Ana Mauad on Bán and Ellis

This essay asks whether the world could be (or could become) its own imagined community in the 21st century. Thinking with and through Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Mauad contemplates Anderson’s shift from defining the “nation” from a political perspective to defining it in cultural and symbolic ways, and uses that to examine both Ban’s essay and Ellis’ essay in the book Global Perspectives on the United States. Mauad is interested in the large gap that has opened up between the kinds of global emphasis one sees nowadays and the relatively established “new American intra- and contingent hemispheric studies” on the other. Both essays, she writes, raise the issue of how cultural expression can suggest meanings and even proposals for a new world in a new century, whether drawing on popular culture or on “high art.” But Mauad also brings into the discussion ideas developed by Brazilian anthropologist Renato Ortiz on mundializacao and ways this differs from what is commonly called globalization (at least in the U.S.).