Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2012"

Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation

Abstract: Desinng the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation. By James K. A. Smith. Cultural Liturgies series, vol. 1. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2009. 238 pp. $21.99 (paper). It may be an understatement to say that Anglicans do not look first to the Reformed tradition for insight and edification in regard to liturgical theology and proposals for liturgical renewal. In fact this book - exceptional in every sense of the word - was not even slated for review in this journal until, in the midst of an engaged reading, I successfully appealed to the editor for a hearing. The author is a Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Congregational and Ministry Studies of Calvin College, an increasingly significant center in the aforementioned tradition for liturgical studies and renewal of worship. Smith projects three volumes in this Cultural Liturgies series. Of this first he says, "The genesis of the project was a desire to communicate to students (and faculty) a vision of what authentic, integral Christian learning looks like, emphasizing how learning is connected to worship and how, together, these constitute practices of formation and discipleship. Instead of focusing on what Christians think, distilling Christian faith into an intellectual summary formula ( a 'worldview'), this book focuses on what Christians do, articulating the shape of a Christian 'social imaginary' as it is embedded in the practices of Christian worship" (p. 11). This work is seen, then, as laying the foundation for a second piece centered on philosophical anthropology and a third volume addressing current debates in political theology. At least three things stand out in regard to this first volume: a newold reconstruction of anthropology, the eschatological focus at the center of Smith's argument, and his creative juxtaposition of the classic elements of Christian worship to the subtle and not so subtle liturgies of mall (the consumer culture), nation (the sports / military culture), and university (a culture producing self-consistent worldviews that are nonetheless disparate). All these compete for our ultimate allegiances in one way or another - sometimes congruent, sometimes not. Smith brings a wide range of scholarship and insight to bear in trenchant analyses of these other liturgical constructions that promise salvation in one way or another. In regard to anthropology, the thesis is advanced that human beings are not primarily thinking or believing beings, but only secondarily so. What is first is desire. With humans as first and foremost desiring creatures, the questions surrounding the ordering of our precognitive and prereflective loves are paramount. In other words, he investigates those seminal practices that willy nilly form us into some vision of human flourishing (the kingdom). It is the dimensions of such kingdoms ("social imaginaries" rather than "worldviews") that give both metaphorical and literal direction to our choices in life. In some ways this is, for Christians at least, as old as Augustine, as lasting as Dante's effoliation of it, and as recent as Alexander Schmemann's For the Life of the World, but it is given fresh and significant exegesis and application by Smith. The argument of the volume is set forth in two parts of three chapters each, following an extensive introduction that is focused on (1) the phenomenology of cultural liturgies; (2) a restatement of the necessary but often unperceived relationship between education and worship; and (3) a consideration of the elements for a theology of culture (with a focus on pedagogy, liturgy, and ecclesia). …

Postsocialist ≠ postcolonial? On post-Soviet imaginary and global coloniality

Abstract: The article presents the main conceptual intersections and differences between postcolonial studies as a product of the anglophone world, of the history of relations between the British Empire and ...

National Identities and Post-Americanist Narratives

Abstract: National narratives create imaginary relations within imagined communities called national peoples. But in the American narrative, alongside the nexus of belonging established for the national community, the national narrative has represented other peoples (women, blacks, "foreigners", the homeless) from whom the property of nationness has been removed altogether and upon whose differences from them the national people depended for the construction of their norms. Dismantling this opposition has become the task of post-national (Post-Americanist) narratives, bent on changing the assumptions that found the "national identity." This volume, originally published as a special issue of bounrary 2, focuses on the process of assembling and dismantling the American national narrative(s), sketching its inception and demolition. The contributors examine various cultural, political, and historical sources--colonial literature, mass movements, epidemics of disease, mass spectacle, transnational corporations, super-weapons, popular magazines, literary texts--out of which this narrative was constructed, and propose different understandings of nationality and identity following in its wake. Contributors. Jonathan Arac, Lauren Berlant, Robert J. Corber, Elizabeth Freeman, Kathryn V. Lingberg, Jack Matthews, Alan Nadel, Patrick O'Donnell, Daniel O'Hara, Donald E. Pease, Ross Posnock, John Carlos Rowe, Rob Wilson

Critical anthropological thought and the radical political imaginary today

Abstract: This article begins by defining the specificity of critical anthropological thought and the way it can articulate with radical politics. It shows how the anthropology of Eduardo Vivieros de Castro ...

