| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen, editors. Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xxv, 252. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.95.
Perhaps the most influential book on nationalism to be published in the last twenty years, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983) offered to stunned Latin Americans and Latin Americanists (addicted to thinking of their part of the world as in every way "dependent" upon developments originating in Europe) the leading role in the making of one of the central historical phenomena of the modern age. By the 1990s, Anderson's book had begun to orient new research and writing on the history and meaning of colonial and postcolonial nationalisms in the Americas. Anderson's arguments that "new nations" emerged out of "old empires" and that Creoles were "pioneers" in the "origin and spread of nationalism" (an argument accentuated in the revised edition of 1991) were useful for those Latin Americanists who were moving beyond dependency perspectives, and vexing for those who were not. But the underlying problem was not just that, as Tulio Halperin Donghi claims, Anderson "got almost everything wrong" (in fact, Anderson got lots of things right), but that much of what he got wrong may be traced to the two "authoritative" histories he relied upon and which, at the time, were widely respected by historians of Latin America: John Lynch's Spanish American Revolutions, 1808–1826 (1973) and, to a lesser extent, Gerhard Masur's Simón Bolívar (1948). The much abused catchphrase "imagined communities" served in the 1990s as fashionable cover for any number of readings, some of them incompatible with the "anthropological spirit" of Anderson's reflections—so much so that, as Halperin Donghi observes, Anderson "has become the victim of his own success" (p. 34).	1
The present volume springs from a small conference held at the Woodrow Wilson Center in April of 2000. In addition to the regionalist critique of Anderson's seminal work, the conference organizers sought to foment dialogue between historians and critics. Although in his introduction coeditor John Charles Chasteen asserts that texts are the "special province of critics" and contexts "the specialty of historians" (p. x), in this volume it is the historians who offer sustained critical engagements with Anderson's text, while the critics depart from some aspect of Anderson's approach to read, perhaps via routes suggested by Homi Bhabha, Walter Benjamin, or Michel Foucault, select nineteenth and twentieth-century texts, practices, or images of the national in one or another Latin American location.	. . .

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