Represented Communities: Fiji and World Decolonization Paperback - 2001 - 1st Edition

This book reconfigures the issues for the anthropology of nations and nationalism, away from nationalism as the culture of modernity, toward the nation-state as an artifact of American power. Benedict Anderson's vastly influential Imagined Communities led a generation of scholars to study national imaginaries, print capitalism, shared memories and identities. Now, Represented Communities offers an extensive and devastating critique of Anderson's approach. The authors focus not on imagination but on legal, ritual, and electoral representation in the formation of communities. They stress not modernity, but decolonization. They track consequences of nationalist sentiments, but also of nation-state realities. Their emphasis is not on memory and identity, but on will and power.

Fiji's story is one of legally entrenched racism and struggles for, against, and about democracy. Its dramatic crises reveal the force and limits of changing global political structures, empires to nation-states. Sophisticated and impassioned, this book portrays the era of decolonization not as the last wave as modern nationalism, but as the actual onset of the nation-state, with a fundamentally different politics of representation.