The Imaginary

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

Incognito ergo sum: Language, memory and the subject

Abstract: Drawing upon a range of theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Barthes), photographers (Adams, Weston, Lange) and literary texts (Baudelaire, Proust, Breton, Camus, Barnes, Kundera), this article explores the role of memory in grounding identity. If the subject is constituted in language, it is argued, identity can be achieved only in the realm of the imaginary, through fixation in an imago of the self. It is memory above all that gives this being-in-denial its imagined solidity; but that solidity is an effect of language’s ability to create verisimilitude in an eternal present of signification, and not of memory’s relation to a real past. Identity therefore always remains precarious, because the signifiers that furnish the points de capiton of what we remember always also defeDrawing upon a range of theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Barthes), photographers (Adams, Weston, Lange) and literary texts (Baudelaire, Proust, Breton, Camus, Barnes, Kundera), this article explores the role of memory in grounding identity. If the subject is constituted in language, it is argued, identity can be achieved only in the realm of the imaginary, through fixation in an imago of the self. It is memory above all that gives this being-in-denial its imagined solidity; but that solidity is an effect of language’s ability to create verisimilitude in an eternal present of signification, and not of memory’s relation to a real past. Identity therefore always remains precarious, because the signifiers that furnish the points de capiton of what we remember always also defer elsewhere.Drawing upon a range of theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Barthes), photographers (Adams, Weston, Lange) and literary texts (Baudelaire, Proust, Breton, Camus, Barnes, Kundera), this article explores the role of memory in grounding identity. If the subject is constituted in language, it is argued, identity can be achieved only in the realm of the imaginary, through fixation in an imago of the self. It is memory above all that gives this being-in-denial its imagined solidity; but that solidity is an effect of language’s ability to create verisimilitude in an eternal present of signification, and not of memory’s relation to a real past. Identity therefore always remains precarious, because the signifiers that furnish the points de capiton of what we remember always also defer elsewhere.

Gender and the social imaginary in medieval Welsh law

Abstract: This talk explores the role played by gender in the social imaginaries implicit in medieval Welsh law. It takes as its starting point the lawbooks of medieval Wales, which have narrative qualities rendering them susceptible to analyses of several different kinds, from standard historical readings, to scrutiny as law, to more literary critical methods. Of particular interest in this lecture are the ways in which ideas about male and female inform lawbook depictions of space and time, sexuality in both animal and human bodies, and everyday practices such as farming.

Overlapping and Interlocking Frames for Humanities Literary Studies: Assia Djebar, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Gloria Anzaldúa

Abstract: This article addresses the need for more comparative perspectives among four cognate fields of study: postcolonial, feminist, ethnic, and francophone studies.1 Francophone studies is the analysis of literature and culture produced in French by authors coming from former French colonies; postcolonial studies represents the theories, histories, and literature emerging from former British colonies; U.S. ethnic studies analyzes the socio-political conditions as well as the literary and cultural productions of people of color in the U.S.; and feminist studies proposes theories taking into account perspectives committed to women's liberation worldwide. I first outline my general argument, and then provide specific examples of decolonial feminist scholarship through an examination of multilingual strategies in the works of three transnational feminist writers: francophone Algerian writer Assia Djebar, anglophone postcolonial filmmaker and writer Tsitsi Dangarembga from Zimbabwe, and Chicana essayist and poet Gloria Anzaldua.Anzaldua's theorization of borderlands is invaluable to developing the concept of "overlapping and interlocking" frames of analysis (Donchin 2004, 320). Anzaldua differentiates borders that act as arbitrary lines separating two discrete countries from borderlands, areas around the borders that serve to blur the boundaries and are sites of ambivalence and tension as well as transition and intellectual expansion (1999, 25). While Anzaldua was writing about a real borderland, the one separating and uniting Mexico and the U.S., her paradigm-shifting work contributed to a reformulation of Chicano/a studies as "border studies" (the work of Paul Gilroy [1993] a few years later contributed to a similar reformulation of Black/African American studies as "Black Atlantic"/Africana studies). This coincided with the beginnings of a sustained interest in transnational frameworks in academia. The influence of these two scholars' works went far beyond ethnic or feminist studies, and contributed to profound reorientations in many areas of humanities research (Castillo 2006, 260-61).In an important essay on the centrality of Anzaldua's work, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano cautions against "universalizing the theory of mestiza or border consciousness, which the text painstakingly grounds in specific historical and cultural experiences" (1998, 13) in order to preclude "[a]ppropriative readings" in which everyone becomes a mestiza and difference and specificity are erased (14; see also Phelan 1997; Castillo 2006). While I agree with Yarbro-Bejarano that what Emma Perez (1999) would call Anzaldua's "decolonial imaginary" should not be flattened out by a postmodern translation of the concept of borderlands that would erase its historical and cultural grounding by turning it into a disembodied metaphor that all can come to claim, it is also important to remember that Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera has at least two levels of address: one deals with the specificity of the Chicana/o history in the US./Mexican borderlands; the other seeks to make a space for Chicanas/os and others whose identities cannot be reduced to binaries in a variety of locations, including the academy. Anzaldua's first words in Borderlands /La Frontera emphasize this very multiplicity of addresses: "The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-US. Southwest/Mexican border. The psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands are not particular to the Southwest." (1999, 19). Thinking of academic fields of study through the model of borders and borderlands is, I believe, a way to follow up on an important insight of Anzaldua's, rather than an appropriation of her work.Discrete fields of knowledge can be seen as being separated by disciplinary borders; the interdisciplinary and comparative areas where they meet and are brought together can be viewed as borderland zones in which new knowledge is created, sometimes remaining in the borderland, sometimes becoming institutionalized into a different field of knowledge with its own borders. …