Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2002"
TL;DR: In Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, a similar economistic imaginary is deployed to suggest that globalization moves of itself, and governments and citizens have only the option of adapting as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Globalization and the coming of postnational and transnational society are often presented as matters of necessity. Globalization appears as an inexorable force—perhaps of progress, perhaps simply of a capitalist juggernaut, but in any case irresistible. European integration, for example, is often sold to voters as a necessary response to the global integration of capital. In Asia, Latin America, and elsewhere, a similar economistic imaginary is deployed to suggest that globalization moves of itself, and governments and citizens have only the option of adapting. Even where the globalist imaginary is not overwhelmingly economistic, it commonly shares in the image of a progressive and imperative modernization. Many accounts of the impact and implications of information technology exemplify this. Alternatives to globalization, on the other hand, are generally presented in terms of inherited identities and solidarities in need of defense. Usually this means nations and cultural identities imagined on the model of nations; sometimes it means religions, civilizations, or other structures of identity presented by their advocates as received rather than created. The social imaginary of inherited cultural tradition and social identity is prominent in ideologies like Hindutva and
515 citations
TL;DR: The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987) as discussed by the authors was a seminal work in the development of the social imaginary as an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents.
Abstract: The idea of a social imaginary as an enabling but not fully explicable symbolic matrix within which a people imagine and act as world-making collective agents has received its fullest contemporary elaboration in the work of Cornelius Castoriadis, especially in his influential book The Imaginary Institution of Society (1987).1 Castoriadis was drawn to the idea of the social imaginary in the late 1960s as he became progressively disillusioned with Marxism. Reacting against the deterministic strands within Marxism, which he regarded as both dominant and unavoidable, Castoriadis sought to identify the creative force in the making of social-historical worlds. The authors of essays in this issue, while familiar with the work of Castoriadis, are drawn to the idea of the social imaginary for a different set of reasons. Writing more than a quarter century after the publication of The Imaginary Institution of Society, they are responding to a radically different intellectual and political milieu signaled by the cataclysmic events of 1989 and their aftermath. A majority of these authors were brought together in a working group nearly two decades ago by the Center for Transcultural Studies (CTS), a Chicago-based notfor-profit research network with close links to the Public Culture editorial collec-
289 citations
TL;DR: The authors revisited two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism, and discussed the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing.
Abstract: In their substantive introduction, the editors first revisit two classical sites of controversy which have offered frameworks for theorizing the interplay between materiality and sociality: reification and fetishism. Obviously, these critical vocabularies emerge as crucial sites of perplexity as soon as the ontological boundary between subjects and objects is rendered equally problematic and fluid as the epistemological boundary between the imaginary and the real. A thumbnail sketch of the history of the two discursive traditions (from Marxism up to Actor Network Theory) provides an elaborate systematic framework for introducing the individual articles. The first axis of debate is generated by conceptual residues of the traditional tug-of-war between idealism and materialism which continues to infiltrate recent redescriptions of the web of sociality/materiality. The concern here is how much autonomy and agency can be granted to material objects in view of their social inscription and symbolic construction, and how far conceptual experiments with the ontological symmetry between humans and nonhumans may take us and/or should be permitted to go. The second axis of debate concerns the fate of critical theory and of ethico-political sensibility in the face of heightened uncertainties about the distinction between what is real, what is constructed, and what is imaginary, and between what may count as a person and what as a thing.
252 citations
Book•
04 Jun 2002
TL;DR: A map of possible worlds of Utopia's "Possible worlds": Zamyatin's We and Le Guin's The Dispossessed Reclaiming We for Utopia The City and the Country Happiness and Freedom The Play of Possible Worlds We's Legacy: The DispOSSessed and the Limits of the Horizon 6.
Abstract: Acknowledgments Introduction: The Reality of Imaginary Communities 1. Genre and the Spatial Histories of Modernity The Institutional Being of Genre Space and Modernity Estrangement and the Temporality of Utopia 2. Utopia and the Birth of Nations Re-authoring, or the Origins of Institutions Utopiques and Conceptualized Space Crime and History Utopia and the Nation-Thing Utopia and the Work of Nations 3. Writing the New American (Re)Public: Remembering and Forgetting in Looking Backward Remembering The Contemporary Cul-de-Sac Fragmentation Consumerism and Class "The Associations of Our Active Lifetime" Forgetting 4. The Occluded Future: Red Star and The Iron Heel as "Critical Utopias" Red Star and the Horizons of Russian Modernity The Long Revolution of The Iron Heel "Nameless, Formless Things" "Gaseous Vertebrate" Simplification and the New Subject of History 5. A Map of Utopia's "Possible Worlds": Zamyatin's We and Le Guin's The Dispossessed Reclaiming We for Utopia The City and the Country Happiness and Freedom The Play of Possible Worlds We's Legacy: The Dispossessed and the Limits of the Horizon 6. Modernity, Nostalgia, and the Ends of Nations in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four From Utopian Modernism to Naturalist Utopia Orwell and Mannheim: Nineteen Eighty-Four as "Conservative Utopia" The Crisis of Modern Reason Modernization against Modernity: The Culture Industry and "Secondary Orality" "If there was hope...": Orwell's Intellectuals Notes Index
139 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the imaginative implications of contemporary Tanzanian economy and society for a select, but by no means peripheral, group of young men living and working, mostly in barbershops, but also in other "informal" businesses in the city of Arusha, one of the largest cities in Tanzania.
