Very few quick notes

• Benedict Anderson – Today’s selection was from his well known book Imagined Communities (1982)

– That book basically created the field of critical, post-structuralist/post-modernist analysis of nationalism

• Instead of seeing nationalism as timeless and natural, he demonstrated how it came to be created

• One of the major critiques of Anderson is that he paid very little attention to the role of gender in the construction of  nationalism

• Slavoj Zizek – A prolific theorist from Slovenia – known for combining the theory of Hegel, Lacan (the second most famous psychoanalytic theorist after Freud), and Marx

– Today you read his critique of the standard version of Marxist ideology

• Marx said ideology was “they know not what they do” [because they were tricked]; Zizek changes to formula to “they know very well what they are doing, but still they are doing it [moving ideology from belief to action].

• Jason Dittmer – A political geographer, well known for examining the intersection of popular culture and geopolitics – in particular comic books.

Questions

Anderson

1.  From pg. 4 in Anderson, what are the three things he wants to investigate about nationalism?

2. Explain his three part definition of nationalism.

3. In what ways is nationalism like a religion?

4. Explain  is the importance of the printing press, languages of power, and the newspaper are to nationalism.

5. What is the importance of the time/literary concept of “meanwhile” to nationalism?

Dittmer

1.   Why does pop culture “structure expectations” in everyday life?

2.  Why are comic book writers “organic intellectuals”?

3. How did Capitan America change along with different periods of US nationalism (note: this is a fairly detailed answer)?

Zizek What is cynicism?  Why does Zizek say “Cynical distance is just one way – one of many ways – to blind ourselves to the structuring power of ideological fantasy”