Benedict Anderson: Foreign Visitors to Keio University

2020/03/12

Professor Anderson (West School Building Hall, Mita)

On the morning of March 27, 2007, the West School Building Hall at Keio University's Mita Campus was filled with an air of anticipation. The audience was packed not only with Keio students but also with people who had flocked there just to catch a glimpse of him and hear him speak. After the lecture, a long line formed for autographs.

After a series of introductions, the West School Building Hall fell silent as the main guest, Professor Benedict Anderson, began to walk slowly onto the stage. In the silence, he spread out his lecture manuscript as usual and began to speak slowly, looking down at the pages as if addressing the audience personally.

The title of the lecture was "Can Nationalism (in Asia) Still Change?" *1. This was a title he devised in consideration of my personal request as the conference organizer to "talk about the interesting aspects of Asian nationalism." His approach was to situate nationalism within a long-term historical context and clarify the trends of 21st-century Asian nationalism.

Professor Anderson's visit to Keio University was realized as part of the Keio University 150th Anniversary Design the Future Fund. The program, titled "Changing Nationalism and Asia," was held over two days on March 26 and 27.

The program itself consisted of two parts: a workshop and a lecture. In the workshop, the dynamism of nationalism in Asia was examined from theoretical, historical, and empirical perspectives to explore the future of Asia and nationalism. Graduate students from Asia, Oceania, and the United States, selected through a paper screening process, engaged in active discussions. Professor Anderson and Professor Nicholas Dirks (then of Columbia University), a leading scholar of Indian history, were invited as workshop commentators, providing constructive and critical comments on individual papers and sessions. The lectures were held with Professor Dirks on March 26 and Professor Anderson on March 27. The scene described at the beginning depicts the lecture on the morning of the second day.

By the way, Professor Anderson stayed at The Prince Park Tower Tokyo in Shiba Park. Initially, we planned to use taxis for travel between the hotel and the campus, but he said he wanted to walk. He had already experienced a heart attack once and had been instructed by his doctor to eat well and get moderate exercise. During his stay, he was insistent on walking, sometimes enjoying the outside air for nearly an hour after a meal. There were always students by his side.

Professor Anderson loved debating with students. Showing no fatigue from the hours-long workshop, he went out to izakayas with the workshop participants on both nights. His friendly personality and his witty, outspoken manner naturally opened the hearts of the graduate students. It was a familiar scene: he would dodge their barrage of questions while throwing out puzzles of his own.

Professor Anderson was born on August 26, 1936, in Kunming, China, to an English mother and an Anglo-Irish father *2. He spent his childhood and youth in Shanghai, California, Colorado, London, and Waterford. He studied classics at Cambridge University and entered the graduate school of Cornell University in January 1958. It was there that he encountered Southeast Asian area studies. From 1961 to 1964, he conducted field research in Indonesia. Using not only Indonesian but also Javanese, he traveled all over Indonesia on a motorcycle. However, a report he wrote regarding the September 1965 coup was banned, and for 27 years starting in 1972, he was unable to set foot in Indonesia. During that time, he expanded his interests to Thailand and the Philippines.

In 1976, he became a professor in the Department of Government at Cornell University, and his critical remarks against contemporary political situations, especially the outrages of power, became even sharper. His Southeast Asian area studies were characterized by unconventional comparative perspectives and a unique narrative style *3.

However, not many readers recognize Professor Anderson solely as a Southeast Asian area researcher. This is because his 1983 book, "Imagined Communities" *4, opened a new frontier in nationalism studies. His arguments were clear and impactful.

He asserted that the nation is an imagined political community. This was made possible by print-capitalism, which brought about the spread of publications in vernacular languages, particularly newspapers. The spread of vernacular publications created a sense of unity among comrades who had never met, and the nation was constructed based on this. Furthermore, he pointed out that the wave of nationalism first arose in Latin America.