Abstract: One of the more compelling developments in contemporary sociocultural anthropology is its increasing attention to "the imagination." From the most spectacular fantasies to the most mundane reveries, imagining the world as it is and as it might be seems to be a rapidly expanding form of activity. Such imaginative acts are now held to be relevant-indeed necessary-not only to such predictable endeavors as consumption and leisure but to fields as diverse as the construction of civil society (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999a), the production of biomedical knowledge (Martin 1998), and nuclear proliferation (Gusterson 1999). This move towards all things imagined has further been characterized by an important kind of reflexivity, as exploring the complexities of "imagined communities" requires the exercise of the "ethnographic imagination." Indeed, even a cursory review of current ethnographic observations might lead us to conclude that nothing is now unimaginable. In this article I will examine the imaginative implications of contemporary Tanzanian economy and society for a select, but by no means peripheral, group of young men living and working, mostly in barbershops, but also in other "informal" businesses in the city of Arusha, one of the largest cities in Tanzania. The expansion of this informal sector in urban Tanzania and the diverse modes of imagining that characterize it are clearly emergent under conditions of what has been described as "globalization," and it is the intersection of these rubrics-"the imaginary" and "the global"-that I intend to explore. I would suggest as a point of theoretical departure that the analytical coupling of the imagination to processes of globalization has often obscured the ways that imaginative acts are in fact materially grounded in social activities. While calls for "localization" and attention to "lived experience" have been legion, too often the act of imagining is unmoored from the specific forms, times, and places through which persons project their possible lives. Thus, it is possible for Abu-Lughod to insist that viewers of Egyptian soap opera are "part of the same cultural worlds we inhabit-worlds of mass media, consumption, and dispersed communities of the imagination" (Abu-Lughod 1997:128). Surely the forms of global connectivity exemplified by soap opera establish, or at
137 citations
TL;DR: This article argued that the focus on an analytic model of place in diaspora studies will ultimately preempt any serious accomplishments and pointed out that for many diasporic groups, place, or place of origin, is not the primary issue.
Abstract: Diaspora studies is becoming popular as a field of inquiry in both the social sciences and humanities. And not without reason; the study of diasporas opens up new points of investigation into nationalism, at the same time demanding that we rethink belonging within a global context. Its evident utility notwithstanding, however, I am concerned that the field’s emphasis on an analytic model of place—central to many studies—will ultimately preempt any serious accomplishments. Place has primarily been developed to identify a diasporic people’s “place of origin.” This very common analytic posits that a homeland is originary and constitutive of a diaspora, and very often it supports an essentialization of origins and a fetishization of what is supposed to be found at the origin (e.g., tradition, religion, language, race).1 Nevertheless, for many diasporic groups, place, or place of origin, is not the primary issue.
136 citations
Book•
31 Mar 2002
TL;DR: The Crisscrossing of Traditions: Globalisation and Cultural Closure Culture: Should we Stop Using the Word? - The Imaginary Polis The Materialisation of the Political Imaginaire Conclusion: The Paradoxical Invention of Modernity as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Contents: The Criss-Crossing of Traditions: Globalisation and Cultural Closure Culture: Should we Stop Using the Word? - The Imaginary Polis The Materialisation of the Political Imaginaire Conclusion: The Paradoxical Invention of Modernity.
132 citations
TL;DR: Putnam [J. D. as mentioned in this paper claimed that Americans are socially and civically disengaged because they watch too much TV, and the analysis of the US General Social Survey (GSS) data indicates that people who watch certain types of TV are more satisfied with their friendships as if they had more friends and socialized with them more often.
119 citations
Book•
01 Jan 2002
TL;DR: The Semiotics of children's drawing practices are discussed in this article, with a focus on the Hermeneutics of Visuality and the Problem of Interpretation, as well as the Semiotic Semantics of Visualities of Difference.
Abstract: Acknowledgements. About the Author. Introduction. Memory Seed. Theories of Learning. Learning Theory in Art Education. Representation and Signification. Identity and Difference. The Idea of Experience. Outline of the Book. Part One: Interpretation and Practice. 1. Semiotics and Hermeneutics. Introduction. Semiotics. Hermeneutics and the Problem of Interpretation. Hermeneutic Strategies. Post-Structural Hermeneutics. 2. Semiotics, Hermeneutics and Observational Drawings. 3. The Semiotics of Children's Drawing Practices. Language Games. Drawings From Australia. Children Drawing Objects. Mystery. Summary. 4. Experience and the Hermeneutics and Semiotics of Visuality. Perspective and Visual Representation. Visualities of Difference. Part Two: Identity and Practice. 5. Constructions of Identity. The Truman Show. Changing the Subject. Althusser. Foucault. Normalisation. Discourse. Discourses of Normalisation and Identification in Art Education. Power-Knowledge. Video Sequence. 6. Identity and Psychoanalysis. Lacan: The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. 7. The Field of Art in Education. Recent Pedagogies for Art Education in England. The National Curriculum for Art in England. Bourdieu's Notions of Field and Habitus. Change in the Field. Chreods and Epigenetic Landscapes. Teacher and Learner Identities in the Field of Art Education. Part Three: Difference and Practice. 8. Forms of Life. Two Narratives. Practice and Change. Experience and Experiencing. Difference. Student's Work. 9. Experience and Practice: Theorising New Identifications. Consequences of the Critique of Experience for Art in Education. References. Subject Index. Name Index.
