Curt Mills Blog #3

Do you speak English?  How does the United States* configure in Anderson’s notions on the role of language and literacy in imaging a nation?

Anderson is the propagator of the term “Imagined Communities,” and has the book by the very same name.  The only type of community that is real for Anderson it seems is one that is based on every day  face to face interaction.  For instance, in a sense, our course in Sex and Race may be a community for Anderson.  In some sense, we as a class are more of a community than even the United States a whole, or William and Mary, and so on. 

The United States is asterisked here, but I will choose it as my nation to comment on.  I am familiar with no other home, so it would disingenuous for me to comment on another.  The United States is a great nation, but is it a great community?  Myriad factors conspire to divide its citizens: race, wealth inequality, inequality of opportunity, land and geography (how much does someone from Maine have in common with someone from Idaho?), and diverse economy (how much does the West Virginia coal miner have in common with the Silicon Valley tech mogul?). 

The US is divided by language and literacy certainly, but not the MOST divided by language and literacy.  Our literacy numbers are high, and most people speak English.  The same cannot be said for say, Iraq, a country torn apart by war, and with less innate purpose as a country than the US (much of the modern Middle East was determined by the British Empire after WWI on a rather arbitrary basis).  Literacy is lower there, and there are multiple languages, religious sects, and dialects.  The divide between someone who speaks Arabic and someone who speaks Kurdish is probably a greater gulf than the divide between English and Spanish in the US (when the US and Mexico were fighting a war in the nineteenth century, Iraq or even the idea of Iraq was long from existing). 

Yes, I speak English.