Benedict Anderson, Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government and Asian Studies at Cornell University, and author, most famously, of Imagined Communities (1983) passed away in December, 2015. Here, Vicente Rafael offers some reflections in memoriam.
I first met Ben Anderson in 1979 when I began my graduate work at Cornell. He invited me to his home for dinner some 20 miles from Ithaca in a town improbably called Freeville—once the location of a juvenile detention facility called the George Junior Republic that had been the model for the Iwahig Penal Colony in the Philippines. Appropriately enough for Ben—a connoisseur of irony—his home used to be the warden’s who had to leave town hurriedly because of some scandal.
My office was directly above his in an old house that served as the site for the Modern Indonesia Project, more commonly known as 102 West Avenue by its denizens. It was a former fraternity house whose members had been kicked out of campus for some transgression, so we were essentially in frat row. The chairs and tables were scarred and stained with cigarette burns and coffee cups, the doors were cracked, the stairs creaked and the parts of the balustrade at times came off as you held on to them. Faculty, students and visiting professors worked in various offices, often late into the night, meeting during evening seminars and weekly brown bags featuring speakers ranging from diplomats to foreign scholars. In the summers, the frat boys sunbathed on the roofs, held beer balloon wars and played very loud rock and roll around us. The basement was full of boxes of file folders, which I always thought were Ben’s research notes, turning the place into a veritable firetrap. 102 West Ave., in short, was an ideal place to work. It’s ramshackle quality lent to it the feel of a refugee camp: precarious, resistant to domestication, but also ripe with insurgent possibilities. At 102, unexpected connections grew into friendships that led people into paths other than those they thought they had embarked on. Its informal atmosphere allowed for explorations of all sorts that deconstructed and deviated from the disciplinary formations that fixed and fixated many of us. Firmly but gently, Ben—sitting in his office, presiding over seminars, asking questions that always surprised and dis-oriented—served as the tutelary spirit of 102.
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Reblogged this on Progressive Geographies and commented:
Vicente Rafael on Benedict Anderson at the Society and Space open site.
Reblogged this on Black Coffee Politics and commented:
I’ve still been coming to terms with Benedict Anderson’s death. Not because I knew him, and not because I obsessively read him, but rather because I didn’t read him well enough — I read his words casually and without mediation. I knew his famous definition of nations as imagined political communities – imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign – and yet I failed to really grapple with his ideas on creole nationalism and national pilgrimage in the Americas, the fall of Latin’s hegemony in sixteenth century Europe and the corresponding emergence of print-capitalism, and the creation of official nationalisms in Europe starting in the early nineteenth century (among the other ideas that are packed into that small book).
I missed a man I never met because I didn’t do my reading and I knew it. When he died in December, I went back and finally completed Imagined Communities, cover to cover, to try and fill the void of my regret.