The Imaginary

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

The colour of destruction On racialization, geno-globality and the social imaginary in Bissau

Abstract: Based on 18 months of fieldwork in Guinea-Bissau, this article sheds light on the social imaginary of urban youth in Bissau City. Set in a context of pervasive decline and destruction, the article shows how the social imaginary in Bissau has come to evolve around issues of race and conflict, and how this has led to an interpretative conflation of blackness and destruction. Through illuminating some of the modes of social differentiation that have emerged in relation to the impact of globalization, I argue that the difference between Self and Other, much commented upon in the discourse of politicized and territorialized culture, may very well be followed by a geno-global construction of identity that simultaneously (re)locates social difference within geo-political boundaries, race and genetics. Finally, the article dwells on the consequences of this process of racialization and argues for an analytical shift from narrative to the social imaginary if we wish to improve our understanding of the relationship...

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. …

The Spanish Gypsy: The History of a European Obsession

Abstract: The Spanish Gypsy: The history of a European obsession. Lou CharnonDeutsch. University Park: Penn State Press. 2004. 286 pp. ISBN 0271023597. Reviewed by Juan F. Gamella This is a nicely illustrated book written by the well-known Hispanicist Lou Charnon-Deutsch, author of Narratives of Desire: Nineteenth-Century Spanish Fiction by Women (1996). It traces the evolution of a 'cultural icon of surprising power and attraction, that of the Spanish Gypsy, the romantic fantasy of an imagined people that became an obsession for European literature, music and visual arts. Based on an encyclopedic knowledge of literary and graphic works in English, French and Spanish, the author analyzes-in an accumulative style that sometimes tires the reader-hundreds of items showing how this foreign import came to occupy a crucial 'symbolic space in the Western imaginary'. Although some glaring absences are inevitable, this is a splendid source of references concerning the artistic representation of Spanish Gypsies. But do not expect to learn much about real, historical Gitanos and Gitanas. The book has five substantive chapters. In the first one Charnon-Deutsch shows conclusively that the fascination of European literature with Cale did not begin with the French Romantics, but with Golden Age Spanish (and Portuguese) novels and plays of the fifteenth and sixteenth century such as La Celestina (1499), Farca das Ciganas (A farce of Gypsy women, 1521), and especially with Cervantes's La gitanilla, one of his most famous short novels (Novelas ejemplares), written in 1610, just one year after the Moriscos or Spanish Muslims were expelled from exhausted, imperial Spain. In a time of intense vilification and repression of Gypsies, Cervantes's portrayal may seem sympathetic. In fact, La gitanilla somehow transcends racial categories (the daughter of aristocrats is protrayed as a Gypsy), and thus maybe read as promoting humanistic ideals. Charnon-Deutsch argues, however, that this popular novel also contributed much to the perpetuation of the negative Gypsy stereotype. According to the author this is a recurrent trait of European societies that both despised and were fascinated by their minority populations. Cervantes expanded earlier Gitano motifs (magic, fortune-telling, baby snatching, ability to sing and dance, horse trading and theft) in two major areas. One, the idealization of a roaming life that allowed Gitanos to escape from the encroachments of feudal or bourgeois orders, and two, the glamorization of the irresistible Gypsy woman materialized in the figure of Preciosa, an exceptional young woman 'unwittingly masquerading as a Gypsy', who falls in love with a Gacho, a non-Gypsy aristocrat. But this novella had a destiny well beyond that of a mere jeu literaire. Its plot of interethnic desire, temptation and love with its associated changes and exchanges of identity and morality offered immense possibilities of adaptation and transmutation. The model was translated and transformed into hundreds of sequels conforming to the qualms and conventions of varying periods and nations. In the rest of the book Charnon-Deutsh traced the indelible mark left by this 'precious jewel of love', this gendered 'exemplar' of the irresistible Other in the world of printed, graphic and performative arts. Thus the second chapter presents the discovery of the Spanish Gypsy by French Romantics. Surprisingly, the Gypsy presence, even in places such as Seville, Granada or Cadiz, had been ignored by most travellers of the eighteenth century. Between 1830 and 1860 interest in Spanish Gypsies was revived as a powerful symbol of nonconformity, spontaneity and freedom and 'an object of intense international curiosity' (p. 58). In this period Spain passed from being a colonial power to a colony of British and French capital. Congruently, the country was described as a land of bullfights, religious superstition, ignorance, poverty, cruel and arbitrary justice, and economic chaos. …

