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Notes
1 Anderson Citation1998b, 227–228.
2 Anderson Citation1998b, 2.
3 Anderson Citation1998b, 2.
4 Hapa is the Hawaiian word for of mixed ethnicities.
5 I taught the Rizal course for almost a decade before I headed to graduate school. The class always began with his talents and academic accomplishments before we moved to his early life. I devoted the rest of the course to Rizal’s major writings and their impact on the political transformation of the Philippines, before ending with a class debate on whether Rizal deserved the title “national hero.” I never thought of comparing Rizal to Southeast Asians, East Asians, and Europeans who, in various ways, shared his sentiments and dreams.
6 Philippine political science followed the American tradition of turning out lawyers and bureaucrats. See Caoili Citation2005, 164–165.
7 At the University of the Philippines’ Department of English and Comparative Literature, the course on “World Literature” requires students to read the Iliad, Cassandra, The Ramayana, The Bhagavad Gita, Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart, Metamorphosis, The Plague, and the short stories “A Very Old Man with Wings,” by Gabriela Garcia Marquez, and “The Aleph” by Jorge Luis Borges. I am grateful to Professor Anna Melinda Testa-de Ocampo for sharing her English 12 syllabus.
8 How non-Filipinos know little of the Philippines is reflected in this this puzzled query by a Latin American scholar to Anderson: “Are you an evangelist for the Philippines?” Quoted in Aguilar Citation2015.
9 Anderson Citation2016, 25. On the family background of the Anderson’s see Anderson Citation1998a. See also Kreisler Citation2008.
10 Anderson Citation2016, 25–26. In an earlier self-description, Anderson wrote that in “English schools we were marked as ‘Irish,’ as we had been ‘American’ in Waterford [Ireland] and ‘English’ in California … [W]e were odd fowl there [in Waterford] too: the only family for hundreds of miles who ate rice regularly.” See Anderson Citation2003, 11, 9 (underscoring mine).
11 Loos Citation2014, 1.
12 On Anderson’s views on the changes in American higher education towards greater “professionalization” at the expense of the passionate search for an explanation, see Anderson Citation2016, 112,135–136, 138, 160–161, and 187–188.
13 “Looking at my skin, which was not white but pink-grey, I realized that it was close to the skin colour of albino animals (water buffaloes, cows, elephants, and so on), for which the Indonesians used the casual term bulai or bulé. So I told my young friends that I and the people who looked like me should be called bulé, not putih (white). They loved the idea and passed it around among other students they knew. Gradually it spread to the newspapers and magazines until it became part of everyday Indonesian language.” Anderson Citation2016, 77.
14 A retired government colleague noticed Ben’s detachment:
Despite [Anderson’s detached relations with the department of government,] he almost always attended department meetings, though he seldom weighed in. Wearing always his Indonesian long white safari shirt, Ben sat the at the meeting table invariably holding a copy of the New York Times open to reveal the crossword puzzle, which he proceeded to work with a pen throughout the meeting, smoking his small cigars or cigarettes as he quickly filled in the blanks. See Kramnick Citation2016, 9
I have to admit that even today, in spite of long residence in the US, many wonderful American friends, and an attachment to Black music of all sorts, I still feel, if not alienated, at least detached from American society and culture. Anderson Citation2016, 28
15 Anderson Citation1972b. Colleague and friend Professor Caroline S. Hau of Kyoto University prefers using “polyglot cosmopolitanism” to “Anglophone cosmopolitanism” in describing Anderson’s perspective because he:
read in 11 languages so he has access to the original texts in their original languages, whereas our Comparative Literature Program in [the University of the Philippines] is all Anglophone-mediated. For example, I first read Garcia Marquez in the excellent English translation by Rabassa, and then was completely bowled over even more when I read him in the original Spanish because his Spanish was so good, so poetic … It’s almost like reading two different books … One imagines Rizal also voraciously reading works in English, German, French, and even some Italian, plus Spanish and Latin and Greek of course. It is this polyglot cosmopolitanism, which is different from Anglophone cosmopolitanism, that is striking about Ben and Rizal. Caroline S. Hau, personal communication, September 11, 2016
16 Anderson Citation2016, 149.
17 Anderson Citation1990a. After publishing this essay, Anderson half-expected that Western intellectuals would say “the Javanese were and are primitive, and we are not.” His riposte:
Hitler, Reagan, Mao, Evita Peron, de Gaulle, Soekarno, Gandhi, Fidel Castro, Lenin and Khomeini: what rationality lay being their hold on people’s imagination? Was there a substratum of old ways of thinking about ‘power’ (mana, tédja) even in cultures that thought of themselves as completely modern? Much later on I was gratified to learn that Reagan never made important decisions before his wife had telephoned her fortune-teller, and that the top leaders of today’s Chinese Communist Party eagerly consult astrologers and feng shui masters – out of the limelight, of course. Anderson Citation2016, 118
18 Errington Citation1998, 190.
19 Anderson Citation1990a. His essays, “A Time of Darkness and a Time of Light: Transposition in Early Indonesian Nationalist Thought” and “Professional Dreams: Reflections on Two Javanese Classics” were republished in Anderson Citation1998b.
20 Anderson Citation1977. In A Life of Boundaries, Anderson wrote that he had “fully expected to be banned from Siam” after he published the essay. “Yet this did not happen.” He never explained why.
