This article critically evaluates Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(1991), arguing that the book's popularity partly derives from its resonance with widespread, deep-seated western notions of language, especially oppositions between print and orality in terms of their relationship to cognition, emotion, history, and nationalism. The article gives reason to reconsider reactions to Anderson's book and argues for a more sustained focus on the relationship between nationalism and linguistic ideologies.
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