This is a post I am making up for the first week of school--shopping period!!

In the first week, we read pieces from Anderson's Imagined Communities, and since then we've covered so much about different imagined communities that it's difficult to think of Anderson's ideas independently. What interests me the most concerning Anderson's ideas of nationalism and community directly relate back to his suggestion that in an imagined community of the nation, “regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship” (Anderson p.7). The biggest and most complicated imagined community i can think of at the top of my head happens to be the United States. Since I am an Ethnic Studies concentrator, this quote made me think a lot about what Anderson actually means about "horizontal comradeship," and how he might apply that to the numerous different ethnic, especially racial communities across the nation. Growing up in a huge Koreatown, I never considered myself "american" until high school. Before that, I was just "Korean." So if I dont consider myself part of the apple-pie baseball larger american nation, am i still part of a physical imagined community called america? is that even possible, for an imagined community to be validified just by a common piece of land that we are living on? through citizenship and official documents? i guess what i want to say is that the nation may exist (called america) but there really isnt anything connecting different american communities through a "horizontal comradeship." I wonder what Anderson would say to this.