It has been suggested that the nationalist imaginary must be understood as a particular democratic imaginary. More precisely, nationalism is a response to the question of democracy par excellence: Who are ‘the people’ in whom sovereignty is vested? This relationship between the nation and the democratic imaginary is easily overlooked if the nation is conceived of as, above all, a cultural artefact; worse, if culture is opposed to the political. This is what happens in The Nation and Its Fragments, Partha Chatterjee's (1993) discussion of post-colonial nationalism in Asia. His argument is that anti-colonial nationalism is unlike European nationalism, precisely because it does not imagine the space of the nation as a political domain. This is an important claim that needs to be addressed.

Chatterjee starts by acknowledging the importance of Benedict Anderson's influential book, Imagined Communities (1991) for animating fresh discussion about nationalism. ‘I have one central objection to Anderson's argument,’ Chatterjee writes. ‘If nationalisms in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain “modular” forms already made available to them by Europe and the Americas, what do they have left to imagine?’ (Chatterjee, 1993: 5). He is worried that Anderson, in a long tradition of European orientalism, denies agency to non-Europeans and/or non-Americans. ‘History, it would seem,’ he writes sarcastically,

Might Michel Foucault not have, in all seriousness, replied, ‘Yes, as a postcolonial subject, you are indeed a perpetual consumer of modernity’? Let us recall Foucault's argument about disciplinary apparatuses, at least in Discipline and Punish (1979) and the first volume of the History of Sexuality (1998): that the very things such apparatuses seek to discipline and control are already their effects. We are told over and over again, for example, that during the nineteenth century, efforts to control and discipline sexuality resulted in its proliferation. Slavoj Zizek extends the logic of this argument to the field of colonialism.