ABSTRACT
In his posthumously published memoir, Benedict Anderson, arguably the most prominent theorist of nationalism in the twentieth and early twenty-first century, alerts his reader about “the danger of arrogant provincialism, or of forgetting that serious nationalism is tied to internationalism” (Anderson 2016: x). Although internationalism instead of cosmopolitanism is his preferred term for a practical discourse that serves as an important corrective to nationalism in the current era of neoliberal capitalist globalization, there is an unmistakable swerve in his thought to the view that a demotic cosmopolitanism from below is a valuable supplement to nationalism. This modulation is significant because the larger part of Anderson’s corpus is marked by a distinct ambivalence towards cosmopolitanism. Anderson felt an intense love for the Indonesian nation, so much so that he saw himself as an Indonesian nationalist (Anderson 2016: 114, 116). This patriotic attachment, which grew out of his love of the Indonesian language, his experiences of Indonesian culture and society since his fieldwork days and his political solidarities with the people he encountered there, undoubtedly informed Imagined Communities, his celebrated study of nationalism. This made Anderson a passionate defender of popular nationalism, which he distinguished from statism and racial chauvinism. Indeed, among thinkers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, Anderson, while acknowledging the fraying of the nationalist project, was the most vigorous defender of the nation’s continuing viability and legitimacy as a political community in an age of globalization. Accordingly, he was extremely critical of postnationalism, such as that espoused by Arjun Appadurai (Appadurai 1996).