91 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that the imaginary and imagination have to become part of the vocabulary utilized by the analysis of religion in order to deal with the tensions generated by such an articulation, and demonstrate their cases through an interpretation of discussions among Islamists on poverty, capitalism and justice.
Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to show that strictly materialist or culturalist approaches are inadequate for the theorization of religious political movements Drawing from the insights provided by these approaches, I contend that Islamism is a novel form of counter-hegemonic politics, which I call religio-moral populism Like every hegemony, it has to be handled as an articulation of conflicting interests and aspirations By deploying Castoriadis' model of the institution of society in my reading of the Islamist press in Turkey, I argue that the imaginary and imagination have to become part of the vocabulary utilized by the analysis of religion in order to deal with the tensions generated by such an articulation I demonstrate my cases through an interpretation of discussions among Islamists on poverty, capitalism and justice
89 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a new reading of organizational life based on the work of Jacques Lacan, and they argue that such notions suggest rigorous alternative ways of approaching organizations, in particular as compulsions to repeat or actings-out.
Abstract: For many rationalist observers, organizational dysfunctions, such as recurrent failures in the implementation of strategic orientations, the constantly aggressive behaviour of managers, and so on, are nothing other than manifestation of deficiencies in decision-making or in the well thought-out application of decisions. In the light of psychoanalysis, however, such phenomena can be regarded differently, in particular as compulsions to repeat or actings-out. Indeed, in this perspective, it is on a ‘stage’ other than that of ‘reality’ that the game is played out: the stage of the imaginary and unconscious symbolic determinations. The object of this article is to propose a fresh reading of organizational life based on the work of Jacques Lacan. Although Lacanian notions are often seen as posing numerous problems for those brought up in an Anglo-American tradition of intellectual endeavour, this article upholds that such notions suggest rigorous alternative ways of approaching organizations.
01 Nov 2002
TL;DR: Fussell as discussed by the authors suggests that travel's pervasive appeal may have owed something to the high degree of acceptance which philosophical empiricism had gained in Britain by the end of the seventeenth century.
Abstract: Itineraries and expectations Travel is everywhere in eighteenth-century British literature. The fictional literature of the age 'is full of travelling heroes enmeshed in journey-plots', and 'almost every author of consequence' - among them Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft - 'produced one overt travel book'. To these must be added the 'numerous essayistic and philosophic performances' that were cast in the form of imaginary travelogues, such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762). Writers seemed to be travelling, in reality or in their imaginations, just about everywhere. Paul Fussell speculates that travel's pervasive appeal may have owed something to the high degree of acceptance which philosophical empiricism had gained in Britain by the end of the seventeenth century. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) became a sort of bible for those who espoused a ‘blank slate’ conception of human consciousness and held that all knowledge is produced from the ‘impressions’ drawn in through our five senses. If knowledge is rooted in experience and nowhere else, travel instantly gains in importance and desirability. Following the great Renaissance age of colonial exploration and expansion, an articulated, systematic empiricism made travelling about the world and seeing the new and different ‘something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind and accumulating knowledge’. Merely reading about conditions elsewhere was not enough. Those who could travel, should – though of course precious few actually could.
TL;DR: The World Heritage Site of Angkor, in Cambodia, is currently one of Asia's fastest growing tourist destinations as discussed by the authors, and its management authorities are actively attempting to resist the 'detrimental effects of mass tourism' by promoting a desired form of cultural tourism.
Abstract: The World Heritage Site of Angkor, in Cambodia, is currently one of Asia's fastest growing tourist destinations. In response to this new era, Angkor's management authorities are actively attempting to resist the 'detrimental effects of mass tourism' by promoting a desired form of cultural tourism. Yet in November 2000, filming of the ultimate post-modern concoction, 'Tomb Raider--The Movie', took place at Angkor.The temples became one of the key locations for a production firmly rooted in a genre of Hollywood Blockbusters, a film genre that eschews any aspirations to high culture or claims of representational integrity. This paper explores this contradictory clash of imaginary cultures. In so doing, it examines the contextual factors that allowed the project to take place, illuminating the ways in which Angkor is presently conceived and managed by both the Cambodian authorities and the attendant international community. In considering some of the implications for Angkor, understood as a site of touristic ...
