Blog 8: Our Community -Matt Antezana

In my first blog post I discussed Benedict Anderson's definition of a nation as an ""imagined political community and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign" (Anderson, 6). This was way back in the first week of the class at the beginning of the semester. Since then we have touched upon subjects such as nationalism, nationality, imperialism, language, feminism, and theories such as Spivak's subaltern. We have watched a variety of movies that have touched upon these topics that have aided in our understanding of these topics and the way they are portrayed in different forms of art. All the way we ourselves have grown as a community in the classroom.

I want to specifically touch upon one aspect of an imagined community that Anderson highlights and says is required for such a community. Anderson writes the community is imagined because "the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship" (Anderson, 7). This quote, in my opinion, describes our class. At the beginning of the semester we were simply a class filled with over thirty students who didn't really know each other and it seemed just like any other lecture class. As time went on trust began to build among us leading to people coming out of their shells either through talking or participating in the group activities. We have gone from a class to a community because we now engage in comfortable discourse and have built a comradeship. Since the beginning forming a community has been a highlight of the class and I believe that through our interactions we have accomplished this. We have all contributed to the community by either contributing to in-class activities and through our blogs where we have expressed our thoughts on the material of the class. The directors of the various films we have watched portrayed their thoughts through their film and we have learned to the same in our class in order to build a community. I feel that a project that would be vital to the positive imagination of our community would be to compose a short documentary style video of the entire class. I feel that such a video would show our transformation into a community instead of a class and display much of what we have learned. In future iterations of the class this could possibly be a documentary that is filmed in bits throughout the entire semester and presented at the end of the semester; to make such a project more coherent and representative of our class/community.