Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2001"

Masculinities and culture

Abstract: Series editor's foreword Introduction and acknowledgements What is masculinity? Masculinities and the Imperial imaginary Understanding masculinities Masculinities and the notion of 'crisis' The commercialization of masculinities From the 'new man' to the 'new lad' 'Millennium masculinity' Researching masculinities today Glossary References Index.

The Enigma of the Gift

Abstract: The Enigma of the Gift. MAURICE GODELIER. Translated by Nora Scott. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press and Polity Press in Association with Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 1999; 256 pp. It is difficult to stifle a yawn in picking up yet another book about gift giving, not least another book about Melanesian exchange. So it is refreshing that Godelier's first words are: "Why this book? Why yet another analysis of gift exchange . . . ?" (p. 1). His answer is a spirited and eloquent assertion of the relevance of understanding gift giving in the modern world. We live in a time when market economies exclude massive numbers of people. In the wealthiest of nations, let alone the poorest, thousands have taken to begging in the streets, many of them homeless. Yet, even as conservatism shifts it ever further away from economic intervention, the state remains charged with reintegrating the dispossessed into society. And so, the call to charity is increasingly heard: to give, to share. Even in the secularized West, the gift is back. If the socially excluded provide the moral incentive for this book, Godelier's dissatisfaction with aspects of Mauss' Essai sur le Don provides its intellectual stimulus: The Enigma of the Gift is an attempt to "complete Mauss' anthropological analysis" (p. 104). To this end, the first half of the book reworks Mauss, with some effective swipes at LeviStrauss, Lacan, and others along the way, most particularly at their assertions that the imaginary has primacy over the symbolic. The remainder of the book recapitulates much of Godelier's previous publications on exchange and social reproduction but ventures also onto new ground in grappling with unresolved problems in that earlier work. Drawing from Annette Weiner's Inalienable Possessions, Godelier argues that to understand the production and reproduction of society, we must focus not only on gifts and exchange as Mauss and others have argued, but also on what is not given, those things (sacred objects and persons, heirlooms, secret myths, names) that are distinguished by the fact that they must not be given. Using his Baruya data to illuminating effect, he argues that these are the anchors or "realities" from which the imaginary realm constructs and develops individual and collective identities. This is not the easiest of books to read and would not be suitable for any but the most advanced student audience. Though far from the worst offender among those who resist concessions to the reader, Godelier propagates his fair share of enormously long, baroquely constructed sentences. Some border on the unprocessable and, along with occasional, prolonged flights of rhetorical questioning, leave the reader with the uneasy feeling that smoke and mirrors are being deployed to hasten the analysis past dangerous ground. Still, there is much to recommend in this thought-provoking book. Godelier's insistence, with Wiener, that we pay more heed to what cannot be given is well taken, especially for the case of Melanesian societies, where at the core of clans and even "tribes" are often found the most valuable of heirlooms. Among the Yangoru Boiken with whom I am acquainted, these are the largest and "blackest" of the shell rings, the suwanga, personified as the clan's wala spirit. Though otherwise indistinguishable from other shell rings, all of which feature prominently in exchange, these should never be given away or, if they are, they must be retrieved at the earliest opportunity on pain of catastrophe. Suwanga, it is said, are the "bone" of the clan, the anchor of its identity, precisely as Godelier claims. Also intriguing is Godelier's connection of such anchors to his particular notion of the sacred. Along with other sacra, these are concretizations of a certain type of (false) relationship that humans entertain with the origin of things. The sacred is a realm that humans have populated with imaginary duplicates of themselves. …

Constraining metaphors and the transnationalisation of spaces in Berlin

Abstract: This paper deals with the impact of the formal principle of membership on the public and scholarly narratives of immigrants' presence in society. It argues that 'ghetto' is a root metaphor of German political culture and explores how this concept, which situates minorities in stigmatised ethno-cultural sites in the city, confines the frameworks and the terminology of immigration debates and the representation of immigrants in the social imaginary in Germany. The ghetto trope of immigrant discourse in Berlin reduces the inscription of difference and belonging in urban space to a simple model of seclusion based on ethnic ties. This constructs a blindness to the transnational spaces of German Turks which provide an arena for the reimagination and negotiation of Turkish immigrants' sociality and belonging to Berlin beyond the given categories of ethnicity and community.