TL;DR: In this article, the authors consider the discursive forces that shape our perceptions of community, group identity, solidarity, and belongingness, and the freedoms and limits of these forces.
Abstract: Contemporary processes of globalization beckon consideration of the discursive forces that shape our perceptions of community, group identity, solidarity, and belongingness. The freedoms and limits...
Book•
01 Apr 2002
TL;DR: This article argued that there is a definite symphysis between literary language and the political embodiment of nationalist ideology, and that the imaginary reflections and misrecognitions of land and religion have been instantiated through literary tropes and images.
Abstract: In this study the supposed difference between political nationalism and what is termed 'cultural nationalism' is interrogated. It is through literary tropes and images, after all, that the imaginary reflections and misrecognitions of land and religion have been instantiated. This study also contends that there is a definite symphysis between literary language and the political embodiment of nationalist ideology.
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the performative and imaginary aspects of caciquismo (political bossism) have been neglected in the analysis of structures of power, and that the cacique often operates as a sort of vanishing mediator who both unveils and masks the absence of a center while standing for the corrupt and venal side of the state.
Abstract: Anthropologists, historians, and political scientists have pointed to the pervasiveness of the cacique (political boss) as a habitual figure who, through his role as an intermediary, is instrumental in the reproduction of a structure of domination. In this article, I argue that the performative and imaginary aspects of caciquismo (political bossism) have been neglected in the analysis of structures of power. Going beyond the conventional view of the cacique as an effective intermediary, I argue that this figure often operates as a sort of vanishing mediator who both unveils and masks the absence of a center while standing for the corrupt and venal side of the state. Furthermore, it is through the orchestration of enjoyment and the image of excessive power that the cacique contributes to the reproduction of a particular mode of hegemony. I illustrate these performative and imaginary processes by drawing on an ethnography of a regional cacique involved in the power struggle of a local Water Users' Association in western Mexico. [Mexico, brokerage, caciquismo, ideology, hegemony, enjoyment, culture of power]
TL;DR: Malcolmson & M.Suzuki as discussed by the authors discuss women's subjectivity in the early modern Pamphlet debates and discuss the question of whether women should be served first.
Abstract: Introduction C.Malcolmson & M.Suzuki PART I: MANUSCRIPTS AND DEBATES Christine de Pizan's 'City of Ladies' in Early Modern England C.Malcolmson Anne Southwell and the Pamphlet Debate: The Politics of Gender, Class, and Manuscript E.Clarke PART II: PRINT, PEDAGOGYAND THE QUESTION OF CLASS Muzzling the Competition: Rachel Speght and the Economics of Print L.Schnell Women's Popular Culture? Teaching the Swetnam Controversy M.Gough PART III: WOMEN'S SUBJECTIVITY IN MALE-AUTOHRED TEXTS The Broadside Ballad and the Woman's Voice S.Clark 'Weele have a Went shall be our Poet': Samuel Rowlands' Gossip Pamphlets S.O'Malley PART IV: FIGURATIONS OF THE MATERNAL AND THE FAMILY The Matter of Death: The Defense of Eve and the Female Ars Moriendi P.Phillippy 'Hens Should Be Served First': Prioritizing Maternal Production in the Early Modern Pamphlet Debate N.Miller Cross-Dressed Women and Natural Mothers: 'Boundary Panic' in Hic Mulier R.Trubowitz PART V: POLITICS, STATE AND THE NATION Monstrous Births and the Body Politic: Women's Political Writings and the Strange and Wonderful Travail of 'Mistress Parliament' and Mris Rump K.Romack Elizabeth, Gender, and the Political Imaginary of Seventeenth-Century England M.Suzuki Afterword H.Smith
TL;DR: Gilroy's The Black Atlantic as mentioned in this paper is a seminal work in the study of diasporas, and it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that it embodies the theoretical positions associated with the rise of "cultural studies" in the 1990s.
Abstract: It is beyond dispute that Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic, pub- lished in 1993, marks an important turning point in the study of diasporas. And it is perhaps no exaggeration to say that, more than any other, this book embodies the theoretical positions associated with the rise of "cultural studies" in the 1990s. Gilroy develops Stuart Hall's equally important and similarly innovative conception of diaspora. What these two works have in common is their appli- cation of new conceptualizations to the case of Africans in the Americas, who are figured for Gilroy as the "Black Atlantic" and for Hall as the "Afro-Caribbean." What is most significant about both is that they make the people issuing from the painful experience of the Atlantic slave trade and subsequent slavery emblematic of a new way to think about diasporic peoples. While the Jewish people serves as the archetypical representation of the classical notion of diaspora, in Hall and Gilroy's conception the Black peoples of the Americas offer the paradigm of a new notion of diaspora. 1 We are thus witnessing a succession of two interpretations of the diaspora as a phenomenon. The first, here called the classic interpretation, rests on a set of criteria set forth by a good many authors (Safran; Sheffer; Bruneau; Tololyan; Cohen, Global Diasporas). At its core is the powerful idea of a dispersed people whose unified conscious- ness is sustained despite the devastating effects of separation. The maintenance of a real or imaginary bond with the place of origin from which the exiled people was dispersed makes the construction of this unity possible. The classic model is strongly associated with the principles of a unified, solidary community and a thematic of territory and memory. James Clifford has called this model "cen- tered," that is, based on the idea of a communal source or origin: in short, a model with the operative metaphor of roots. The writings of Gilroy and Hall propose the second interpretation, a model that privileges hybridity and can be called "hybrid." The diaspora is no longer seen as unitary; instead, its sociality is seen as based on movement, interconnection, and mixed references. Formed in the xxxxxxxxxxxx 359
04 Jan 2002
TL;DR: The empirical and imaginary space between the communal and the individual is precisely where much cultural work is undertaken in the Communication Age as discussed by the authors, and a discussion of how that work is accomplished, and what some of the major consequences are, is the main purpose of this writing.
