ENGL 233: All Ah We

Discussion Framework
Benedict Anderson Imagined Communities,
Dione Brand Land to Light On, Lynn Nottage Intimate Apparel

INTRODUCTION CHAPTER OF BENEDICT ANDERSON’S IMAGINED COMMUNITIES:

REFLECTIONS ON THE ORIGIN AND SPREAD OF NATIONALISM (1983)

Context & Objectives of Book

§ “Nation, nationality, nationalism – all have proved notoriously difficult to define, let alone
analyse. In contrast to the immense influence that nationalism has exerted on the modern
world, plausible theory about it is conspicuously meagre.” (2)
§ “The aim of this book is to offer some tentative suggestions for a more satisfactory
interpretation of the ‘anomaly’ of nationalism.” (2)
§ * “My point of departure is that nationality, or, as one might prefer to put it in view of that
world’s multiple significations , nation-ness, as well as nationalism, are cultural artefacts of
a particular kind.” (2)
§ “I will be trying to argue that the creation of these artefacts towards the end of the
eighteenth century was the spontaneous distillation of a complex ‘crossing’ of discrete
historical forces; but that, once created, they became ‘modular,’ capable of being
transplanted, with varying degrees of self-consciousness, to a great variety of social
terrains, to merge and be merged with a correspondingly wide variety of political and
ideological constellations.”(2)
§ “I will also attempt to show why these particular cultural artefacts have aroused such deep
attachments.” (2)

Points of Interest
§ “Such considerations serve to underline the fact that since World War II every successful
revolution has defined itself in national terms…and in so doing, has grounded itself firmly in
a territorial and social space inherited from the prerevolutionary past.” (2)
§ “[N]ation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time.” (2)

The Nation & The Imaginary

§ “…I propose the following definition of nation: it is an imagined political community –
and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign [supreme power].” (5-6)
§ “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of
their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the
image of their communion.” (6)
§ * “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the
style in which they are imagined.” (6)
§ “…[I]t is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation
that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship.”
(7)
 § “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so
many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings.”
(7)
Footnote of interest
“9. Seton-Watson, Nations and States, p. 5: ‘All that I can find to say is that a nation exists when a
significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if
they formed one.’ We may translate ‘consider themselves’ as ‘imagine themselves.’” (6)

Why Anderson? Application to Theatre Studies

§ Our Afro-Caribbean playwrights this semester are imagining themselves and their communities and
articulating these imaginings in the form of dramatic texts.
§ In this course, we will consider each play as a case study that opens our eyes to the cultural
artefacts of the Caribbean, as documented by our playwrights, as they imagine themselves and
their nation through DuBoisian (W. E. B. DuBois) objectives: authored by them, for them,
near them, and about them.
§ We are interested in the contours of their imagination. What is included, what is excluded,
what is proclaimed, what is silenced, what is made new, what is restored – when Afro-
Caribbean authors present themselves against, and sometimes, in conversation with deeply
historical assumptions and stereotypes about the people, places, and customs of these
islands?
§ Who is the intended audience for their text? Are translations, definitions, and legibility
important?
§ Moreover, Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities provides us with the language
– in our classroom – to think about:
o The expanse of nation or country in terms of both tangible size and as a far reaching,
construct of shared imagination.
o Migration as an ingredient for imagined communities à Some of our authors write
from within the home nation, yet, many others write outside of it – looking back
and/or creating new documents of national imagining through their art.
o The ways in which these plays, along with Dionne Brands poetry, are political acts of
self-definition by Afro-Caribbean authors who aim to counteract the exotic and
incomplete imaginings of the Caribbean that have been authored by those who are
outside of these communities.
§ Do keep in mind, that in some of our plays, such as Kwame Kwei Armah’s Elmina’s Kitchen,
we will see horizontal comradeship and bonds of kinship between migrants who are from
different “islands.”
o Thus, displaying the ways in which the Caribbean is simultaneously a community that
is both distinctively unique, yet regionally similar.
o *Importantly, in the context of the Caribbean, Benedict Anderson’s concept of the
nation serves as a great launching point, but not a complete view of what unites
these varied, yet connected archipelagos and the people who have populated them.

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DIONNE BRAND, LAND TO LIGHT ON (1997)

Who is Dionne Brand?

Black Lesbian Canadian Poet and Author, born in Trinidad in 1953 and migrated to Canada in 1970.
Toronto’s third Poet Laureate (2009-2012). Winner of several prestigious writing prizes and awards.
Early on in career, considered a poet of Caribbean exile.

Dialectics

Read together “VI i” (p. 51)

I view Brand’s project of presenting Afro-Caribbean realities through the method of dialectics to
be wholly in service of the multiple truths, experiences, and analytical complexities that the
Caribbean contains. Brand puts these voices and multiple vantage points in conversation with
one another to create a collective voice, an imagined community, so to speak. As she says in poem
VI ii, she is “analyzing the dialectic” (52). Through her poetry, she is viewing and analyzing the
contradictions – her aunt’s “sweet hand” and her “sore leg” and painting a fuller picture of
emotion, expression, reality, existence, … i.e. “the turned corn meal” and “the amber pain
hanging at my Aunt Phyllis’ foot” (52)

Her aunt…

First Poem: VI i (p. 51)

o “I feel like my aunt….”
- What kind of information are we given about how the poem’s speaker feels?
- What kind of complexities are revealed about her aunt as a Afro-Caribbean subject?
- What is her world composed of?/What does it contain?
- What kind of energies?

Poems/Passages of interest

o VII ii excerpt
anything of the baby’s indecision to yawn or bawl, I
could not miss the marl of her teeth crushed on worry,
nothing she could sell for nothing, at the end of herself,
needing a plan because at the end of herself she was
still alive, still blooming children and crying, and short
of burying them in the cane field at the back of her house
she had to hang them on her hips where harm
was greater if only they knew the sweet ground would
be milk.
(p. 54; with interest in how it continues in VII iv)

o VII v excerpt – a different presentation of the environment, specifically rain

She pedalled the Hitachi sewing machine
for kilometres into the cane field
…
her feet delirious. In the morning
the bedclothes would be a dress and a skirt
and a jacket and a blouse, kilometres
of pedaling and it was hard to breathe night,

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 holding it to her fierece lungs, her feet
losing bone, she hummed the needle through
the presser foot singing like rain.
(p. 57)

o IX I, entire poem (p. 63) – contains the guilt and effects of distance and migration;
something that Nottage’s character George is not granted room to voice. Who did George
leave behind? To go work in the Panama Canal and then, when he moved to the U.S.? A
severed & strained existence.
o X, entire poem (66-67) – discusses church, the slowness of Sunday, and the desire to escape.
The poem contains moments that seem to be in conversation with the content of George’s
letters and then it departs radically from it. It becomes a poem that it is not interested in
allure, enticement, presentation, or display. Detailed agony and anguish, perhaps.

Islands Vanish

Read together XIII (p. 73) – the arrival à the racial, social, cultural realities of life after migration,
more deeply presented than in Nottage’s play
In this country where islands vanish, bodies submerge,
the heart of darkness is these white roads, snow
at our throats, and at the windshield a thick white cop
in a blue steel windbreaker peering into our car, suspiciously,
…
(p. 73)

Continues on p. 74
…
out there, every two minutes the imagination conjures
an exact bridge, the mind insists on solidity, we lose
the light of the car ahead, in the jagged beam of the cop’s
blistering eye we lose the names of things, the three of us,
two women who love women, one man with so many demon
…

…
just the indifference of a cop. It takes us six hours
to travel three. I coil myself up into a nerve and quarrel
with the woman, lover, and the man for landing me in
this white hell.