The Imaginary

About: The Imaginary is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 4807 publications have been published within this topic receiving 87663 citations.

Not Even Remotely Global? Method and Scale in World History

Abstract: Geoff Eley's call for more rigorous histories of the global joins a burgeoning literature preoccupied with the relationship between contemporary plane tary interdependence and what Hegel called die Weltgeschichte - which Ranajit Guha has translated as 'World-history'.1 Seeking a break from the sociological literature on globalization as well as from the apparently endless terminological debate about when the word emerged or what it means, Eley offers a two-pronged approach, one which privileges two heretofore distinct historiographies: studies of slavery, post-emancipation and the Black Atlantic, and work on transnational labour markets and migration. By insisting on drawing each of these (back) into the history of global capital on either side of the long nineteenth century, Eley envisions histories of globalization that make the domain of the social - a longstanding concern of his - more legible than it has been among either self-styled world historians or students of geopolitics in a variety of disciplines.2 He also aspires to rematerialize the political effects, in real and imaginary terms, of the convergence of historically specific forms of global transformation with, among other things, 'new patterns of transnational migration', both 'free' and coerced. Above all, Eley is interested in more rigorously historicized genealogies of the global present: genealogies that are, if not predictive, then at least forward-looking in terms of democratic practice for an emergent 'global left'. There is much to get behind in response to a manifesto of this kind. In many respects, Eley's priorities are a breath of fresh air in the context of much recent work on globalization. For one thing, he challenges the econometric approaches on offer in the work of students of the phenomenon like Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton, for whom the exceptionalism of the present has been a central concern.3 Eley also takes seriously recent

Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state

Abstract: I argue that contemporary Americans of many ethnoracial backgrounds have, in the past forty years, negotiated the painful consequences of a form of multiculturalism that rewards otherness with cultural capital and punishes it with structural and symbolic abjection, through mechanisms of what I call performative return : genealogical invocations of legitimating and mythologized origins, particularly ancestral homelands and fraught narratives of arrival to the United States, that become mobilized in performances to a range of ideological and political ends Some of these performances are local to specific cities and some take place in a discursive realm; some are mobilized for purposes of truly liberatory democratic ends, and others to redraw the boundaries of exclusion In the context of this dissertation, I turn my attention in particular to two narratives of transatlantic arrival to the US - the Middle Passage, and Ellis Island immigration As transatlantic arrivals to the US, the groups of subjects implicated in these narratives have tended to have had relatively permanent stays here - more so, for instance, than im/migrants from elsewhere in the Americas, who are more likely, on account of proximity, to navigate transnational back-and-forth relationships with their home country But more significantly, these narratives are the purview of racial subjects in the US who are implicated in a pernicious and reductive black-white binary conception of race Resultantly, these narratives - particularly in the context of post-civil rights multiculturalisms - are articulated in relation to one another in a variety of ways Ratifying origins shores up legitimacy, which is to say, it shores up the felicitousness of the performative And performativity is a deeply temporal concept - while a performance takes place as a discrete event in a bounded moment in time, performativity is the repetition and revision over a long expanse of time: it is the longue duree, the mechanism by which social and power structures are formed and upheld Performative return is central to the process of creating usable histories to various and sometimes deeply conflicting political and ideological ends: origins shore up legitimacy so that the narratives they invoke become articulated as reality I establish a comparative framework of racialized histories and groups, of defining moments in the construction of an American racial state, and the ways in which their consequences register and are negotiated in the present through representations that slip into various worldmaking activities And the project is comparative and relational not only because the racial state produces its subjects relationally within the framework of slavery, genocide, conquest and imperialism, and immigration, but also because I want to demonstrate the across-the-board nature of the ways that the past, ancestral homelands, and narratives of arrival are invoked as a means of negotiating racialized subjects' exclusion and legitimacy The performative returns that I examine articulate the racial state, as well as ground-up negotiations of groups' and individuals' own racialized experiences or categorizations, in terms of the relational context of the US in the world That is, the performative returns are produced within a historical consciousness and transnational imaginary that brings spatial and temporal causes to bear on one another and takes seriously the constitutive potential of memory, the uses of narratives, and the calling into being of re-constituted elsewheres

Contestation over an island imaginary landscape: the management and maintenance of touristic nature

Abstract: This article demonstrates how maintaining high-end tourism in luxury resorts requires recreating a tourist imaginary of pristine, isolated and unpeopled island landscapes, thus necessitating the ce...

Imagination under Pressure, 1789-1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility

Abstract: Introduction 1. Burke and the civic imagination 2. Paine's attack on artifice 3. Wollstonecraft, imagination and futurity 4. Hazlitt and the sympathetic imagination 5. Cobbett's imaginary landscape 6. Coleridge and the afterlife of imagination Afterword.