Abstract: How can people find their way in a world where the stabilizing influence of
culture as a communal project is being transformed into a far more symbolic,
personalized panorama of images and dreams, fantasies and illusions, journeys
and retreats? The historically unparalleled development of communications
technology and the sweep of globalization that surrounds us today are changing
the very nature and meaning of culture. Although ‘community’ remains a key
characteristic, culture is becoming more an individualistic and highly discursive
enterprise now. Moreover, cultural communities themselves are being formed
in new ways, signaling a fundamental transformation of human experience.
The empirical and imaginary space between the communal and the individual
is precisely where much cultural work is undertaken in the Communication
Age. A discussion of how that work is accomplished, and what some of the
major consequences are, is the main purpose of this writing.
Book•
01 Jul 2002
TL;DR: Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879 by Carolyn Sorisio as mentioned in this paper is a recent work that compares the contributions of seven writers to the process of defining the body in the mid-nineteenth century.
Abstract: Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879. By Carolyn Sorisio. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Pp. x, 299. Cloth, $44.95.)The study of race and gender has been a staple of historical and literary scholarship for roughly forty years now, and the study of the body for at least half that long. In her recent book, Carolyn Sorisio adds to this tradition by comparing the contributions of seven writers to the process of defining the body in the mid-nineteenth century: Lydia Maria Child, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet A. Jacobs, and Martin Robeson Delany. In this published form of her 1996 doctoral dissertation, Sorisio argues that these authors helped to "flesh out" political and social understandings of the body, giving specific forms to the disembodied conception of personhood at work during the revolutionary era.Sorisio's methodology is distinct from that typically employed by historians and literary historicists and merits early mention. Although Sorisio provides some brief historical setting for each subject, as an overall strategy, she eschews contextualizing individual authors in favor of gathering disparate authors into a "contact zone" where they might speak to each other in ways not always provided by history. As she explains, her entire approach is guided by the "overall inquiry that dominates this book: Can we combat the disturbingly divisive nature of the politics of the body through the imaginary space that literature provides" (12)? Sorisio wants her methodology to strike a balance between investigating these texts "in their own right" and forging "answers to some contemporary pedagogical and theoretical problems" (2).In its narrative design, the book is structured around a concern with the dynamic between science and literature in defining the body. Sorisio wishes to avoid the extremes of both pure physiological essentialism and complete social construction. After a chapter in which she reviews the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific discourse on the body, highlighting the issues of race and gender, she gives a chapter to each of her principle authors. The scope of the project-seven different authors-necessarily makes much of the analysis of any given writer significantly derivative from previous scholarship. However, as Sorisio works through a running summary of existing work on each author, she provides the reader with her own contribution in the form of synthesis of this scholarship and comparisons among the seven writers.Each author pursued a different strategy in addressing race and gender as they gave specific shape to the body. In looking at the bodily dimensions of slavery without succumbing to voyeurism, Child successfully navigates the treacherous waters of propriety awaiting any women of her period who entered the literary sphere, especially if they were talking about black bodies. As a black woman, Harper used temperance rhetoric to deflect readers' gaze away from black bodies and refocus it on the shortcomings of whites. Emerson's commitment to establishing a common foundation across racial lines comes at the cost of reifying the era's dichotomies of gender, eventually undermining his racial egalitarianism. In avoiding such a gendered distinction, Fuller draws on ethnography to address tensions in her feminism by symbolically transferring "politically detrimental aspects of corporeality onto the bodies of Native Americans" (146). …
TL;DR: The Americas of the 1850s provides James Dunkerley with compelling material for this majestic and unorthodox book as mentioned in this paper, which is arranged around major themes of time and space, culture, political economy, and international relations.
