Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 2013"

Imagination as Expansion of Experience

Abstract: This paper proposes a developmental view on imagination: from this perspective, imagination can be seen as triggered by some disrupting event, which generates a disjunction from the person's unfolding experience of the "real" world, and as unfolding as a loop, which eventually comes back to the actual experience. Examining recent and classical theorization of imagination in psychology, the paper opposes a deficitary view of imagination to an expansive notion of imagination. The paper explores Piaget, Vygotsky, Harris and Pelaprat & Cole consider: 1) What does provoke a "rupture" or disjunction? 2) What are the psychological processes involved in the imaginary loop? 3) What nourishes such processes? 4) What are the consequences of such imaginary loop, or what does it enable doing? The paper proposes to adopt an expansive view of imagination, as Vygotsky proposed-a perspective that has been under-explored empirically since his seminal work. To stimulate such sociocultural psychology of imagination, two empirical examples are provided, one showing how children make sense of metaphor in an experimental setting, the other showing a young person using a novel met at school as symbolic resource.

The Persistence of Nationalism: From Imagined Communities to Urban Encounters

Abstract: This is a book about the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism. The book offers a detailed study of how contemporary attempts by theorists of cosmopolitanism, citizenship, globalism and multiculturalism to go beyond nationalism often reproduce key aspects of a nationalist imaginary. It argues that the challenge of resisting nationalism will require more than a shift in the scale of politics – from the national up to the global or down to the local, and more than a shift in the count of politics – to an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. In order to avoid the grip of ‘nationalist thinking’, we need to re-open the question of what it means to imagine community. Set against the backdrop of the imaginative geographies of the War in Terror and the new beginning promised by the Presidency of Barack Obama, the book shows how critical interventions often work in collaboration with nationalist politics, even when the aim is to resist nationalism. It claims that a nationalist imaginary includes powerful understandings of freedom, subjectivity, sovereignty and political space/time which must also be placed under question if we want to avoid reproducing ideas about ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on insights from feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as critical approaches to International Relations and Geography, this book presents a unique and refreshing approach to the politics of nationalism.

Professional Standards, Teacher Identities and an Ethics of Singularity.

Abstract: This paper offers a critical analysis of the education policy move towards teacher professional standards Drawing on Lacan’s three registers of the psyche (real, imaginary and symbolic), the paper argues that moves towards codification (and domestication) of teachers’ work and identities in standardized (and sanitized) forms, such as the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership professional standards recently adopted in Australia, can be read as a colonization of the Real and the imaginary by (a rather static, mortified form of) the symbolic The paper argues that in response to such normalizing moves, we need to consider how we might conceptualize the reanimation of what it means to teach and be a teacher, something we attempt in terms of enabling each of the psyche’s registers to inter-animate each other, as a means of engendering teacher identities characterized by criticality, creativity and passion – that is, by an ethics of singularity rather than by standardization

What Do Invisible Friends Know? Imaginary Companions, God, and Theory of Mind

Abstract: Theory of mind (ToM) research has been carried out in relation to a variety of human and nonhuman agents such as parents, friends, God, Mayan forest spirits, and animals. The present study adds a new agent to the list—the imaginary/invisible friend. Three types of ToM tasks were administered to 36 children, ages 2 to 8, who had invisible friends at the time of the tasks: occluded picture, background knowledge, and surprising contents tasks. The knowledge attributed to imaginary companions was compared to the knowledge attributed to God, as well as to a human and to a dog. Results showed that younger children tended to attribute knowledge to all agents, including imaginary friends. Older children treated God differently from all other agents, but the invisible friend was also treated differently from the human and the dog. Implications regarding cognitive development and anthropomorphism are considered, as well as for the in-between character of invisible friends.

Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus's Imagines

Abstract: sed quemadmodum si litteras pulchras alicubi inspiceremus, non nobis sufficeret laudare scriptoris articulum, quoniam eas pariles, aequales decorasque fecit, nisi etiam legeremus quid nobis per illas indicaverit: ita factum hoc qui tantum inspicit, delectatur pulchritudine facti ut admiretur artificem; qui autem intellegit, quasi legit, aliter enim videtur pictura, aliter videntur litterae. picturam cum videris, hoc est totum vidisse, laudasse: litteras cum videris, non hoc est totum; quoniam commoneris et legere. But if we were looking at beautifully written letters somewhere, it would not suffice for us to praise the hand of the writer--the fact that he has made them uniform, symmetrical, and elegant--unless we were also reading what, through them, he has conveyed to us. In the same way, the person who views this deed [Christ's miracle of the loaves and fishes] might be so pleased with the deed's beauty as to admire the person performing it. Yet the person who understands it is, as it were, the person who reads. For a picture is looked at in one way, and letters are looked at in another. When you have seen a picture, the activity is complete: to have seen is to have praised. When you have seen letters, the thing is not complete, for you are reminded also to read. Augustine, In Evang. Iohan. (Tractatus 24), 2 This volume investigates the many ways in which modes and practices of viewing were conceptualized in the ancient Greek world. The contributors have turned to both archaeological and literary products, and have used these various 'traces' to excavate a lost discourse of seeing, while formulating (according to the conventions of twenty-first-century academic prose) the social, political, and intellectual parameters of viewing in cultural historical perspective. But ancient Greek authors were themselves acutely sensitive to the stakes of theorizing sight in language--of translating visual stimuli, and the act of critically responding to them into spoken or written discourse. How, if at all, can words mediate sight? In what ways do texts function like images, and images like texts? And which medium better represents the hermeneutics of perception: pictures for viewing, or words for reading? Such questions stretch back to the very beginnings of the Greek literary tradition. Indeed, they might be said to have their conceptual origins in the Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Book 18 of the Iliad). To my mind, Homer was the first to probe, and indeed contest, the respective limits of words and pictures. At the same time, Homers description of Achilles' shield also laid the ground for critical conventions of analogizing visual and verbal modes of representation: by orally invoking pictures that paradoxically talk, sound, and sing, the shield forged by the Homeric Hephaestus itself forged a tradition of theorizing vision in terms of voice, and vice versa. (1) According to Plutarch, it was Simonides who coined the subsequent aphorism that "painting is silent poetry and poetry is talking painting." (2) But this framework for coming to terms with vision remained a literary critical mainstay. If, as Michael Baxandall (1985, 107) diagnosed, viewing is always a "theory-laden" activity, Greek discourses of vision were loaded with an associated ideology of voice: in the Greek cultural imaginary, and across a remarkably long timespan, theorizing viewing meant relating it to the parallel processes of hearing and reading. (3) While this tradition of conceptualizing sight stretches back to the beginnings of Greek literature, it also stretches forwards to the murky transition from late antique to early medieval intellectual thinking. As the opening epigraph wonderfully attests, Augustine (writing between the late fourth and early fifth centuries CE) also theorized the act of seeing in terms of reading. Where classical forebears tended to champion the parallels between words and pictures, however, Augustine exploited the analogy in order to champion the supremacy of language. …

The Lack of Power or the Power of Lack in Leadership as a Discursively Constructed Identity

Abstract: The study uses a psychoanalytic framework to explore how leadership identities are constructed. It advances the idea that leadership identities are imaginary constructions that invariable fail, reiterating a lack of being. Empirical material consisting of interviews with 15 leaders is used to explore the productive role this lack plays. The study suggests that leadership identities are always already subverted by unconscious desire and therefore less powerful than we might think with regard to imposing structures on others, but also much more powerful than we might think as liberating struggles with leaders’ imaginary selves.

What is the corporation and why does it matter

Abstract: ‘Management’ is widely and deeply embedded in ‘corporations’. Yet in many studies of management and organization the corporation is an influential but shadowy and largely unaccountable presence. Rarely is the modern, capitalist corporation thematized. This article contributes to remedying this omission by attending to how the corporation is a product of three imaginaries: legal, economic, and political. In the post-medieval order, the legal imaginary made possible the construction of the corporate form; the economic imaginary has promoted an expansion of this form and shaped its subsequent development; and, finally, the political imaginary offers a way of appreciating how politics, including the power of the state, is key to (i) the rise of the modern corporation, and (ii) to a recognition of how the primacy of the political in the formation and development of the modern corporation is articulated through, and obscured behind, the dominance of legal and economic imaginaries. Attending to the three imaginaries, it is argued, is central to a thorough comprehension of the modern corporation, a concomitant appreciation of its deeply divisive consequences, and lastly, to the development of policies designed to counteract its malign effects.

