A modern nation is, according to historian Benedict Anderson, an imagined community; collectively imagined by its people as limited, with clearly marked territorial boundaries that separate it from its neighbors; and imagined as sovereign, for each nation has its own political system and civic culture. It is also imagined as a community despite sometimes great internal social, ethnic, and regional variation. What binds those often disparate parts together as a whole is a common sense of history and destiny, so that, as Anderson says, “the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”
In the introduction to the book All Over the Map: Rethinking American Regions, Edward Ayers and Peter Onuf focus on regional diversity as a part of the American imagined community when they say that American identities are based on regions where time and space converge; places that give those who live there their identities, where people acquire their distinctive ways of speaking, and where they take on the historic burden of their region. And no matter where those people may move, they cherish memories of the regions they come from. Without regions, say the authors, there could be no country, without the parts there can be no whole. Thus regions, as diverse as they may be, are integral parts of a nation.
Comments