"No Longer in a Future Heaven": Women and Nationalism in South Africa

All nationalisms are gendered, all are invented, and all are dangerous. Nations are not the natural flowering into time of the organic essence of a people, borne unscathed through the ages. Rather, as Ernest Gellner observes, nationalism nations where they do not exist. Most modern nations, despite their appeal to an august and immemorial past, are for the most part very recent inventions. Benedict Anderson thus argues that nations are best understood as communities, systems of representations whereby people come to imagine a shared experience of identification with an extended community. Nonetheless, nations are not simply phantasmagoria of mind. The term imagined carries in its train connotations of fiction and make-believe, moonshine and chimera. The term invented community, by contrast, refuses the conservative faith in essence and nature, while at the same time conveying more powerfully the implications of labor and creative ingenuity, technology and institutional power. Nations are elaborate social practices enacted through time, laboriously fabricated through the media and the printing press, in schools, churches, the myriad forms of popular culture, in trade unions and funerals, protest marches and uprisings. Nationalism both invents and performs social difference, enacting it ritualistically in Olympic extravaganzas, mass rallies and military displays, flag waving and costumery, and becoming thereby constitutive of people's identities. The green, black, and gold flag of the African National Congress, or a Palestinian kafiyeh, may be bits of colored cloth, but there is nothing fictive about their power to conjure up the loyalties of life and death, or to provoke the state's expert machinery of wrath. For this reason, nationalisms are dangerous, not, as Eric Hobsbawm would have it, in the sense that they should be opposed, but rather in the sense that they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence. Nationalisms are con-