Anderson, too, had an exceedingly cosmopolitan and international career, spanning from the United States to Southeast Asia. His family background was steeped in the history of Empire and the history of Irish Nationalism in the nineteenth-century. He came from an Anglo-Irish family, and his Anglo-Irish father was a Chinese Maritime Customs Official during the 1930s. He was born in China, in 1936, during the rule of the Kuomintang, and educated in Britain and the United States. Anderson’s life was varied for an academic, even for one who specialised in politics. It mostly describes Anderson’s life, but its main focus is an attempt, by Anderson, to account for his own ideas and his own intellectual development. Life Beyond Boundaries is an intellectual memoir. In this short review I outline how this book fits with the rest of Anderson’s writings. His autobiography and memoir, Life beyond Boundaries, published in 2016, and written in the years prior to his death, is a worthy addition to this life and work. In many ways Anderson was a great generalist in an age of narrow specialists.
His essays always showed real understanding of his subjects. His books covered history, politics and literature. Anderson was also an expert on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, anti-colonial struggle, and South Asian literature. In Anderson’s case, that was the study of nations, nationalism, Colonial and post-Colonial Asia. He was part of the post-war generation of academic writers and researchers, particularly on the left, who revolutionised their chosen subjects and their chosen fields. Anderson, as a left-wing thinker and writer should be remembered, and his work ensures this.Īnderson was Professor of International Studies and Southeast Asia, at Cornell University. Anderson also produced excellent work on the realities of colonialism and imperialism in South-East Asia, in particular the 1965-1966 anti-communist massacres in Indonesia, and the crimes of the Suharto regime.
His book, Imagined Communities remains one of the best studies of the origins and development of nations and nationalism, and it is vital to anyone who is interested in the politics and history of nationalism under capitalism. Benedict Anderson, who sadly passed away in 2015, was one of the great left-wing political scientists and historians of the latter half of the twentieth century.
0 kommentar(er)
