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Imagined communities

Benedict Anderson

The nation is a limited, sovereign, imagined community, made possible by print-capitalism and reproduced by modular piracy across the world.

What it does in the chain

Makes the nation an inscribed, emergent social object: the lever of the cultural domain that colonises the political and the economic. Print-capitalism becomes documediality; modular piracy becomes measurable constitutional borrowing.

Where it is used

Chapters and companion operations that rely on this operator are listed from the chapter map. Primary sources are cited in the book; this page does not replace them.

Interpretation  This reading is the author’s, and is marked as such.