Global Education Inc.: New policy networks and the neoliberal imaginary

Abstract: Edu.net: Globalisation and Education Policy Mobility 1st ...Global Education ProjectGlobal Education Policy and International Development: New ...Global Education Inc. New policy networks and the neo ...Global Education Inc. | New Policy Networks and the ...Bing: Global Education Inc New PolicyGlobal Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the ...Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the ...The Handbook of Global Education Policy | Wiley Online BooksGlobal Education Policy Dashboard World BankWhy do Policy-makers Adopt Global Education Policies ...A Framework for Global-Education Policy Global Learning ...Global Education Inc.: Ball, Stephen J.: 9780415684101 ...Global Education Inc.: New Policy Networks and the Neo ...The Harvard Educational Review HEPGERIC ED530484 Global Education Inc.: New Policy ...Global Education Policy and International Development: New ...Global Education Inc.Global Education Inc New PolicyLocally Global Education, Inc. in New York, NY | Company Info

Place Branding and the Imaginary: The Politics of Re-imagining a Garden City

Abstract: This article discusses contemporary practices of place branding through the concept of the imaginary. Specifically, the aim is to interrogate place branding as a politically constituted process which unfolds in relation to dominant discourses and symbols that are in circulation; how existing material structures inform the process; and what material consequences occur as a result. The process is empirically illustrated by drawing on a qualitative study conducted within a municipal project organisation charged with organising the 50th anniversary of Tapiola Garden City in Finland. The anniversary provided the decision-makers with an opportunity for re-imagining the Garden City, which in the course of time was seen to have become outdated and in need of symbolic and material rejuvenation. In the light of the study, the article examines how place branding contributes to producing discursive privileging and marginalisation of particular values and social groups.

Conversations with Bourdieu: The Johannesburg Moment

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) is the most influential sociologist of our time. His works take in education, culture, sport, literature, painting, class, philosophy, religion, law, media, intellectuals, methodology, photography, universities, colonialism, kinship, schooling and politics. Not much remains outside Bourdieu’s sociological eye. His works are widely read across disciplines and he was one of the most prominent public intellectuals in France. Conversations with Bourdieu presents the first comprehensive attempt at a critical engagement with Bourdieu’s theory as a totality. Michael Burawoy constructs a series of imaginary conversations between Bourdieu and his nemesis – Marxism – from which he silently borrowed so much. Starting with Marx, and proceeding through Gramsci, Fanon, Freire, de Beauvoir, and Mills, Burawoy takes up the challenge Bourdieu presents to Marxism, simultaneously developing a critique of Bourdieu and a reconstruction of Marxism. Karl Von Holdt, in turn, brings these conversations to South Africa, showing the relevance of Bourdieu’s ideas to a country he never visited. Armed with Bourdieu, Von Holdt takes up some of the most pressing social and political issues of contemporary South Africa: the relation between symbolic and real violence, the place of intellectuals in public life, the intervention of gender in politics, the grappling with race, the critique of education, the importance of habitus, the history and future of class mobilisation, and the legacy of the liberation struggle. Conversations with Bourdieu pioneers a distinctive approach to doing social theory that is neither a combat sport nor an artificial synthesis, but a way of pushing theory to its limits through dialogue – dialogue between theorists and dialogue between theory and the world it represents. The book is distinctive too in pointing towards a new global sociology consciously rooted in a dialogue between the social realities and theoretical perspectives of North and South. The conversations were first presented as Mellon Lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in 2010

Talkin' 'bout the ghetto: popular culture and urban imaginaries of immobility

Abstract: The concept of the ghetto, referring to specifically urban experiences of sociospatial marginalization, has played a prominent role in black popular culture. This article explores the role of the ghetto as a discursive space of immobility and traces its global journey as a mobile imaginary. Focusing mainly on the US and the Caribbean, it explores how this popular culture imaginary is produced and employed to frame and negotiate social and spatial marginalization in a broad range of urban settings. As ‘the ghetto’ begins to travel through the global dissemination and appropriation of black popular culture, its relation to racialized understandings of blackness shifts. This move, in which the ghetto can belong to anyone, allows the imaginary both to function as a site for the production of transgressive, cosmopolitan ‘immobile subjects’, and to be transformed by commercial forces into a global commodity.

