Yue (Ivy) Blog #4: Reflect on your own position and experience with what makes you an “American” in reference to the other notions of “Americanness” Anderson describes in ch4.

In Chapter 4 of his book, Anderson describes the development of creole-centered institutions in the Americas, which borrowed profusely from European notions of capitalism and democracy. Anderson describes the movement of Europeans to the new world as intimately tied to the notion of print-capitalism, or the process by which formally exclusive knowledge became readily accessible to middle-class citizens. In a sense, this sharing of specific kinds of knowledge like the American constitution, or Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations leveled the playing field for a growing bourgeoisie. The intended or unintended result was the formation of imagined communities centered on political administration as it related to the middle classes particularly in the New World. In a sense, a greater inclusion of creoles and natives in the New World was in essence a self-serving priority. In Bolivia and other South American countries, the inclusion of natives was a defensive reaction against revolting sub-groups of disenfranchised population areas. In Brazil, the Portuguese monarchy invested huge sums to move its administrative functions across the Atlantic, which ultimately preserved Don Pedro’s hold on power against the Napoleonic threat. The unintended result however, was the creation of bureaucratic and administrative institutions, which set the foundations for the formation of modern societies based on early models of democracy and capitalism. In the case of North America, the formation of the United States was centered on interests concerning taxation.

In my opinion, Americanness is very much defined by the notion of contracts and recorded legal precedence. Americans in a sense live in a fair society but not necessarily free. By this I mean that American culture is very much determined by written history. I understand this because of my experience living in communist China. I would say that Chinese society is very much based on hierarchies previously delineated by a Confucian understanding of power (now more so by socioeconomic position). This kind of society tends to be submissive in relation to higher order groups.

Additionally, I believe that what makes Americanness (South and North American) is the critical interaction between the colonizing culture and the colonized native communities. In a sense, especially in South America where natives and imported slaves (and creoles as well) interbred to a point that racial differences become moot, the culture itself is a constant obsession with discovering that which has been lost of native history along with a longing for mercantile modernization with a simultaneous/active rejection of the foreign.

North American, or specifically the USA, is of course a collection of sovereign states bound by a federal union but in a sense it is not the same as the European Union though the federative organization is theoretically of the same kind. This involves a measure of history and language (though Anderson refutes this), a connectedness that is evident in the federal-state level of analysis but that differentially exists in other realms of society, which may or may not be visible or apparent or even real. Americanness can also be stated in the light of immigrantness. The North American continent with the exception of Mexico (but not really) is a nation less about reconciliation of a fragmented identity but the consolidation of a variety of sub-cultures. The effect is that the society becomes diverse enough to have sub-cultures but broad and accepting enough to allow them to coexist without critically debilitating inefficiencies. The function of culture after all is inclusion- in America.