Appadurai, You Ruined My Afternoon

I remember reading Appadurai in the evening and thinking, oh god, this would have been great reading material before bedtime. The text was certainly complex and jargon-heavy, but he never failed to hold my attention (although it took me longer than I had expected to finish the reading).

"One man's imagined community is another man's political prison" (Appadurai 514).

The moment I came across this sentence, I read it once, twice, and then once again. I completely agree with Appadurai – a dream of another person might very well be the other's nightmare. This reminded me of my high school history classes; this trend was extremely evident throughout the course of history. A perfect example would be the Afghanistan War in 1979, in which the Soviet Union wanted to communise the nation. There was widespread social unrest, considering that communism required the neutralization of religion – something extremely important to the people. While the Soviets imagined Afghanistan as the perfect communist partner, the people of Afghanistan saw this as an act against their religion.

During Thursday's class, we discussed about the definitions of imagine, the imagined, and the imaginary. Everyone said something that I never expected; it was clear that all three were somehow intertwined in their definitions. Contextually, the "imagined" is, in essence, a preconceived image that one party might have for something – I believe that everyone has their own "imagined." With such contrasting ways of how we view the world, it wouldn't be difficult to assume that everyone has different perspectives on the same subject. In other words, everyone could have different "imagined" for one thought. The Soviets saw Communism as a way out of economical and social distress. The United States saw it as an invasive plague that could eventually take over the world. Afghanistan saw it as an unwanted ideology that threatened their religion.

It certainly made me ponder about the likelihood of homogenization, or as the Introduction to Part VI mentioned, the notion of hybrid identities. Coming from a multi-ethnic country, I grew up with people of Chinese, Malay, and Indian descent. I studied in an international school and met people from all around the world. Pieterse introduced the idea of globalization through hybridity, in which a new society would be created where race, sexuality, class, and territory would be neutralized (for the lack of a better word). Does this really make for a better world, though? A world without prejudice would certainly be nirvana, but what about a world without borders?

Certainly, "one man's imagined community is another man's political prison." Perhaps some might think that a borderless globe would pose as the perfect community, but others might think of it as a world without political organization. Who decides what?

Thanks, Appadurai.