“Imaginary Communities” examines the concept of the nation within Han Clothing Movement discourses to develop a new theory of nationalism. The analyses are based in the question: if nations are imagined communities, how exactly are they imagined? Beginning from a dialogue with a movement enthusiast in Shenzhen, in which he presents the unexpected proposition that “today’s China is not the real China,” this chapter combines Anderson’s materialist approach with Smith’s ethnosymbolic approach to the nation to reinterpret imagined communities, structured around mundane, repetitive rituals and homogenous, empty time, as imaginary communities, structured around larger than life fantasies which illusorily incorporate individuals through the narrative of national identity. This concept of imaginary communities is thenfounded in the distinction between the nation as an ideal, which I call the fantastic national imaginary, and the nation as reality, characterized by mundane and disappointing experience. Insofar as the solution to the failure of national identity is sought in the source of this dilemma, namely the larger than life national fantasy, the nation is analyzed herein as a self-reproducing system, perpetuated over time precisely in its failure.
In the land of “football-art”: football books, national identity and the building of imagined communities in modern Brazil