Deforming the Figure: Topology and the Social Imaginary:

Abstract: Topology is integral to a shift in socio-cultural theory from a linguistic to a mathematical paradigm. This has enabled in Badiou and Žižek a critique of the symbolic register, understood in terms of pure conceptual abstraction. Drawing on topology, this article understands it instead in terms of the figure. The break with the symbolic and language necessitates a break with form, but topologically still preserves a logic of the figure. This becomes a process of figuration, indeed a process of `deformation'. Badiou/Žižek will then presume a break with the symbolic for `the real'. But topology entails the centrality of not the real but the imaginary. With Castoriadis, this imaginary is understood as productive and social, and with Sloterdijk as spatial. In our times this is a self-organizing socio-technical imaginary. For Niklas Luhmann these socio-technical systems engage in coupling. They structurally couple with other social imaginaries. Their self-organization, going beyond pure functionality, operates through semantic excess: an excess that organizes the system and is their structure. Such structural coupling entails semantic exchange, consisting of not just information but also of images.

Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric

Abstract: "Lacan in Public" argues that Lacan s contributions to the theory of rhetoric are substantial and revolutionary and that rhetoric is in fact the central concern of Lacan s entire body of work.Scholars typically cite Jacques Lacan as a thinker primarily concerned with issues of desire, affect, politics, and pleasure. Scholars who identify themselves as rhetoricians have rarely cited Lacan as a significant influence in their own field.Though Lacan explicitly contends with some of the pivotal thinkers in the field of rhetoric (Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian) and familiar topoi (the oratorical tradition, the power of trope, stasis theory, and questions of contingency and context), rhetorical studies has been reticent to embrace the French thinker both because his writing is difficult and because Lacan s conception of rhetoric runs counter to the American traditions of rhetoric in composition and communication studies. Lacan s conception of rhetoric, Christian Lundberg argues in Lacan in Public, upsets and extends the received wisdom of American rhetorical studies that rhetoric is a science, rather than an art; that rhetoric is predicated not on the reciprocal exchange of meanings, but rather on the impossibility of such an exchange; and that rhetoric never achieves a correspondence with the real-world circumstances it attempts to describe.Lundberg proceeds from an analysis of Lacan s most recognizable maxim the unconscious is structured like a language and advances a rhetorical theory drawn from Lacanian psychoanalysis that provides a systematic account of rhetoric while simultaneously contributing to contemporary scholarship on Lacan.As Lundberg shows, Lacan s work speaks directly to conversations at the center of current rhetorical scholarship, including debates regarding the nature of the public and public discourses, the materiality of rhetoric and agency, and the contours of a theory of persuasion."

The Singularity of Being: Lacan and the Immortal Within

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic, this paper constructs a theory of subjective singularity from a Lacanian perspective. It argues that, unlike the "subject" (who comes into existence as a result of symbolic prohibition), or the "person" (who is aligned with the narcissistic conceits of the imaginary), the singular self emerges in response to a galvanizing directive arising from the real. This directive summons the individual to a "character" beyond his or her social and intersubjective investments. Consequently, singularity expresses the individual's nonnegotiable distinctiveness, eccentricity, or idiosyncrasy at the same time as it prevents both symbolic and imaginary closure. It opens to layers of rebelliousness that indicate that there are components of human life that exceed the realm of normative sociality. Indeed, insofar as singularity articulates something about the "undead" pulse of jouissance, it connects the individual to a paradoxical kind of immortality. This does not mean that the individual will not die, but rather that he or she is capable of "transcendent" experiences, such as heightened states of creativity, that (always momentarily) reach "outside" the parameters of mortal life. Such experiences allow the individual to feel "real" in ways that fend off symbolic abduction and psychic death.