About the Imaginary

Abstract: Do you ever know the book? Yeah, this is a very interesting book to read. As we told previously, reading is not kind of obligation activity to do when we have to obligate. Reading should be a habit, a good habit. By reading, you can open the new world and get the power from the world. Everything can be gained through the book. Well in brief, book is very powerful. As what we offer you right here, this imaginary is as one of reading book for you.

Outlines of a Topography of Cruelty: Citizenship and Civility in the Era of Global Violence

Abstract: With this pretentious title, I want to continue investigating a nexus of problems, both theoretical and philosophical, which I already touched upon several times – particularly in my Wellek Lectures at Irvine in 1996.1 The term “cruelty” is chosen by convention (but with some literary references in mind) to indicate those forms of extreme violence, either intentional or systemic, physical or moral – although such distinctions become questionable precisely when we cross the lines of extremity – that, so to speak, appear to us to be “worse than death.” It is my hypothesis, generally speaking, that the actual or virtual looming of cruelty represents for politics, and particularly for today’s politics in the framework of socalled globalization, a crucial experiment in which the very possibility of politics is at stake. For the speculative idea of a politics of politics, or a politics in the second degree, which aims at creating, recreating, and conserving the set of conditions within which politics as a collective participation in public affairs is possible or is not made absolutely impossible, I borrow the term “civility” – which indeed has many other uses. It is certainly an ambiguous term, but I think that its connotations are preferable to those of, say, civilization, socialization, police and policing, politeness, etc. In particular, “civility” does not necessarily involve the idea of a suppression of “conflicts” and “antagonisms” in society, as if they were always the harbingers of violence and not the opposite. Much, if not most, of the extreme violence we are led to discuss is the result of a blind political preference for “consensus” and “peace,” not to speak of the implementation of law and order policies on a global scale. This, among other reasons, is what leads me to discuss these issues in terms of “topography,” by which I understand at the same time a concrete, spatial, geographical, or geopolitical perspective – for instance taking into account such shifting distinctions as “North and South,” “center and periphery,” “this side of the border or across the border,” “global and local,” etc. – and an abstract, speculative perspective, meaning that the causes and effects of extreme violence are not produced on one and the same stage, but on different “scenes” or “stages,” which can be pictured as “real” and “virtual” or “imaginary” – but the imaginary and the virtual are probably no less material, no less determining than the real. This paper is based on a talk which I was asked to deliver in November 1999 for the opening of the Graduate Course in Humanitarian Action at the University of Geneva.2 This will explain why the issues of citizenship and segregation,

Haciendo que hacer - cultivating a Mestiza worldview and academic achievement: Braiding cultural knowledge into educational research, policy, practice

Abstract: In this article Francisca E Gonzalez shifts the focus from a deficit view of cultural knowledge to an imaginary of the formation of identities and integrity braided with the law, policy, and social formations. In this way, cultural practices cultivate a unique worldview with implications for K-12 educational excellence and academic achievement. Gonzalez situates her research within the national discourse on educational reform so as to direct educational researchers', policy makers', and educators' thinking of young Mexicanas as pensadoras who interrogate the social order, and who give meaning to learning, knowing, and power. She describes a study intended to explore the development of womanhood among young Mexicanas beginning with an explanation of a theoretical lens, a looking prism of critical race feminisms and Latina critical theory interpretive frameworks. Then she explains the study's multimethodological approach of trenzas y mestizaje, the braiding of theory, qualitative research strategies, and a ...

Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method

Abstract: Thomas A. Gregor and Donald Tuzin, eds., Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 343 pages.This is a collection of 14 articles, the first of which is Thomas Gregor's and Donald Tuzin's "theoretical orientation." Even from the Acknowledgments, it is clear that Gregor and Tuzin are proud, and justifiably so, to have produced "...the first book to systematically compare the cultures of Melanesia and Amazonia, and to consider the remarkable parallels and illuminating differences that exist between them" (p. ix). Taking the two regions as one (the imaginary "Melazonia," as Hugh-Jones dubs it) is a big task, and one that I suspect many anthropologists have wondered about, but found too daunting to take further than imagining what might explain those parallels and differences. So I congratulate the editors on putting together this project. They are also to be commended, as are the other authors, for doing what is all too seldom done in relatively large collections of articles: each author specifically engages other contributors' articles; in addition, each article is introduced by a paragraph which briefly summarizes the focus of the article and recommends other articles that could fruitfully be read in relation to it.Gregor and Tuzin's introduction reviews the history of comparative method in the discipline, particularly in American anthropology. They assert that comparison is indeed possible and, in fact, is anthropology's primary contribution. They choose gender as the organizing principle for their comparison because "...the resemblance among the societies in Melazonia that stands out most dramatically is gender" (p. 8). Moreover, "[Gender] is an inherently integrative subject, bringing together intellectual perspectives derived from such diverse areas as human biology, environmental studies, psychology, social anthropology, and the humanities" (p. 8).As the editors point out (p. 10), Descola is the only contributor who takes issue with this perspective, arguing that gender is not so central, at least in Amazonia. However, I question the conclusions of a researcher who refers to gender as a "fashionable anthropological topic" (p. 92) and who describes Jivaroan Achuar co-wives' opposition to a violent husband as culminating in "...even a strike in the kitchen" (p. 100). This sort of comment implicitly degrades the extra-domestic roles of women/wives, and perhaps more so demonstrates an inappropriate application of the domestic/public dichotomy. It also implies an employer/labourer relationship between husband and co-wives which is quite thoroughly inappropriate.Many of the articles (including Bonnemere, Hill and Biersack) focus on "male initiations" as "making men" (Papua New Guinea case studies) as opposed to "renewing the cosmos" (Amazonian examples). This difference is then related in interesting ways to differing ideas of the origins of the cosmos and of living species (Bonnemere, 41). Hill compares "marked" and "unmarked cults" across the two regions, and looks also at the parallels in childbirth rites. Biersack (rather unfairly) criticizes Turner and Van Gennep for not seeing the reproductive politics in male-focussed rituals. In her analysis of a ritual practiced by the Paiela of the Papua New Guinea Highlands in order to grow boys' hair and bodies,she makes an original point that the goal is to make them into not men, but husbands. One might reasonably ask, though, whether it is indeed making them into potential fathers instead, and whether that is an important distinction to draw. …

Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics

Abstract: 1. Approaching the Question of Japanese Identity and Nationalism 2. 'Overcoming Modernity': Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Identity 3. Uneasy with the Modern: the Postwar Revival of the Modern and the Return of Dissent 4. The Age of Rapid Economic Growth and Romantic Resurgence - Mass Society and the Erosion of Popular Politics and the Social Imaginary 5. Back to Identity: 'Postmodernity,' Nihonjinron, and the Desire of the Other 6. Japan in the 1990s and Beyond - Identity Crises in Late Modern Conditions 7. Japanese Nationalism in the Late Modern World

Great Walls of Discourse and Other Adventures in Cultural China

Abstract: "China" and "the West," "us" and "them," the "subject" and the "non-subject" - these and other dualisms furnish China watchers, both inside and outside China, with a pervasive, ready-made set of definitions immune to empirical disproof. But what does this language of essential difference accomplish? The essays in this book are an attempt to cut short the recitation of differences and to answer this question. In six interpretive studies of China, the author examines the ways in which the networks of assumption and consensus that make communication possible within a discipline affect collective thinking about the object of study. Among other subjects, these essays offer a historical and historiographical introduction to the problem of comparison and deal with translation, religious proselytisation, semiotics, linguistics, cultural bilingualism, writing systems, the career of postmodernism in China, and the role of China as an imaginary model for postmodernity in the West. Against the reigning simplifications, these essays seek to restore the interpretation of China to the complexity and impurity of the historical situations in which it is always caught. The chief goal of the essays in this book is not to expose errors in interpreting China but to use these misunderstandings as a basis for devising better methodologies for comparative studies.

