ABOLITION OF THE NATIONAL PARADIGM: THE CASE AGAINST BENEDICT ANDERSON AND MARIA TODOROVA’S RACELESS IMAGINARIES
ABOLITION OF THE NATIONAL PARADIGM: THE CASE AGAINST BENEDICT ANDERSON AND MARIA TODOROVA’S RACELESS IMAGINARIES

Summary/Abstract: This paper strategically uses “race” to challenge the claim under national paradigms that the absence of coloniality within nation-states excludes internal racial formations. With this in mind, I will examine two canonical national paradigms, the works of Benedict Anderson and Maria Todorova. Central to each of their paradigms is the incommensurability thesis of nationalism and racism, race, and nationality. Anderson and Todorova’s theses reflect today’s colonial amnesia of European historiography (Wilder 2003, 3; Kundrus 2011, 39; Baker 2018, 23). To argue the opposite – that modern nations are racial formations, that nations are not imagined but rather racialized communities – I will first outline the main points of their theses before moving to the comparative analysis of the Balkans and Latin American eugenics as an example of how race has played a role in the formation of nations and then conclude by exposing “racial capitalism” (Cox 1959; Williams 1994; DuBois 1969; Wilson-Gilmore 2007; Kelley 2002; Robinson 2000) as the silent background of Anderson and Todorova’s structural amnesia.

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