Parades postcoloniales : la fabrication des identités dans le roman congolais

Abstract: Numerous studies have explored the validity and pertinence of the national approach to African literatures, and this is not the place to re-rehearse the central tenets of these contributions. Parades postcoloniales: la fabrication des identit?s dans le roman congolais examines five novels published by Congolese writers between 1979 and 1998 (Sylvain Bemba, R?ves portatifs, 1979; Sony Labou Tansi, La vie et demie, 1979; Henri Lopes, Sur l'autre rive, 1992; Daniel Biyaoula, L'impasse, 1996; and Alain Mabanckou, Bleu blanc rouge, 1998). Lydie Moudileno's insightful site-specific analysis challenges us to think about the various ways in which our contextualiza tion of colonial, national, transnational, and transcolonial cultural, political, and social phenomena can be enhanced through the juxtaposition of texts produced in postcolonial, migrant, and postmigrant circumstances. Naturally, the findings and conclusions have important implications for the wider francophone African context. Moudileno foregrounds the ways in which these novels exhibit a "jeux de la repr?sentation" (9), a relationship between playfulness and experimentation. Indeed, the study draws on influential theoretical works by Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Godefroy Bidima, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Louis Marin, and Achille Mbe mbe to signal ways such an interdisciplinary framework can assist us in unpack ing the works under investigation, particularly in terms of the key etymological terms announced in the title, namely, the role of "parades" and "fabrication," and accordingly how they may "highlight the capacity of fiction to both illustrate and underscore the process of [. . .] fabricating postcolonial identity in the African novel" (13-16), pointing to such practices as the "public display of power" (16), its orchestration and theatricality, and hence operate as a "defense strategy" (17) aimed at the "reversal of a dynamic of domination" (17). The "performance" or "performative" dimension is employed here to emphasize the implicit influence of socially constructed categories of reference and description as the influential work of Butler has convincingly demonstrated. Bemba is an important writer who has not received the critical attention he deserves. Here, Moudileno shows how Bemba sought to highlight "the determin ing role played by the cinematographic image or imaginary in the construction of national identity" (24). Bemba reminds the reader of its colonial antecedent, and how in turn the visual has been reformulated to service the imperatives of nation-state formation and propagandist directives. "Through repetition," Moudi leno argues, "the audience ends up internalizing both the ethics and worldview imposed by a film's imaginary" (37). In many ways, Bemba's insights on the potentialities and dangers associated with technological progress anticipate many contemporary concerns. Yet, his skepticism of film, what Moudileno describes as "the seduction of the visual by the visual" (56), is unusual, at odds even with devel opments in francophone sub-Saharan cultural history at a time when writers such

Legal Imaginaries and the Anthropocene: ‘Of’ and ‘For’

Abstract: This reflection contrasts the dominant imaginary underlying ‘law of the Anthropocene’ with an imaginary reaching towards ‘law/s for the Anthropocene’. It does so primarily by contrasting two imaginaries of human embodiment —law’s existing imaginary of quasi-disembodiment and an alternative imaginary of embodiment as co-woven with the lively incipiencies and tendencies of matter. It draws on ‘transcorporeality’ and ‘sympoiesis’ as inspiration for ‘sympoeitic normativities’ as ways of co-living and co-organizing in the face of the catastrophic implications of the Anthropocene emergency.