Ghana's Concert Party Theatre

Abstract: Preliminary Table of Contents: Acknowledgments Note on Orthography 1. Introduction 2. Reading Blackface in West Africa: Wonders Taken for Signs 3. "The Rowdy Lot Created the Usual Disturbance": Concerts and Emergent Publics, 1895-1927 4. "Ohia Ma Adwennwen," or "Use Your Gumption!": The Pragmatics of Performance, 1927- 1945 5. Improvising Popular Traveling Theatre: The Poetics of Invention 6. "This is Actually a Good Interpretation of Modern Civilization": Staging the Social Imaginary, 1946-1966 Notes Bibliography

'Pataphysics: The Poetics of an Imaginary Science

Abstract: A critical look at the historical and cultural implications of Alfred Jarry's pseudoscience, pataphysics 'Pataphysics, what Alfred Jarry calls "the science of imaginary solutions," has until now gone largely ignored by literary scholars, due in part to its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity. Nevertheless, this capricious philosophy has inspired nearly one hundred years of avant-garde experimentation. Christian Bok redresses this critical omission by tracing the tangled history of pataphysics, discussing the tension between science and poetics, in order to demonstrate that pataphysics constitutes an intrinsic, but neglected, cornerstone of postmodernity itself. Bok examines the work of Jarry, arguing that it represents a humorous addendum to the philosophy of Nietzsche, while also considering the influence of 'pataphysics upon the poetic legacy of the twentieth century, particularly the work of Italian Futurists, French Oulipians, and Canadian Jarryites. Bok resorts to the radical poetics of such contemporary philosophers as Delauze, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Serres in order to explicate the 'pataphysical relationship between rationalism and its discontents. Bok draws on a wide range of reading in poetry and theory to establish a firm historical ground for understanding the influence of 'pataphysics - all the while making a variety of seemingly difficult or obscure material accessible in a surprisingly charming and poetic manner. A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, his book raises important historical, cultural, and theoretical issues germane to the production and reception of poetry, how we think about it, how we write it, how we read it, and what sorts of claims it makes upon our understanding.

Interacting with Babylon 5: Fan Performances in a Media Universe

Abstract: Much of the pleasure of science fiction and fantasy stems from the genres' ability to transport fans into imaginary worlds that often feel more "real" than ordinary life. This pioneering book uses the insights of performance theory to explore how fans of the television show "Babylon 5" actively immerse themselves in its imaginary environment by role-playing games and fan fiction, through which the fans perform-make real-fantasies they previously watched on television. Kurt Lancaster opens with a background analysis of "Babylon 5", including creator-producer J. Michael Straczynski's online interaction with fans. Then, he thoroughly examines the performance aspects of all the participatory media surrounding the show - the role-playing game, collectable card game, war game, CD-ROM "guidebook," fan fiction, and web pages. His use of performance theory offers a new way of understanding the enormous popularity of imaginary entertainment environments and the fandom surrounding other popular sites of science fiction and fantasy, including "Star Trek", "Star Wars", and J. R. R. Tolkien's "Middle-earth". Kurt Lancaster has taught at New York University and currently serves as a lecturer on the literature faculty at MIT. He is the author of "Warlocks and Warpdrive: Contemporary Fantasy Entertainments with Interactive and Virtual Environments".

National Belonging and Cultural Difference: South Africa and the Global Imaginary

Abstract: For at least the last two-and-a-half decades, critical theory in the humanities and social sciences has been concerned, amongst other things, with exploding the myths and fictions of nationalist thought. Instead of the coherence of 'imagined communities', or even the unity of the individual subject, it emphasises the multiple, shifting, fragmented and often contradictory modes of identification that characterise what are referred to variously as the 'postmodern', 'postcolonial', 'posthistorical' or 'postideological' conditions of the contemporary world. Yet recent history has seen a burgeoning of nationalist sentiments and struggles, and numerous bloody wars have been fought over inclusive and exclusive conceptions of identity. In less violent, although no less compelling, ways, countries such as South Africa are struggling with the competing demands of difference and unity as they seek to reconstruct themselves in more humane and equitable ways. Far from disappearing, arguments about national belonging a...

Framing 'India': The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture

Abstract: This book explores what Columbus searched for but did not find: India. Rather than study the geographical area denoted by that word, it focuses on the figures of India and the East in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European thought. By analyzing how these figures functioned, Framing India sketches the emergence of a European colonial imaginary: ways of thinking, acting, and representing patterns of behavior that made India productive (in all senses of the word) for early modern Europe. Through careful readings of early modern cartography, Cam>es s The Lusiads, Fletcher s The Island Princess, Dryden s Amboyna, and Shakespeare s A Midsummer Night s Dream, the author reveals the subtle but formative relationships between material practices and artistic representations of India. While placing particular emphasis on England s stage representations, the book also describes England s belated entry into and eventual success in Eastern trade and colonization within broader historical and intellectual contexts. Throughout, the author draws upon a wide range of philosophical and literary texts, maps, and historical documents.

Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the U.S. Latino Imaginary

Abstract: In the corrido ‘‘Tres veces mojado’’ by the Mexican norteño group Los Tigres del Norte, Central Americans personify the (un)sung heroes of legendary border crossing, their monumental efforts to reach safe haven in the United States undocumented and unrecognized. In the film El Norte (1984), Maya-Quiché brother and sister Enrique and Rosita cross the perilous borders between Guatemala, Mexico, and the United States to escape Guatemala’s civil war and its repression of indigenous communities. In an episode of the defunct television series 21 Jump Street, detective Doug Penhall marries a young ‘‘illegal’’ Salvadoran woman who is deported and ‘‘disappears’’ in El Salvador. Richard Boyle’s Salvadoran girlfriend in Oliver Stone’s film Salvador (1985) faces a similar fate as she crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, only to be plucked from a bus by immigration officers. In these popular musical and visual texts, Central Americans are featured in their own border narratives while playing the role of refugee in a growing corpus of U.S. Latino texts. Many of these texts produced by the mass media in the U.S. Latino cultural boom create an image of Central Americans as political refugees who, after fleeing locally manufactured repression, death squads, and wars south of the United States are redemptively transformed into U.S. Latino (im)migrants. Reality, however, confounds this image. Displaced first by the Reagan-Bush geopolitics in the Caribbean and in Central America and now by the global economy of the new millennium, Central American refugees represent the contradictions of U.S. policies and politics in the region. Victims of the disorder and violence

From distance and uncertainty to research and pedagogy in the Borderlands: implications for the future of intercultural communication

Abstract: Thus, their new subjectivity emerges in the process of drawing borders around their old subject positions, a process that constitutes them as nascent specular border intellectuals Their contemplation of the condition of their lives represents a freedom, or at least an attempt to have freedom, from the politics of imaginary identification and opposition, from conflation of identity and location, and so on - in short, from the varied and powerful forms of suturing that are represented by and instrumental in the construction of their sedimented culture The process of decoding as well as the emerging command of literacy permits them a gradual shift from the confines of the imaginary to the outer edges of the symbolic realm

The ability of children with imaginary companions to differentiate between fantasy and reality

Abstract: This study investigated the ability of children with and without imaginary companions (N = 80) aged 4-8 years to differentiate fantasy from reality. Following children's descriptions of a monster, a monster-shaped silhouette was unexpectedly projected in the room. Video-recordings of each child's reaction to the silhouette and responses to a subsequent series of questions indicated that a significantly larger number of imaginary companion than non-imaginary companion children thought that an imaginary entity could be reflected in reality. However, as a number of nonimaginary companion children also thought that an imaginary entity could be reflected in reality, differences in children's level of credulity, rather than the presence or absence of the imaginary companion, was considered to account for the fantasy- reality confusion.

Keyframes : popular cinema and cultural studies

Abstract: Introduction Section 1: Woman as Inter/National Sign 1. '"You've Been in My Life So Long I Can't Remember Anything Else": Into the Labyrinth with Ripley and the Alien' Pamela Church Gibson 2. 'Warrior Marks: Global Womanism's Neo-Colonial Discourse in a Multicultural Context' Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan 3. '"Daddy, Where's the FBI Warning?": Constructing the Video Spectator' Ina Rae Hark 4. 'Romance And/As Tourism: Heritage Whiteness and the (Inter)National Imaginary in the New Woman's Film Diane Negra 5. 'Race as Spectacle, Feminism as Alibi: Representing the Civil Rights Era in the 1990s' Sharon Willis Section 2: New Constellations: Stars 6. 'Judy on the Net: Judy Garland and 'The Gay Thing' Revisited' Steven Cohan 7. 'Jackie Chan and the Black Connection' Gina Marchetti 8. 'Stardom and Serial Fantasies: Thomas Harris's Hannibal' Linda Mizejewski 9. 'Learning From Bruce Lee: Pedagogy and Political Correctness in Marial Arts Cinema' Meaghan Morris 10. 'The Bicultural Text: Cheech Marin's Born in East L.A.' Chon Noriega Section 3: Moving Desires 11. 'The Voice of Pornography: Tracking the Subject Through the Sonic Spaces of Gay-Male Moving Image Pornography' Richard Cante and Angelo Restivo 12. 'Nostalgia of the New Wave: Structure in Wong Kar-wai's Happy Together Rey Chow 13. 'Mario Lanza and the "Fourth World"' Marcia Landy 14. 'Devouring Creation: Cannibalism, Sodomy and the Scene of Analysis in Suddenly Last Summer' Kevin Ohi 15. 'Queer Bollywood, or "I'm the Player, You're the Naive One": Patterns of Sexual Subversion in Recent Indian Popular Cinema' Thomas Waugh 16. 'Cinema Studies Doesn't Matter Or, I Know What You Did Last Semester' Toby Miller 17. '12 Monkeys, Postmodernism and the Urban: Toward a New Method' Matthew Ruben 18. 'Terminator Technology: Hollywood, History and Technology' Paul Smith 19. 'Compulsory Viewing for Every Citizen: Mr. Smith and the Rhetoric of Reception' Eric Smoodin 20. 'Standardizing Professionalism and Showmanship: The Performance of Motion Picture Projectionists During the Early Sync-Sound Era' Steve Wurtzler 21. 'States of Emergency' Patricia Zimmermann Contributor Notes

