Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization

Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press - A Phoenix Book, 2001. First Printing . Trade Paperback. Fine. 6" x 9. 243 Pages Indexed. Nine of the first 13 pages and the back endpaper have extensive but light and erasible penciled notes. The remaining 233 pages are faultless. Illustrated with a nine page gallery of black and white photographs. In the year 2000, Fiji was the site of chaos: a coup d'etat; marital law; near civil war; local takeovers of police stations, factories, resorts, even military bases. Why has the social contract of the nation-state been unsustainable there? What is this social contract in real history, especially since World War II? This book reconfigures the issues for the anthropology of nations and nationalism, away from nationalism as the culture of modernity, toward the nation-state as an artifact of American power. Benedict Andersons's vastly influentiaal Imagined Communities led a generation of scholars to study, national imaginaries, print capitalism, shared memories and identities. Now this book offers an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's approach. The authors focus not on imagination but on legal, ritual, and electoral representation in the formation of comunities. They stress not modernity, but decolonizaiton. They track consequences not only of nationalist sentiments, but also of nation-state realities. Their emphasis is not on memory and identity, but on will and power. Fiji's story is one of legally entrenched racism and struggles for, against, and about democracy. Its dramatic crises reveall the force and ilimits of changing global poitical structures, empires to nation-states.