Literature of the Indian Diaspora

Abstract: O.P. Dwivedi, Literature of the Indian Diaspora (PencraftInternational, 2011)Literature of the Indian Diaspora constitutes a major study of the literature and other cultural texts of the Indian diaspora. It is also an important contribution to diaspora theory in general. Applying a theoretical framework based on trauma, mourning/impossible mourning, spectres, identity, travel, translation, and recognition, this anthology uses the term 'migrant identity' to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously or unconsciously, as a group in displacement. The present anthology examines the works of key writers, many now based across the globe in Canada, Denmark, America and the UK - V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Balachandra Rajan, M.G. Vassanji, Jhumpa Lahiri, Gautam Malkani, Shiva Naipaul, Tabish Khair and Shauna Singh Baldwin, among them - to show how they exemplify both the diasporic imaginary and the respective traumas of Indian diasporas.Corelating the concept of diaspora - literally dispersal or the scattering of a people - with the historical and contemporary presence of people of Indian sub-continental origin in other areas of the world, this anthology uses this paradigm to analyse Indian expatriate writing. In Reworlding, O.P. Dwivedi has commissioned ten critical essays by as many scholars to examine major areas of the diaspora. Collectively, the essays demonstrate that the various literary traditions within the Indian diaspora share certain common resonances engendered by historical connections, spiritual affinities, and racial memories. Individually, they provide challenging insights into the particular experiences and writers. At the core of the diasporic writing is the haunting presence of India and the shared anguish of personal loss that generate the aesthetics of 'reworlding' underlying and unifying this body of literature. This collection will be of value to scholars and students of Indian writing in English, postcolonial writing in general, and the literature of exile and immigration.This collection of essays also retraces the postcolonial narratives of Indian diaspora etched by diasporic Indian writers. What mainly comes under its scrutiny is the complex experience of migrancy, encompassing both cultural hybridisation and assimilation on the one hand and lingering nostalgia and cultural alienation on the other. Its critique of the recent and not so recent diasporic texts, at once probing and insightful, foregrounds the deterritorialised, expatriate sensibility of their authors. Noticeably, the study contends that this sensibility blends seamlessly with various prominent features of this variety of diasporic writing, for instance, of individuation and self-definition in Rushdie, of conquest of rootlessness in Jhumpa Lahiri, of cultural inbetweenness in B. Rajan, and of the special charms of diasporic sensibility itself in Naipaul.This anthology, consisting of ten essays, encompasses an overarching view of the writing of the Indian diaspora. Of these, the first paper, by Silvia Albertazzi, titled 'Translation, Migration and Diaspora in Salman Rushdie's fiction', brilliantly argues how migrant narration becomes a fiction of individuation and self-definition, a kind of travel literature where departure is often forced, transit is endless and one very rarely reaches a point of arrival where present is lived by renaming the past. Migration always implies change: and change involves the risk of losing one's identity. Whilst the migrant does not recognize him/herself in his/her new image, the people around him/her do not accept his/her otherness. Therefore, s/he is compelled to face everyday life through a continuous oscillation between reality and dream. The migrant writer opposes imagination and the fantastic to western realistic mimesis. Albertazzi stresses, 'The migrant is compelled to experience the world through imagination' (34). The second paper, 'Reconfigured Identities: "Points of Departure" and Alienation of Arrival in Balachandra Rajan's The Dark Dancer', by Anna Clarke examines at length the postcolonial predicament of Rajan's protagonist, Krishnan, in the novel to 'belong' to his society and its cultural paradigms because of his long stay in the West. …

Lacan and the Concept of the 'Real'

Abstract: Acknowledgements Introduction - Approaching the Real The Imaginary and the Real The Symbolic and the Real Space and the Real Psychopathology and the Real Lacanian Materialism? Conclusion References Index