Around Quitting Time: Work and Middle-Class Fantasy in American Fiction

Abstract: Virtually since its inception, the United States has nurtured a dreamlike and often delirious image of itself as an essentially classless society. Given the stark levels of social inequality that have actually existed and that continue today, what sustains this atonce hopelessly ideological and breathlessly utopian mirage? In Around Quitting Time Robert Seguin investigates this question, focusing on a series of modern writers who were acutely sensitive to the American web of ideology and utopic vision in order to argue that a pervasive middle-class imaginary is the key to the enigma of class in America. Tracing connections between the reconstruction of the labor process and the aesthetic dilemmas of modernism, between the emergence of the modern state and the structure of narrative, Seguin analyzes the work of Nathanael West, Ernest Hemingway, Willa Cather, John Barth, and others. These fictional narratives serve to demonstrate for Seguin the pattern of social sites and cultural phenomenon that have emerged where work and leisure, production and consumption, and activity and passivity coincide. He reveals how, by creating pathways between these seemingly opposed domains, the middle-class imaginary at once captures and suspends the dynamics of social class and opens out onto a political and cultural terrain where class is both omnipresent and invisible. Aroung Quitting Time will interest critics and historians of modern U.S. culture, literary scholars, and those who explore the interaction between economic and cultural forms.

A Staggered Orientalism: The Cape-to-Cairo Imaginary

Abstract: Cecil Rhodes's vision of an all-British "Cape-to-Cairo" road, rail, and telegraph route is addressed by a reconstruction of the cultural matrix that appears to have held this concept before the public eye for nearly five decades. This cultural matrix constitutes a kind of colonial and imperial imaginary, which generated a particular founding myth for the colonial state of the Union of South Africa in 1910 and which also lent to foreign visitors, tourists, and immigrants a readily understood interpretation of South Africa and the Cape as "Mediterranean" rather than as "African." This essay approaches the material from four broad emphases: first, the neo-Hegelian tropology of pre–World War I Oxford idealist philosophy, which celebrates the "dawning of consciousness" in the subcontinent with the advent of union in 1910 and which the essay relates to Hegel's views on Africa and Egypt; second, the ubiquitous influence of Freemasonry in Britain and the British Empire at the turn of the nineteenth century, in particular Freemasonry's concern with Egyptology; third, the varied impulses behind the concept of the Cape as Mediterranean, from climate to architecture, tourism, and ethnography; and fourth, the mutually supporting roles of journalism, travel, and performance in rehearsing a national act of identity formation. The Cape-to-Cairo idea coincides with the historical moment of the forging of union. It also coincides with a period of transition in Western culture from the late Victorian age to modernism. This essay suggests that these broad issues of national identity formation and of simultaneous transition between two different cultural milieus, which are evident as much in the dominant nations of Europe at the time as they are in the making of South Africa, may be tracked in a reconstruction of the complex of cultural epiphenomena that surrounded and propagated for several decades the fantasy of the Cape-to-Cairo axis.