Abstract: The Americas of the 1850s provides James Dunkerley with compelling material for this majestic and unorthodox book. Drawing on a range of contemporary sources from Walt Whitman to Darwin,Trollope, Marx and Sarmiento, Dunkerley adopts a fully Atlanticist perspective to reappraise the first steps in American modernity. Americana is arranged around major themes of time and space, culture, political economy, and international relations. Between these more general discussions are transcripts of three court cases from the period which both divert and illuminate: John Mitchel's 1848 conviction for treason in Dublin led him through Bermuda, Tasmania and Nicaragua before he joined the Confederate cause in the US Civil War. Myra Gaines' suit for the return of her legacy in New Orleans reveals her Sligo-born father to have conspired against Jefferson and treated with Napoleon's agents in the sale of Louisiana. Mariano Munoz's trial for releasing a prisoner on Good Friday in the style of Pontius Pilate draws the curtain back on Francisco Burdett O'Connor, prefect of Tarija, elder brother of the Chartist leader Feargus, and Bolivar's chief of staff. Americana seeks simultaneously to savour the language and sensibilities of the nineteenth century in the Americas and to provide a pleasurable critique of contemporary vanities over globalisation and the complex sophistication of modernity. "The present text has chronology unashamedly as its starting-point, taking the years 1845 to 1855 as its framework...As should be clear, however, the framework adopted is not rigid or binding. If history is indeed lived forwards and read backwards, then events in the 1840s may form part of processes of the 1820s or of the 1860s as well as being 'now'. Each of the three trials presented here demonstrates the importance of such a reach, suggesting that the mid-century slot is simply an excuse for looking at the whole. This, though, is not my aim, and I hope to make something of the very ordinary proposition that these years were not only like all others in which humans live, love and die (and so leave some good stories), but can also be seen as distinctive in themselves and in relation to the conjuncture of today." - from the opening chapter
TL;DR: The main part of this text was first presented at a conference, "New Sources of Critical Theory,” of the International Sociological Association held at the University of Cambridge in 2000, then as a seminar at the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at Birkbeck College, London, in 2001 as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: 141 The main part of this text was first presented at a conference, “New Sources of Critical Theory,” of the International Sociological Association held at the University of Cambridge in 2000, then as a seminar at the Centre for Psycho-Social Studies at Birkbeck College, London, in 2001. I wish to thank the late Cornelius Castoriadis for his extensive comments on an earlier draft of the essay. Thanks also to Nicola Geraghty, Anthony Moran, Nick Stevenson, Lynne Segal, and Stephen Frosh. Peter Rudnytsky provided incisive editorial assistance. ANTHONY ELLIOTT
TL;DR: Mayhew's survey of London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by identifying throughout the world "two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers." This division also distinguishes, as races, outsider and insider, "the vagabond and the citizen" as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Henry Mayhew introduces his survey of London Labour and the London Poor (1851) by identifying throughout the world "two distinct and broadly marked races, viz., the wanderers and the settlers." This division also distinguishes, as races, outsider and insider, "the vagabond and the citizen." When he compares the poor in England to "Bushmen," "Lappes," and "Arabian Bedouins," Mayhew effectively locates these "wandering tribes" in imaginary spaces outside the bounds of national life. Mayhew further depicts this vagabond class "preying upon" the nation's citizens, whose movements-as tourists and imperialists, for example-he ignores (1). In Dracula, published in 1897, Bram Stoker complicates Mayhew's social order when he suggests that at the end of the century the modern citizen claimed no settled identity, but a mobility even more extensive than that of Mayhew's "wandering races." The vampire Dracula, who in the novel is identified as primitive and alien and who certainly preys upon citizens, is a wanderer, according to the peculiar logic of the "undead." But those in the novel who eventually defeat Dracula are characterized by unsettled behavior as well. Not quite insiders, they comprise a group of Western citizens who belong within no single nation or social class and who are experienced travellers. What endows the movements of these characters with cultural privilege is their power to capitalize upon mobility, to convert changes of place into opportunities for investment.
Journal Article•
TL;DR: The authors compare the tropological subversion in unwonted reflections of the Creole in two nineteenth-century texts: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and George Sand's Indiana.