On the Names-Of-The-Father

Abstract: Foreword by Jacques-Alain Miller The Symbolic, the Imaginary, and the Real Introduction to the Names-of-the-Father Bio-bibliographical Notes Translator s Notes

Adventures of the Symbolic: Post-marxism and Radical Democracy

Abstract: Foreword, by Dick HowardAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Post-Marxism and the Symbolic Turn1. The Symbolic Dimension and the Politics of Young Hegelianism2. The Fate of the Symbolic from Romantic Socialism to a Marxism in extremis3. From the Symbolic Turn to the Social Imaginary: Castoriadis's Project of Autonomy4. Democracy Between Disenchantment and Political Theology: French Post-Marxism and the Return of Religion5. The Post-Marx of the Letter: Laclau and Mouffe Between Postmodern Melancholy and Post-Marxist Mourning6. Of Empty Places: Zizek and LaclauEpilogueNotesIndex

Not as it Seems: Using Deleuzian Concepts of the Imaginary to Rethink Children's Drawings

Abstract: Deleuze (1990) states in Negotiations that signs are realized in ideas. Although Deleuze referred to cinema, his thinking about signs and ideas can apply to drawings. Cinema is moving imagery and drawing is static, however both are informed and constructed from realized ideas that continue to shift beyond the artifact. Theories about children’s drawings have historically pertained to establishing schematic universalities rather than acknowledging the agglomerative connections they make to the multiple things occurring around a drawing as it is created. Universal schemas however persist within early childhood art discourses despite the growth of critical theory research into other aspects of childhood. Deleuze’s assertions about the signs and classifications of cinema help to contest notions of schematic development, i.e. children should progress through particular iconic drawing stages at particular ages. Deleuze’s quotes and thoughts on the imaginary and imagination are referenced to interrogate ‘scientific’ knowledges and the gathering of evidential truths about children’s intellectual growth and development. Four examples from a dataset of drawings from a pilot study, undertaken by the author that tested the methodological potential of intergenerational collaborative drawing in early childhood settings, facilitate focused discussion on the above contestations.

Hope in a Land of Strangers

Abstract: This response to Ash Amin's new book, ‘Land of Strangers’ considers his argument that an ‘urban commons’ of multiplicity must be underpinned by a cultural imaginary that creates momentum and musters sentiment with affective force. He argues encounters are always deeply mediated and attitudes shaped by material, technological and symbolic influences with provenances near and remote. This paper targets the sphere of public narratives of encounter, providing two examples of interventions aimed at mobilising sentiment towards ideas of intercultural solidarity and care, and at re-working place identities in ways that highlight multiplicity, interdependency, and intersecting realities.

This Is Not a Program

Abstract: Tiqqun, 777/s Is Not a Program Cambridge: MIT Press/Semiotext(e), 2011, 200pp. ISBN 978-1-58435-097-2Tiqqun was a French journal published in 1999-2001. Part of the French Autonome movement, it also engages with the Italian Autonomist tradition (Negri, Tronti...). Ibis Is Not a Program refers to Deleuze and Guattari, to Foucault, Heidegger and Debord. The book is composed of two sections ("This Is Not a Program' and 'As a Science of Apparatuses'). Each section contains short chapters illustrated with a photograph, according to an aesthetic device invented by the Surrealists (for instance in Breton's Nadja). This review will endeavour to summarise the main points of this book before providing a discussion of some themes.First, Tiqqun refutes Marxist class analysis:To continue the struggle today, we will have to scrap the notion of class and with it the whole entourage of certified origins, reassuring sociologisms, identity prostheses. The notion of class is only good for holding like a little bedpan the neuroses, separation, and perpetual recrimination in which They have taken such morbid delight in France, in every segment of society, for such a long time. Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes - the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers - among which, in each individual case, one could differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through the middle of each of us, between what makes us a citizen, our predicates, and all the rest. It is thus in each of us that war is being waged between imperial socialization and that which already eludes it (p. 12).In effect, Tiqqun affirms that domination and control are produced through apparatuses of power/knowledge which capture our subjectivity. Consequently, domination is not based on economic exploitation but rather in the political domain:THE POLITICAL NOW DOMINATES THE ECONOMIC. What is ultimately at stake is no longer the extraction of surplus value, but Control. Now the level of surplus value extracted solely indicates the level of Control, which is the local condition of extraction. Capital is no longer but a means to generalized control (p. 155).In order to resist this political domination, Tiqqun asserts that it is necessary to construct a political activity within an immanent process: 'We have called this plane of consistency the Imaginary Party' (p. …