Fantasies and Illusions: On Liberty, Order, and Free Market

Abstract: Critical thinkers have used various terms to describe the collective imaginary that has real effects on individuals, society, and politics. Freud used the term “einer Illusion” to characterize religious belief in his work, The Future of an Illusion, though many others in the psychoanalytic tradition would turn to the notion of fantasy. Marx sometimes used the term illusion and he notoriously deployed the optical illusion and the phantasmagoria in his famous discussion of commodity fetishism. (And Marx, of course, is the father of Ideologiekritic). Foucault at times used the language of fantasy and phantasms, in an early period deployed the term illusion, and in later works adamantly rejected the word illusion. (He would always resist the term ideology). What is the difference between an illusion, a fantasy, and ideology? What is the right term to describe these collective imaginaries that have real effects on social and political conditions? In this essay, the first of a triptych, I explore the relation between two of these notions, namely illusions and fantasies, in the concrete context of the myth of the “free market.”

'Pataphysics: A Useless Guide

Abstract: Of all the French cultural exports over the last 150 years or so, 'pataphysics--the science of imaginary solutions and the laws governing exceptions--has proven to be one of the most durable. Originating in the wild imagination of French poet and playwright Alfred Jarry and his schoolmates, resisting clear definition, purposefully useless, and almost impossible to understand, 'pataphysics nevertheless lies around the roots of Absurdism, Dada, futurism, surrealism, situationism, and other key cultural developments of the twentieth century. In this account of the evolution and influence of 'pataphysics, Andrew Hugill offers an informed exposition of a rich and difficult territory, staying aloft on a tightrope stretched between the twin dangers of oversimplifying a serious subject and taking a joke too seriously. Drawing on more than twenty-five years' research, Hugill maps the 'pataphysical presence (partly conscious and acknowledged but largely unconscious and unacknowledged) in literature, theater, music, the visual arts, and the culture at large, and even detects 'pataphysical influence in the social sciences and the sciences. He offers many substantial excerpts (in English translation) from primary sources, intercalated with a thorough explication of key themes and events of 'pataphysical history. In a Jarryesque touch, he provides these in reverse chronological order, beginning with a survey of 'pataphysics in the digital age and working backward to Jarry and beyond. He looks specifically at the work of Jean Baudrillard, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, J. G. Ballard, Asger Jorn, Gilles Deleuze, Roger Shattuck, Jacques Prevert, Antonin Artaud, Rene Clair, the Marx Brothers, Joan Miro, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Raymond Roussel, Jean-Pierre Brisset, and many others.

On the Importance of Visions among the Amazonian Shuar

Abstract: This essay involves a set of speculations concerning the role plant-granted visions play in the formation of the Shuar subject. It also reflects on the need for an ethnography of secrecy and the ineffable. In both these tasks I seek to engage psychoanalytic theory. Jacques Lacan’s distinction between the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic helps analyze the relationship between the discourse and the silence of the unconscious. His essay on the “mirror stage” is useful for thinking about bourgeois subjectivity. Nevertheless, I argue that premissionization Shuar did not go through the mirror stage. First, I argue that Shuar practices effected the colonization of the Symbolic by the Real, in contrast to bourgeois culture, in which the Symbolic colonizes the Real. Then I explore the role of desire, violence, and speech in the construction of different kinds of power. Pierre Clastres’ work helps to explore how these two cultures clash and articulate on the colonization frontier, while psychoanalytic theory a...

Figurations et relations : le sujet dans les romans à la première personne et les textes philosophiques du XVIIe siècle

Abstract: The objective of this thesis is to set out several aspects of the figuration of the subject in the 17th Century, through a joint reading of first person novels and philosophical texts from this period. Beginning with similar questions, these two discursive genres construct a figure of a knowing and itinerant subject, a subject animated by the desire to know and thus guided to rethink the conditions that articulate his particular experience. For the authors of these works, the truth is discovered through a series of singular experiences and experiments; the world more clearly announces itself in the first person, rendering a principally singular perception. This poses the problem of the legitimation of personal pronouncement, legitimation which allows for the articulation of the first person with an alterity, while conserving the singularity of the subject. This singularity always doubles as a dispersion of the identities and referents of the first person. Still, narration, fiction and corporal practice show this identity as constellation. The first two expose the diverse faces of the ‘I’, their agreements and disagreements, their being at the same time past and present, real persons and imaginary characters, narrator and author. From the practices tied to the pain and pleasure of the body is drawn another form of possible encounter between the particularity of a subject and an other: the one he desires, with whom he suffers and plays, the one who lives in him. Through all these aspects, enunciative, narrative, fictional, physical, the subjectivity that is inscribed in and described by these texts is always primarily relational: an account recounted to encounter the other.