Despite its somewhat heterodox perspectives and analysis, within about ten years of its publication, the book came to be widely read around the world as a "classic" of nationalism studies. The audience gathered at Mita in 2007 also looked upon Professor Anderson as a leading authority on nationalism.

In his lecture, Professor Anderson organized the history of the development of nationalism and then spoke about the dynamism of nationalism in 21st-century Asia, amidst increasing movement of people within and outside the region and widening inequality. At the core of his theory of nationalism are always the rights and responsibilities of being a nation. Looking back thirteen years after the lecture, one gets a strong sense that his talk anticipated the changes of the times.

Above all, he emphasized the trans-border nature of nationalism as a contemporary characteristic. While preaching the importance of understanding history, he named a new 21st-century phenomenon "portable nationalism." In 2007, he argued that improvements in communication technology, such as the internet, had changed the media usage and consciousness of immigrants living in foreign lands. Information about one's birthplace is easily accessible, while the pressure to assimilate in the new country weakens. One maintains the identity of their country of birth and carries it across borders. A gap emerges between citizenship and being a nation. Even before the widespread adoption of smartphones like the iPhone, Professor Anderson argued that an era of portable nationalism that transcends time, space, and generations had arrived. This discussion seemed to foresee the phenomena of discrimination and xenophobia surrounding refugees and immigrants in the 2010s as a global trend.

At the same time, he mentioned the rights of minorities and the responsibilities of society and its residents. Using women's suffrage in the United States as an example, he argued that if women are treated as equals as "fellow Americans" within society, then that logic should also apply to homosexuals. The identity and rights of homosexuals become a compass for national identity as Americans. Here, he is not only questioning the responsibility of Americans as a nation but also highlighting an inherent crisis of national identity. This was a warning against intolerance toward others, something that became prominent in the 2010s.

And at the end of the lecture, Professor Anderson said: it is a bad thing when politics ceases to take responsibility; nationalism is not opening up a new horizon of liberation.

Since retiring from Cornell University in 2002, Professor Anderson traveled all over the world. The lectures he was invited to give were countless. At the same time, during the 2000s, he devoted much time to research on Chinese Indonesians and visited Indonesia frequently. A bundle of curiosity, he engaged in repeated discussions with local youth and intellectuals, feeling the changes in society firsthand. That experience was condensed into his lecture at Mita.

Professor Anderson clearly pointed out that 21st-century nationalism is a complex intertwining of two elements: trans-border nature and inward-looking nature. This is a phenomenon of nationalism not only in Asia but worldwide. The warning for the times he spoke of at Mita in 2007 is now being presented to us as a real-world problem more than ten years later.

Inviting Professor Anderson to Keio University was a long-held dream of mine. I studied abroad at Cornell University Graduate School from 1989 to 1992 and studied under him. Although I was a slow-moving and unworthy disciple, I managed to finish my doctoral dissertation in 2010. I became the last student whose doctoral dissertation he supervised.

On the afternoon of March 27, 2007, during a coffee break in the program, I (for the first time) asked Professor Anderson for an autograph. That signature remains on the wall of a small room on the 6th floor of the East Building.

Eight years after his visit to Keio, late on the night of December 12, 2015, Professor Anderson passed away due to a seizure in the small city of Batu, East Java. It was in the middle of a journey visiting the ruins across Java that he loved. However, the signature he left behind has spread throughout the world—in the world of academia and in the hearts of people.

*1 The lecture manuscript can be read in the Working Paper Series of the Keio University Institute for Journalism, Media & Communication Studies.

*2 For Professor Anderson's autobiography, see Benedict Anderson, "A Life Beyond Boundaries" (Japanese translation by Tsuyoshi Kato, NTT Publishing, 2009).

*3 Regarding the uniqueness of his Southeast Asian area studies, see Nobuto Yamamoto, "Flexible Comparative Thinking and Free Expression" (Shiso, no. 1108, 2016, pp. 7-23).

*4 Benedict Anderson, "Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism" (Japanese translation by Takashi Shiraishi and Saya Shiraishi, Shoiki Kobo Hayama, 2007).