Serbian Dreambook : National Imaginary in the Time of Milosevic

Abstract: Erin Jessee reviews Serbian Dreambook: National Imaginary in the Time of Milosevic by By Marko Živkovic

The Sociological Imaginary and Disability Enquiry in Late Modernity

Abstract: Mills’s idea of the sociological imagination has captured many generations of scholars interested in the difficult social issues that people grapple with in their lives. Yet, sociology has traditio...

The north-south divide in the German imaginary: rethinking cultural identity in Goethe’s Italienische reise and Heine’s Italian Reisebilder

Abstract: ............................................................................................................................................ i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................................... iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................................................................................ v LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS OF PRIMARY WORKS CITED .......................................................... vi

Religion as dialogical resource: a socio-cultural approach.

Abstract: William James proposed a psychological study of religion examining people’s religious experiences, and to see in what sense these were good for them. The recent developments of psychology of religion moved far from that initial proposition. In this paper, we propose a sociocultural perspective to religion that renews with that initial stance. After recalling Vygtotsky’s core ideas, we suggest that religion, as cultural and symbolic system, participates to the orchestration of human activities and sense-making. Such orchestration works both from within the person, through internalized values and ideas, and from without, through the person’s interactions with others, discourses, cultural objects etc. This leads us to consider religions as supporting various forms of dialogical dynamics—intra-psychological dialogues, interpersonal with present, absent or imaginary others, as well as inter-group dialogues—which we illustrate with empirical vignettes. The example of religious tensions in the Balkans in the 90’s highlights how much the historical-cultural embeddedness of these dynamics can also lead to the end of dialogicality, and therefore, sense-making

Anthropological Places, Digital Spaces, and Imaginary Scapes: Packaging a Digital Sámiland

Abstract: This article, which focuses on the Sami, the indigenous people of Fenno-Scandinavia, investigates the production of place in digital environments. Place-making practices are approached through the ...

Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction

Abstract: Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 290pp. ISBN 9780470974575. "Who would ever think of learning to live out of an English novel?" --Anthony Trollope Just like broccoli, so too is reading fiction good for you. Well, not exactly. However, with his claim that stories function as simulations of the social world, cognitive psychologist and novelist Keith Oatley argues that reading novels, short stories, poems, and dramas enable us to better understand other people and navigate the complexities of social life. Oatley proposes to develop what he sees as a neglected field of inquiry--the "psychology of fiction." Geared towards "general readers, psychologists, literary theorists, and students" (x), Such Stuff as Dreams aims to demonstrate "how fiction enters the mind, how it prompts us toward emotions, how it affords insights into ourselves and others, how it is enjoyable, [and] how it has been shown to have worthwhile effects on readers" (7). Oatley's central premise (borrowed from Shakespeare and others) is that fiction is a "guided dream" or "a model of the world" that offers readers a glimpse "beneath the surface of the everyday world" (2). Oatley draws upon the results of his research group's experiments with readers, along with recent scientific techniques such as brain scans (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging), to demonstrate reading as a process of simulation. "Narrative stories are simulations that run not on computers but on minds" (17). The recent discovery of mirrors neurons, the "smart cells" in our bodies constitutes the neural underpinnings of reading as a process of simulation. Mirror neurons are cells in the brain that fire both when an action is observed and when that same action is enacted by the observer. Citing recent fMRI evidence that brain regions track different aspects of a story, Oatley explains that "recognition of an action in the imagination when we hear or read about it involves brain systems responsible for initiating that action"; thus, "readers construct an active mental model of what is going on in the story, and can also imagine what might happen next" (20). Oatley sees readers as participating in a collaborative relationship with the writer--when we read, we create "our own version of the piece of fiction, our own dream, and our own reenactment." Oatley suggests that "with the idea of fiction as world-creating, and also world reflecting, we can understand something of what happens psychologically when we engage with fiction as readers or audience members" (18). That there is constant interplay between author, reader and text is not exactly news. Wolfgang Iser first conceptualized reading as an active practice of meaning making in The Implied Reader (1978), though he focused more on features of the text rather than psychological processes. For Iser, the novel was the genre in which reader involvement coincided with meaning production. (1) Later, in The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology (1993), Iser explained how the literary text brings "into view the interplay among the fictive, the real, and the imaginary." (2) More recently, in Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative (2004), David Herman has emphasized narrative as an instrument of mind, describing the processes by which readers co-construct narrative worlds as "worlding the story" and "storying the world." Strangely, Oatley's entire discussion of creativity and imagined worlds--"we write our own versions of what we read" (62)--neither extends nor nuances Iser's or Herman's far more developed theories of fiction as a sense-making activity. Building on Brian Boyd's theory in The Origin of Stories (2000) that fiction originates in play, Oatley says that "pretend play" (make-believe or "what if") involves discovery--we become things we are not (27). Our ability to engage in such imaginative play as children becomes the basis for how we later create, understand, and enjoy stories. …

