but not someone from elsewhere in what is today Indonesia, like someone from Java. Unless that Javanese person went to Suriname first after slavery was abolished there, in which case that person would be from a cultural minority background.

    In the Netherlands, as in elsewhere, we learn a lot about politics and society from the categories that we use to regulate identity.

    UPDATE

    Another day, another thing learned. There are plenty other ways that peoplehood and citizenship are regulated in the Netherlands (and, of course, elsewhere too, but the Netherlands example is the one that fascinates this Indonesianist). Take, for example, the requirements for obtaining a temporary residence permit to live in the Netherlands. Many migrants have to take a Basic Civic Integration Exam. But not all of them!

    You do not have to take the exam in one of the following situations:

    • You are under 18 or you have reached your AOW pension age. The AOW pension age differs per person.
    • You have a valid residence permit and you want to change the purpose of stay.
    • You have lived in the Netherlands for at least 8 years during the compulsory school age.
    • You have the nationality of an EU/EEA country, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Switzerland, United States of America, Vatican City.
    • You have the status of a long-term resident EC in another EU country.
    • You have the Turkish nationality or you are a family member of a Turkish national that has lawful stay in the Netherlands…
    • You have the Surinamese nationality and have at least finished primary school in the Dutch language in Surinam or the Netherlands…

    Whereas the examples above show that Indonesians are viewed as having a Western background rather than a non-Western one, when it comes to civic integration, Indonesians are treated like other non-Western migrants—but Surinamese who are educated in Dutch are not!

    There is a fascinating book to be written on the politics of citizenship in the Netherlands and Indonesia. The mutual co-constitution of Dutch and Indonesian ideas of citizenship, from the colonial period through today.