21 Loos Citation2014, 9.
22 In Ayal Citation1978, 193–247. When Thai scholars hit back at the piece by suggesting that Anderson knew little of the Thai language, his response was a superb translation of several modern Thai short stories, which he edited and co-translated with Mendiones Citation1985. What better way to show proof of socio-cultural sensitivity than translating the local literature!
23 Anderson Citation1986.
24 Anderson Citation1988.
25 Anderson refused to visit the Philippines while the dictator Ferdinand Marcos was in power. He also never went to Singapore.
26 “The First Filipino” and “Hard to Imagine” in Anderson Citation1998b. In his memoir, Anderson wrote:
I got permission to take eighteen months off to do my first real research on the Philippines. By the time, however, I realized that I could not bear to write about American colonialism and imperialism. Almost all the ‘American language’ scholarship focused on the American period and its aftermath. US scholars preferred to do this for linguistic reasons as well as, perhaps with mixed feelings, nationalist ones – on the premise that, although the US colonized the Philippines, its colonialism was more benevolent than that of other colonizing powers. Filipino scholars focused on the period for some of the same reasons, but in their case in response to a growing anti-American nationalist sentiment. Otherwise there were only a few Japanese scholars, mostly writing in a language I could not read. And there were practically no Spanish scholars interested at all. Anderson Citation2016, 100
27 Anderson Citation2012. What exactly did he mean?
Let me give you a simple example. Indonesia has a national language that is not colonial, represents no particular ethnic group, and is the basis of the country’s nationalism. India, which became independent at almost the same time, has no national language that is accepted everywhere, but India has been for sixty-plus years more or less a democratic state, while Indonesia has only once in a short while been democratic. These “opposites” – what do they explain to us, and how?
28 Anderson Citation1983, 1–8.
29 Anderson had such examples in mind:
No Japanese will be surprised by a comparison with China, since it has been made for centuries, the path is well trodden, and people usually have their minds made up beforehand. But a comparison of Japan with Austria or Mexico might catch the reader off her guard. Anderson Citation2016, 130
30 Anderson Citation2016, 150.
31 There is yet no biography of Perry Anderson, but he shares some of his background in a television interview. See Kreisler 2008. Apart from friendship and shared radicalism, Anderson’s “broadening” of his Southeast Asian mindset may also have to do with the company he kept. Tamara Loos made this observation as she watched Anderson shift from writing about Thai politics to film reviews. Accordingly since he was:
the type of scholar whose work is profoundly grounded in the interest of the company he keeps, it makes sense that a shift in his comradely communities and scholarly focus would occur simultaneously, as they did in his articles about Thailand published after the millennium. (Loos Citation2014, 12)
32 Ali, Khalili, and Clark Citation2016. Years after Imagined Communities came out, Ali and Anderson used to talk how banality had overwhelmed the book.
33 Anderson Citation2016, 157.
34 Anderson Citation2005, 1–2.
35 Anderson Citation2016, 166.
36 Anderson Citation2016, 166.
37 Edwards Citation2006.
38 Notably, Chatterjee Citation1994. See also Hobsbawm Citation1992, Tamir Citation1995: 418–400, Motyl Citation2002: 233–250, well as Wollman and Spencer Citation2007, 5–8.
39 Anderson could speak and write Bahasa Indonesia, Dutch, English, Tagalog, German, Greek, French, Javanese, Latin, Spanish, and Thai. He also knows elementary Russian. See Heer Citation2015.
40 For a sample of Anderson’s prokem-influenced writings, see Anderson Citation1990b and Citation1990c. On Prokem, see Chambert-Loir Citation1984, 105–117.
41 When writing to his Filipino students, he would use the word “cosa,” the local gangster’s way of referring to a friend or a “homie.” Candaliza-Gutierres Citation2018: 193–237.
42 Anderson Citation2016, 169.
43 I am grateful to Professor Tamara Loos of the Cornell University Department of History for this information.
44 Anderson Citation2016, 74.
45 Anderson Citation2016, 78.
46 Anderson Citation2016, 74.
47 Cheah Citation2015.
48 See for example Danforth Citation2013.
49 Khazaleh Citation2005.
50 Anderson Citation2016, 184.
51 Sherman Citation2016.
52 Anderson Citation2016, 161.
53 In a 1994, a Dutch interviewer asked Anderson a last “personal question” which stumped him:
Interviewer: “Which country would you be ready to die for?” Anderson sighed and took his time to answer prompting the interviewer to add, “Is it such a difficult question?” The author of Imagined Communities finally answered: “Yes I think that for someone with so, as it were, many nations inside him, it would depend very much on the circumstances.” The interviewer further asked: “So you are not yet sure then?” Anderson added: “Put it this way, if I was called up for the Gulf War I would be in the first plane to Canada, I mean no way.” Interviewer: You would run? Anderson: “Yes I would run.” Then a pause, and these last sentences: “If … I simply cannot give you the answer for that. I simply don’t know. Pretty one does not know until the time comes.” End of interview
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Patricio N. Abinales
Patricio N. Abinales is a Professor of Asian Studies at the School of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa. Benedict Anderson was his dissertation adviser, mentor, and ka-cosa. He is grateful to Carol Hau for her comments and suggestions, and Ben Abel and Jeff Hadler for explaining prokem.