Affect and Society in Precolonial Africa

Abstract: "If the study of political and religious institutions, economic and social patterns , philosophical and scientific ideas is indispensable for an understanding of what our civilization has been and is, why shouldn't the same be true of the study of our feelings, among them both imaginary and real, for a thousand years? "- Octavio Paz, Nobel-prize winning Mexican poet1In their 1920 ethnography of the Ila, Reverend Edwin Smith and District Commissioner Andrew Dale described as "prostitution" the Ila institution of kuweza lubono mung'anda (lit. "to hunt for wealth at home," also called "hunting cattle"), in which a wife and husband agree that she take lovers to attract gifts shared between them. Smith and Dale categorized kuweza lubono as prostitution because they associated the sensuous experience of sex with material exchange or the sincerity of affection, but could not imagine a link between all three without negating the sincerity of lovers' affection.2 Kuweza lubono was all the more complicated because the instigator might be the wife or the husband, confounding categories, such as female "victim" or male "cuckold." The practice of kuweza lubono inspired in Ila husbands and wives jealousy over both personal relationships and the material gains.3 Yet, kuweza lubono was also a source of husbands' pride in industrious wives who accumulated great stores of wealth and wives' satisfaction in both the material and social success facilitated by kuweza lubono. ,4 Indeed, for Ila speakers, the verb kuweza also described the "seeking for wealth and power" in the quest to establish one's social position and the ever-present possibility of failure, conjuring up the uncertainties of striving for social mobility.5 Women often developed deep attachment to their kuweza lubono partners, cultivating such relationships over long periods of time, and even shifting into lubambo relationships (publicly acknowledged lovers) with them.Ila men and women instructed Smith and Dale on meeting economic and social aspirations through kuweza lubono and teach us about entanglements between the sensuous, the affective, and the material in human relationships in Bwila during the first years of the twentieth century. Their descriptions capture instances of affectivity with roots in precolonial life, however recent. The feelings, gifts, and sensory experiences shared or exchanged through kuweza lubono reveal new categories of historical actors, such as lovers, with the potential to bring a subjectivity rich in sensory experience and emotional depth to histories of the precolonial past. They dramatically recast what was at stake in processes common in histories of precolonial Africa, such as the circulation of wealth in the pursuit of social ties.Oral traditions, recovered burial sites, words' shifting meanings, and other residue of early African life also resonate with affectivity, but all too often our narratives of the deep African past do not capture the emotional experiences of the subjects who shared stories of estranged families and jealous husbands,6 who visited gravesites carrying worn pebbles to purposefully deposit on the newly mounded earth of fresh graves,7 and who drew on familiar concepts and words to name new sources of both terror and honor.8 Our precolonial histories, which illuminate the causal power of, for example, novel technologies and political institutions in explaining historical change, might seem dry and overly instrumental to colleagues (and students) studying more recent periods or other world regions because they lack the narrative depth of human emotion. Incorporating the affective dimensions of life into histories of early African societies holds great promise for bringing much needed subjectivity to central themes of early African history, making it "legible" to a broader audience,9 and for transforming how we understand the developments to which we already assign great explanatory power. Indeed, narratives about the development of political institutions, the spread of technologies like metallurgy, cattle keeping, and cereal cropping and even the familiar problem of the Bantu Expansions may well be comprehensible only when we know more about the subjective emotional stakes for the agents of these transformations. …