Abstract: | The colonial encounter raises myriad possibilities for reinscribing the terms of subjectivity in the post-colonial condition. Issues of alienation, difference and desire framed the imperial will to conquest, at the pinnacle of the colonial project in the midnineteenth century. Despite their differences, both France and Britain as European colonial powers came to represent the Creole as the unnamable third term, the impossible indeterminacy excluded by the colonial binary's neither/nor dyad. Because discursive form provided the key to authority and control over a myriad of people and places, literary tropes helped construct, elaborate, and reinforce a hierarchical, race-based discourse of inequality.This essay, then, compares the tropological subversion in unwonted reflections of the Creole in two nineteenth-century texts: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and George Sand's Indiana. Both texts seek to contain the complexities of the Creole by negating these disturbing, dangerously indeterminate figures whose subjectivity is paradoxically both unacknowledged and restrained, reflecting a colonial dyad that signifies metropolitan notions of lack and excess. For both Jane Eyre and Indiana-despite their disparate political and sociocultural contexts--are defined by a climactic subjective moment in which their female metropolitan protagonists are forced to give way to an instability signified by a Creole counterpart reflected in the mirror. When this Creole figure confronts the gendered metropolitan subject in the mirror of the colonial imagination, the resultant reversal and discursives undermine those presumptions of subjectivity and knowability that undergird the colonial site. Both scenes, then, inscribe critical contexts that allow us to question colonial binaries through their links to identity, alterity, and knowledge. Held in thrall to the comprehensive discourse of domination and desire in the colonial text, contemporary figures of racial division tended to subsume the "exotic" differences produced by the encounter with the Other, allowing metropolitan authors to ignore colonialism's nascent ambiguities and to appropriate a variety of figures of blackness as repressed elements of the social whole, constructing simulacra of identity that reveal to the reader the dependent framework of metropolitan subjectivity, and provoking the interwoven Creole complexities to increasingly critical strategies of substitution. Principles and patterns of literary re-presentation, then, help shape the imaginary alienation that marks colonial identity, as Homi Bhabha remarks, "The visibility of the racial/colonial Other is at once a point of identity ... and at the same time a problem.... [T]he recognition and disavowal of`difference' is always disturbed by the question of its re-presentation or construction" (1994, 81; emphasis in the original). As literary discourse re-presented the authoritarian violence of the colonial encounter through figures of cultural subjection and exclusion, transposing its hierarchies of self and Other into conventions of class and gender, metropolitan subjectivity was forced to confront the binary relation between metropolitan lack and Creole excess in the alterities of the Creole's erupting, unavowed, supplementary pluralities. The psychological interaction between the subject and its mirror reflection also informs the principles underlying this reading. To sum up, in Lacanian terms, the mirror stage acts as a site of misrecognition and alienation, a moment of crisis that also doubles as the source of secondary identifications. But while these Creole figures do not necessarily act as the metropolitan subject's ideal reflection, they do allow her to be defined through an external image, in a process which, as Kaja Silverman points out, "is to be defined through self-alienation." More important for this subject and her colonial context, perhaps, are the binary patterns of ambivalence that emerge from such structures; as Silverman continues, "it entertains a profoundly ambivalent relationship to that reflection . …
TL;DR: The North British Review carried a long, learned historical-theoretical essay entitled "Autobiographies" as mentioned in this paper, which marked the writer's first substantial appearance in print and proposed a three-stage history of autobiography "corresponding roughly to Comte's three historic periods".
Abstract: rT ^he January 1870 issue of the North British Review carried a long, learned historical-theoretical essay entitled "Autobiographies." Though its confident generalizations and Johnsonian syntax hardly seem the work of a literary novice, it marked the writer's first substantial appearance in print. The essay proposes a three-stage history of autobiography "corresponding roughly to Comte's three historic periods": first, the epic story of a heroic life written with "primitive energy"; then, the realistic narrative in which a man stands as a representative of his age; and finally, the more problematic category of post-Romantic autobiography. The modern autobiographer was, it seemed, trapped in an Arnoldian era of "decaying originality" in which the self and the world could come into no satisfactory relation. He was forced "to chronicle thought instead of action, changes of opinion instead of succeeding experience, or else to represent the influences of imaginary circumstances upon a real mind" ("Autobiographies" 530). The irresolute subjectivity of the third phase is clearly rendered as a matter for dismay.' The writer of this apparently magisterial essay was a twenty-fiveyear-old woman called EdithJemima Simcox. Born in 1844, she was the youngest of three children and the only girl in an upper-middle-class London family. Her brothers were educated at Oxford; both became Fellows of Queen's College. The elder, Augustus, developed a reputation as a brilliant classical scholar as well as an eccentric; the younger, William, took orders and served as rector of a College living at Weyhill (McKenzie 1-3). Edith herself belonged to a generation whose daughters, perhaps even younger sisters, could go to women's colleges; she was writing her review of autobiographies just at the time Girton opened its doors. University would have been a natural step for this