Incest, the Child, and the Despotic Father

Abstract: Based on ethnographic research in Berlin, this paper examines two paradigmatic cases in which real incest is brought into the penumbra of law and subsumed into an imaginary complex superimposed on sexual abuse. It uses them to theorize at a higher level of abstraction about the deployment of myth by the unconscious, the relation between taboo and law, male and female attachments to the child, gender conflict, and changes in the position of the father in the symbolic order of the West. One case focuses on how a child victim translates what had happened into the therapeutic and legal languages of sexual abuse, the other on the father’s evolving apprehension of his deed in the course of therapy. I argue that (1) the incest taboo increasingly regulates lineal rather than lateral relations between kin; (2) the imaginary complex construes male sexuality as a security threat to children, resulting in a negative identification with and of male difference, with serious consequences for the family, the heterosexual...

Gangland Online: Performing the Real Imaginary World of Gangstas and Ghettos in Brussels

Abstract: Using the Brussels black African gangs as an example, this article aims to prove that gang members nowadays take advantage of the new possibilities offered by technological innovation, such as the internet and more specifically weblogs, to communicate ‘gang-ness’. In recent years, Brussels, the Belgian capital, has witnessed the rise of several troublesome youth gangs, among which black African youth gangs have attracted most attention. Made up of migrants predominantly coming from the African Great Lakes Region, the Belgian police estimate that at least 13 black African gangs are active in Brussels, each with approximately 20–50 members. Their gang labels allude to skin colour, such as ‘Black Demolition’, to the neighbourhood surrounding the subway station of the same name, such as ‘Anneessens’ or to postal codes of Brussels municipalities such as ‘1140’, ‘1070 style’, ‘1050 Staff’. Although members are held responsible for extortion, drug trafficking and violent robberies, the foremost distinctive feature of black African gangs is their involvement in public black-on-black fights involving excessive violence, stabbings and occasionally homicides. In 2009 five gang-motivated homicides were recorded in Brussels – a figure that by Belgian standards is exceptionally high. European Journal of Crime, Criminal Law and Criminal Justice 20 (2012) 165–180

Obeah’s Sensations: Rethinking Religion at the Transnational Turn

Abstract: In a recent journal issue, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine Murison observe that work on non-Protestant religions has the potential to upend conventional accounts of religion's place in British America. Taking up that challenge, Jaudon's essay discusses Revolutionary-era literary representations of obeah, a creole religion practiced by enslaved persons in the British Caribbean, arguing that such narratives use religious experience to craft an alternative transnationalism. Works such as William Earle's 1800 novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack and similar chapbooks, penny-dreadfuls, and pantomimes share a common fascination with the occult forms of sensation obeah enabled, explaining away these experiences as misrecognitions of a stable material reality. Jaudon draws together recent reassessments of the history of the senses by anthropologists and challenges to secularism by political theorists to unsettle these texts' easy dismissal of the strange sense perceptions and bodily capacities that obeah cultivated among enslaved persons. In their anxious attempts to debunk obeah, these narratives record what Jacques Ranciere calls a "dissensus": a clash between competing models of sensory perception. Such moments of sensory disjuncture posed a significant threat to a colonial order that claimed universality for its sense perceptions. Obeah narratives indicate that embodied religious experience constitutes a sensual alternative to what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon terms the "Westphalian imaginary" of a world mapped into nation-states. By recharacterizing religion as an alternative to the nation instead of something that circulates across its boundaries, Jaudon suggests new maps for transnational inquiry-ones that focus on the sensual relations religions forge or forbid between their adherents' bodies and the nation-state's world.