A children’s geography of occupation: imaginary, emotional, and everyday spaces of palestinian childhood

Abstract: OF DISSERTATION A CHILDREN’S GEOGRAPHY OF OCCUPATION: IMAGINARY, EMOTIONAL, AND EVERYDAY SPACES OF PALESTINIAN CHILDHOOD This research examines the political geographies of Palestinian children, and the ways in which their everyday spaces and practices are shaped by broader social and political processes. This research begins with an investigation into the role of the child in the moral geopolitics of humanitarianism and the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. From here, the research explores how the competing discourses of Palestinian nationalism and international humanitarianism, and the legacy of forced migration, have shaped the subjectivity of Palestinian children and the spaces of childhood in a West Bank refugee camp, from homes, to schools, streets, and youth centers. Finally, using participant observation, visual methods and guided tours, this research explores how children reshape the discursive spaces of childhood and child subjectivity through their everyday practices.

Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human

Abstract: Medieval authors placed fantastic creatures in the borders of manuscripts, since they mark the boundaries of our understanding. Tales throughout the world generally place fabulous beasts in marginal locations - deserts, deep woods, remote islands, glaciers, ocean depths, mountain peaks, caves, swamps, heavenly bodies and alternate universes. According to apocalyptic visions of the Bible, they will also proliferate as we approach the end of time. Because they challenge our conceptual powers, fantastic creatures also seem to exist at the limits of language. Legends tell us that imaginary animals belong to a primordial time, before we had encompassed the world in names, categories and elaborate conceptual frameworks. This richly illustrated book shows how, despite their liminal role, griffins, dog-men, mermaids, dragons, unicorns, yetis and many other imaginary creatures are socially constructed through the same complex play of sensuality and imagination as 'real' ones. It traces the history of imaginary animals from Palaeolithic art to the Harry Potter stories and robotic pets. These figures help us psychologically by giving form to our amorphous fears as 'monsters', as well as embodying our hopes as 'wonders'. Nevertheless, their greatest service may be to continually challenge our imaginations, directing us beyond the limitations of our conventional beliefs and expectations.

Signs of the Soul: Toward a Semiotics of Religious Subjectivity

Abstract: Taking as a point of departure the description and depiction of the anima ragionevole e beata (sensible and blessed soul) in Ripa’s Iconologia, this essay inquires, from a semiotic point of view, into the labyrinthine development of the Christian imaginary of the soul, considered one of the sources of the cultural semiotics of modern and contemporary subjectivities Placed between the Greek model of visual representations of psyche, incarnated by countless fleeting but visible beings (sirens, birds, butterflies, snakes, etc), and the Jewish model of a vital breath that, having to resemble the divine one, must shun any iconic rendering, the Christian imaginary of the soul develops—in parallel with the Christian theology of the soul—paradoxically, seeking to combine its depiction and, simultaneously, the denial of it

Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary

Abstract: Tomislav Z. Longinovic Durham, NC & London: Duke University Press, 2011, x+212pp., £14.99/$22.95 p/b THE VAMPIRE, THE ORGANISING TROPE USED BY TOMISLAV LONGINOVIC'S study of violence, nationhood an...

The Central American transnational imaginary: Defining the transnational and gendered contours of Central American immigrant experience

Abstract: In this article, I explore recent cultural production about and by Central Americans in the United States, including the independent film Sin nombre, Sirias's novel, Bernardo and the Virgin, and the autobiographical account, December Sky: Beyond My Undocumented Life by Cortez-Davis. Drawing on Jose Saldivar's conceptualization of a “transnational imaginary,” I contend that these cultural works contribute to the formation and continuous redefinition of an emergent Central American transnational imaginary. In so doing, they provide insight into the identities and multiple subject positions taking shape among Central American immigrants in the United States. Moreover, because in all of these texts women play a central role, these works also call attention to the gendered dimensions and implications of such processes.