TL;DR: The Continuing Appeal of the Birch Society Robert Welch once publicly asserted that Republican Senator Robert Taft had died of cancer that had been passed on to him by Soviet operatives through "a radium tube planted in the upholstery of his Senate seat" (Pipes, 1997, p. 157) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: EMILE DURKHEIM ONCE OBSERVED: "There is perhaps no collective representation which is not, in some sense, delirious" (qtd. in Moscovici, 1987, p. 157). I begin this response by acknowledging that we all might be more prone than we realize to the powerful, often beguiling nature of conspiracy appeals. As Stewart, Smith, & Denton (1994, pp. 52-53) observe, a "conspiracy may be real or imagined, but the process is the same; a chain of apparently unrelated events or actions is linked to reveal concerted actions and intentions to cause all sorts of social, economic, political, religious, and moral problems." (1) In the process, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy. It also may be difficult to avoid delirium. The Continuing Appeal of the Birch Society Robert Welch once publicly asserted that Republican Senator Robert Taft had died of cancer that had been passed on to him by Soviet operatives through "a radium tube planted in the upholstery of his Senate seat" (Pipes, 1997, p. 37). The description of this absurd scenario can take on the patina of legitimacy when, for example, such claims are made in a cold war setting where reputable sources report that KGB agents, in an effort to get a British spy out of a room, smeared a poisonous substance on a chair and made the intended victim violently ill. Telling the real from the imaginary can be a difficult and demanding task. There are legions of subjective judgments attached. The reference to Welch is, of course, a not so subtle transition to Professor Stewart's essay. Stewart rightly observes that the changing context of the times has everything to do with the believability and potential acceptance of conspiratorial forces. In fact, the social, historical, geographic, temporal, and contextual dimensions of change help account for the popularity or demise of particular conspiracy accounts. In the John Birch Society, we encounter a remarkable longevity and persistence. Professor Stewart persuasively documents why this is the case. I believe the Birchers have latched on to a classic conspiracy model; it is made even more complete because it is imbued with transhistorical significance through what Stewart terms "interlocking conspiracies." Indeed, Stewart gives a convincing account of how the Society made the transition from one conspiracy context to the next. In Stewart's apt phrase, it was an "effortless shift." This shift is particularly striking since we are now in the post-Soviet, post-Cold War era. Welch's guiding principles help establish the generic parameters of conspiracy discourse. Key themes, like the "cancer of collectivism," the master conspiracy tracing its roots to the secret 18th century Bavarian society that came to be known as the Illuminati, all the way to the "invisible government" represented by the nefarious agents of Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, to the god and devil terms associated with the New World Order, and the attribution of a moral decline associated with the "family," strike, one and all, old familiar refrains. Indeed, the characters and actions emerge like family members in a long lost but constantly resurrected picture album handed down through the generations. In this company and with these images, an article such as "My Mother the State" becomes a generic warrant for all that is wrong with America and a clarion call to action against "wrongdoers" (see e.g., Goldzwig, 1987). Thus, in conspiracy, active participants and dupes alike march inexorably toward the precipice of impending disaster. Ostensibly, only true believers can stanch the rising tides of ruin. What is most convincingly documented in Professor Stewart's account is a vivid description and analysis of a rhetoric of dystopian logic that has accomplished transgenerational influence through a contextually constructed substitution of terms--each of which blurs distinctions as they chain out over time. …
TL;DR: The authors argue that no re-mapping project can be undertaken without considering racial harassment and racialization processes, and juxtaposes racialized ethnic populations and Ireland's emerging multiculturalism, based, as they argue, on a degree of disavowal, and, rather than on a 'politics of recognition', on the more appropriate "politics of interrogation".
Abstract: This article begins by positing some theoretical and methodological issues in relation to 'remapping' Dublin's changing ethnic landscape from the viewpoint of its racialized 'others'. 'Mapping' here is an attempt to chart imaginary moments--sketched by racialized members--of the city as human landscape, ever changing to accommodate and encapsulate their shifting spatial needs and desires. The article posits 'minority discourse' as a methodological route and historicizes the racialization of the city through the transition from the gaze of 'the Jew Bloom', Joyce's Hibernian metropolitan other, to the postmetropolis gaze of the 'new Dubliners'. The article argues that no re-mapping project can be undertaken without considering racial harassment and racialization processes, and juxtaposes racialized ethnic populations and Ireland's emerging multiculturalism, based, as I argue, on a degree of disavowal, and, rather than on a 'politics of recognition', on the more appropriate 'politics of interrogation'. The a...
TL;DR: The importance of place and material culture for identity-construction in contemporary European regionalism is brought up in an investigation of the region of Istria in Croatia and Slovenia.
Abstract: The importance of place and material culture for identity-construction in contemporary European regionalism is brought up in an investigation of the region of Istria in Croatia and Slovenia. Theories of modernity tend to regard place either as disappearing in a time-place compression or as a compensation for the uprooting in a world of globalisation and insecurity. A slightly different perspective comes to the fore when focus is being put on how regions actually are used in a contemporary praxis: as basis for people's culture building and identification. Not as a place to defend or escape to, but as an opening, a possibility. From a phenomenological point of view the imaginary potentials of things and heritage are being discussed, arguing that lived experience and agency must be studied in parallel to narrations and cultural constructions. Regions also could be seen both as outcomes of micro-nationalism and as cultural imaginaries where something different is formulated.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors demonstrate that Wolfgang Iser's concept of the imaginary as described in The Fictive and the Imaginary provides a theoretical basis for understanding the way the imaginary can work in organizational settings.
Abstract: This paper will demonstrate that Wolfgang Iser's concept of the imaginary as described in The Fictive and the Imaginary provides a theoretical basis for understanding the way the imaginary can work in organizational settings. First, Iser's insights suggest that the imaginary can be engaged but not controlled. The imaginary reveals itself through play, but the context in which play takes place influences the degree to which the imagination is free. Fictionalizing is a form of play that allows us to stage an endless number of ideas about the human condition. Second, I turn to the arts to describe a technique that has long been used to engage the imagination?improvisation. Third, I examine the notion of improvisational processes in public administration, including barriers and drawbacks. Improvisational processes both draw upon the imaginary and institutionalize meaning by adding to an organization ys knowledge. Fourth, I describe the use of improvisation games as a way for organizations to fictionalize and stage ideas, noting that in order for such games to be effective, the rest of the organizational setting must value imagination. Finally, I suggest that discourse about public administration can be seen as a series of improvisations that substitute small narratives for metanarratives.