Cinema by Other Means

Abstract: Preamble 1. Film, Or the Vibrancy of Matter 2. On Re-materialization of the Cinematographic Apparatus 3. Written Films 4. Notes Around General Cinefication 5. Whither the Imaginary Signifier? 6. The 'Between' of Cinema Index

Beyond reified categories. Multidimensional identifications among 'Black' and 'Indian' groups in Columbia and Mexico.

Abstract: Analyses of multicultural state-dictated social categories are often governed by those same categories, even while they deconstruct them Nonetheless, these categories are often used as well in public spheres such as national imaginary or ethno-political activism Taking a different point of departure, that of representations rather than the categories themselves, the aim of our paper is to understand the mode of classification that are relevant among four populations in Colombia and Mexico who would, a priori, be categorized as 'black' or 'Indian' The daily reality of these groups indicates other possible internal, sometimes even intersecting, kinds of categorizations, which, far from naturalizing the 'Indian' and 'black' categories, in fact reveal place based social identifications These identifications seem closer to everyday lives and practices of the people in question, and underscore the local conceptions of their presence and agency in a given spot

South Africa in the global imaginary

Abstract: ‘South Africa’ has long meant different things to different people. As a discursive construction, the term has traded on – and been influenced by – contending representations and performances across a range of media, the reception of which, both within the region and ‘abroad’, has necessarily had an effect on what this label is taken to name. Reception is always interested , influenced by ideological or psychological imperatives, whether by apologists for or subjects of empire, members of anti-colonial or anti-apartheid movements, exiles and emigres, or by only apparently disinterested outsiders for whom the region's vicarious rewards have been – and are – many. Thus ‘South Africa’, once no more than a descriptive geographical term of convenience, has served for disaggregated global communities of interest variously to signify a site of adventure, sport or recuperation, a space marked by vitality or cruelty, reconciliation and redemption, and been mediated or contested as a kind of home. During the second Anglo-Boer or South African War, it named the location of one of imperial Britain's most serious moments of crisis, while simultaneously providing occasion for transnational identifications by such diverse groups as Irish nationalists and aristocratic tsarist Russians, who shared little with the proto-Afrikaner Boers besides opposition to the British Empire. For much of the second half of the twentieth century it served in a global imaginary largely as the domain of a white nationalist regime whose policies propelled the word ‘apartheid’ into the global lexicon.

Highways, heroes, and secular martyrs: the symbolics of power and sacrifice

Abstract: This article examines the subtle and not so subtle shifts in Canadian political culture that have taken place in, through and alongside the so-called ‘return’ of the Canadian warrior. It begins from the contention that while the racialised dimensions of the post 9/11 Canadian security state have been well analysed elsewhere, the gendered dimensions have not been fully explored. This article explores the re-emergence of a sacrificial imaginary in Canadian culture through an examination of seemingly irreconcilable accounts that have emerged of the Canadian security state – one that reads ‘Canada’ through the story of the torture and repatriation of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, and one that tells the story of ‘Canada at War’ through the warrior's return. It examines both in terms of the tensions and instabilities they reveal in the Western liberal imaginary and in terms of the ways in which they collectively operate to redefine the aesthetic borders of the Canadian political community. The article argues that the sacralisation of violence which has refound this political community has been enabled by a remasculinised aesthetic that delimits the ‘progressive liberalism’ which animated the Canada of Old – ostensibly in order to protect it.

Mapping the imaginary of charitable giving

Abstract: The meaningfulness of charitable giving is largely owed to the imaginary conceptions that underpin this form of giving Building on Taylor's notion of “social imaginary” and Godelier's work on “gift imaginary,” we theorize the imaginary of charitable giving Through a combination of qualitative methods the charitable gift imaginary and its role in givers' meaning making are explored in a specific socio-cultural context The theoretical foundation and the generated data enable us to map the imaginary of charitable giving across four distinct clusters and theorize meaning – making as navigation across relatively stable assemblages of conceptions of poverty, donors, end-recipients and charitable giving These assemblages are suggested to form a multifaceted imaginary that is both cultural (shared) and personal (individually performed)