Imagined states : nationalism, utopia, and longing in oral cultures

Imagined States: Nationalism, Utopia and Longing in Oral Cultures. Edited by Luisa Del Giudice and Gerald Porter. (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2001. Pp. 224, introduction, illustrations, photographs, index. $22.95 paper) This is a hugely enjoyable collection, extending Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined communities into a treatment of "imagined states." It is a topical subject of more than disciplinary interest (similar studies in my field include David McCrone's Understanding Scotland and Devine and Logue's Being Scottish). Imagined States will be valued by all those interested in the construction of national and regional identities, including literary critics and historians, but it is particularly useful for the folklorist. Imagined States shows that landscapes of the mind depend on comparing personal experience with that of "the other" (whether through social class, ethnic origin or family unit). The first section, "Idealized States," opens with Luisa Del Giudice's "Mountains of Cheese and Rivers of Wine: Paesi di Cuccagna and other Gastronomic Utopias" (11-63). This essay explores the sense-satisfying land of Cuccagna (Cockayne), in Italy and beyond, from the sixteenth century onwards. Scholarly and convincing-illustrations include broadsides, paintings and festival recreations of Cuccagna-Del Giudice sheds light on how mental Utopias (and their formation in relation to less perfect realities) shape expectations for the future and are thereby altered, and demonstrates that "Italians came to associate Cuccagna with America as it was imagined and as immigrant propaganda-and immigrant narrative itself-came to depict it: the land of plenty" (48). Paradoxically, by enacting Cuccagna, they rendered the phenomenon "never actually a place but the desire for place-obsolete" (53). It is an intriguing premise which deserves further investigation; Del Giudice draws attention to her forthcoming work, In Search of Abundance: Mountains of Cheese, Rivers of Wine and other Italian Gastronomic Utopias. The following piece, Sadhand Naithan's "Prefaced Space: Tales of the Colonial British Collectors of Indian Folklore" (64-79), shows that "British colonial officers and missionaries created in the second half of the nineteenth century a tale about India suited to the interests of the colonial state" (77). Reimund Kvideland and Gerald Porter, in "Working the Railways, Constructing Navvy Identity" (80-97), look at how Norwegians constructed, through song, "a compensatory territory" relating to their physical environment (88). Parallels could be drawn-as the writers point out-with songs from the British and American traditions; the virile poetry of the Scottish Alexander Anderson "Surfaceman" (1845-1909) springs to mind in this context. In his Song of Labour Anderson celebrates his "toiling Brothers": "The God above hath made us one in flesh and blood with kings, / But the lower use is ours, and all the force of rougher things" (1). His, too, is an imagined state, bounded by railway lines, and informed by the potentially destructive power of the railway engine. "Demonized States," the middle section, shows how identities are created by hostile comparisons. Gerald Porter, in "'Who Talks of My Nation?' The Role of Wales, Scotland and Ireland in constructing 'Englishness'" (101-135), argues that England's self-image was formed against offensive stereotypes of their neighbors. Using broadsides, he concludes that "sentiments which led groups of 'us' to give themselves an ethnic/linguistic identity against a foreign and threatening 'them' was part of a project to create an unequally weighted union which still (just) survives" (132). …