Footprints on The Beach : Traces of colonial adventure in narratives of independent tourism

Abstract: This article analyses the imperial imaginary intrinsic to forms of 'independent' tourism and reads Alex Garland's cult novel of independent travel 'The Beach' as an expression of contemporary cultural encounter. Drawing on theories of tourism, my analysis tried to show how 'independent' tourism, although narrated as a more culturally sensitive form of encounter than conventional tourism, often 'Others' host populations in characteristically postcolonial ways.

Figures of hope and the filmic imaginary of Jianghu in contemporary Hong Kong cinema

Abstract: Through an extensive allegorical reading of films, this paper attempts to capture a certain cultural form of imagination in Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the historical handover of power in 1997. Dwelling on the world of signification conjured up through what I call the jianghu filmic imaginary,the analysis focuses on the ideological and utopian impulses registered in relation to a whole emotional complex of anxiety, bewilderment and despair in the works of some highly creative local filmmakers of the genre: Ching Siu-Tong, Ann Hui, Tsui Hark and Wong KarWai. The study draws theoretically from Castoriadis's notion of the social imaginary and Bloch's aesthetics of hope, to focus on the textual and contextual re-constructions of a number of very unconventional martial arts swordplay (wuxia) films made in Hong Kong in the last two decades: namely, Tsui's Butterfly Murders (1979), Hui's Romance of Book and Sword (1987), Ching/Tsui's Swordsman II (1992), and Wong's Ashes of Time (1994)...

Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England

Abstract: Introduction 1. "Fugitive Forms": Imagining the Realm 2. Female Fidelities on Trial 3. Masculinity, Affiliation, and Rootlessness 4. Secrecy and the Epistolary Self Conclusion Notes Works Cited Index Acknowledgments

The Scouring of the Shire: Fairies, Trolls and Pixies in Eco-Protest Culture

Abstract: Environmental protest in Britain in the 1990s flourished with the growth of the direct action movement. A distinctive culture of protest emerged, particularly in response to the construction of new roads, with its own radicalised spirituality known as ''eco-paganism.'' One feature of the movement was the adoption of a fairy mythology as a significant belief narrative. This article gives examples of this mythology, showing how it was expressed, and demonstrates that it produced three responses: outright rejection; a symbolic identification with fairies; and/or literal belief. This last position was given credence by occasional phenomenological encounters with otherworldly beings, examples of which are given. The article concludes that, whether literal or symbolic, the belief in fairies helped protesters make sense of their struggles, hardships and occasional successes.

The Symbolic Meaning of Libraries in a Digital Age

Abstract: As an increasingly virtual society anticipates the decline of print, it looks to the keepers of the written record to maintain continuity with its past. Libraries cannot formulate intelligent collection and preservation policies without taking into account current perceptions of the fragility of historical memory. Understanding the symbolic role they play in the cultural imaginary will help libraries to map a future that addresses public concerns about the preservation of the historical

On the concept of axial space: Orientalism and the originary

Abstract: The problem of Orientalism as a system of classification that maps out the cultural and political boundaries between East and West has been widely discussed within the humanities and social sciences, but it has been less overtly prominent as an issue in the specific field of archaeology. This absence is peculiar, given the legitimating role of classical archaeology as an account of the primitive occupation of space. We can initially explore the question of archaeological Orientalism in terms of Karl Jaspers’s notion of axial ages. This concept is useful in the analysis of what we might call the construction of a ‘privileged space’ in European philosophy. This article examines the European debate about the authority of cultural origins through a commentary on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and, following the Lacanian notion of the imaginary, describes the issue of authentic beginnings as the problem of ‘the originary’. In postmodern social theory, Heidegger has been a dominant influence in the deconstr...

Sitting for the Civilization Test: The Making(s) of a Civil Imaginary in Colonial South Africa

Abstract: This essay presents the argument for a model of postcoloniality that disavows the axiomatic determinations of oppositionality. It presents a case, in the history of nascent African nationalism in South Africa, in which subject formation by Africans under late colonialism was framed in apparent complicity with prescribed forms of Western civility. The essay argues that conventional notions of postcolonial resistance are unable to provide an adequate explanation for identity politics which are based on the desire for Western acculturation instead of resistance to it. By recourse to the idea of a “civil imaginary,” the essay offers an alternative framework for understanding the intermeshing processes of colonial subjectification and African nationalism in South Africa.