Mayssa Chehata, Blog #8: Sub-Communities and the Nations they Exist Within

Looking back at my first post, I’m still in agreement with everything I wrote. My post was basically a stream of consciousness regarding Anderson and the formation of nations, and my views about that haven’t changed much throughout the course. What has changed, however, are my views about my position within nations, and how nations are created and shaped by their members.

I wrote in my first post mostly about nations defined as states/countries, but throughout the class, I am coming to think more about nations as they exist within and across borders. Racial groups, people with similar interests, religious groups, gangs, tribes, etc. This is how I think about nations now, about 10 weeks into our class. I think about our classroom as a nation, or rather as a community. The way we have found something that connects us (being a part of THEA/AFST322, coming to class every T/R from 11-1, watching the same films and sharing our various perspectives and sometimes intimate details about our personal lives and viewpoints) and formed a bond over those things.

In addition, through the films we have been watching and discussing, I am seeing the fundamental importance of communities/nations that exist within nations. We can see how within the army in Amigo, you have the larger nation of the entire army, then smaller sub-nations of each group and different posts/stations. And the dynamics and characteristics of the larger nation do not always reflect the intricacies of the culture of the smaller sub-communities within it. We see this phenomenon in almost all the films and readings we have consumed, from the skinhead community within the American nation in American History X, to the different racial groups again within the American nation in Who Killed Vincent Chin, and again with the American/ex-pat community within the Saipan nation. We see it in the readings as well, with Spivak’s self-immolating women within the larger Indian nation. The list goes on, but the point is that we see how these sub-communities draw from the larger nations/communities they are a part of, and that the larger nations are a product of the combination of all the sub-nations. And sometimes, we see one of those things taking over the other. For example, if you have the larger nations controlling the sub-communities, then you have abuse of hegemony or authoritarianism.

A project I would propose for the positive imagination of a nation as I see it now, 10 weeks into the course would maybe be along the lines of having everyone in the class say adjectives that describe themselves. Then, to have everyone say words that describe the class as a whole, the community. We would be writing all the words down as we go, and I think it would be interesting to see how the two lists of words match up, and if they do at all. This could show us the similarities between the individuals (or “sub-communities”) and the class as a whole (or the “larger nation”). Finally, we could look at each word pairing and try to determine if it is something that the individual contributed to the nation, or something that the individual received/learned from the greater classroom community. I’m really interested in this idea about how we affect our nations and how our nation is affected by us, and I think a close examination of that could be useful for understanding our individual positions in the class.