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The Imaginary

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


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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examine how a territorial imaginary conflating culture, territory, nation, and security allows elite statecraft in Europe to frame citizenship and integration policy as (inter)national security matters.
Abstract: In this article, I examine how a territorial imaginary conflating culture, territory, nation, and security allows “elites of statecraft” in Europe to frame citizenship and integration policy as (inter)national security matters. Focusing on post-Soviet Estonia, I argue that this imaginary legitimized the denial of citizenship to Soviet-era Russian speakers and enabled the government's integration policy objective of creating the “Estonian cultural domain.” Drawing on historical, archival, and ethnographic research, I demonstrate how the invocation of national security justified these events and how the territorial imaginary structured the making of integration policy from the 1991 reestablishment of independence to E.U. accession in 2004.

55 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2006
TL;DR: The concept of "imaginary money" was coined by the most authoritative writer among the historians of French monetary vicissitudes, Francois Le Blanc, who resigned himself to defining as imaginary any kind of money which, "properly speaking, is but a collective term comprising a certain number of real moneys" as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: If one reads the books on monetary subjects that were written in the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, one frequently encounters the concept of ‘imaginary money’. Other terms used are ‘ideal money’, ‘political money’, moneta numeraria, ‘money of account’. What these terms meant was not very clear even to contemporaries. The most authoritative writer among the historians of French monetary vicissitudes, Francois Le Blanc, resigned himself to defining as imaginary any kind of money which, ‘properly speaking, is but a collective term comprising a certain number of real moneys’. The imaginary money which almost everywhere was called ‘pound’ or an equivalent term such as ‘livre’, ‘lira’, ‘pond’, was, in Le Blanc’s words, ‘never changing in value; in fact, we have used it since the time of Charlemagne, and it has always been worth 20 sous (shillings), and each sou, 12 deniers (pence)’.1 It is called ‘imaginary’ because of the fact that it has never been coined; ‘because we have never had a real specie which has consistently been worth 20 sous or one worth 12 deniers’. Although from time immemorial men have neither seen nor touched any imaginary money, nevertheless, in the remote past it was something real, ‘since if we go back to the time when in France people began to count in pounds, shillings, and pence, we shall find that these imaginary moneys owe their origin to a real thing’.

55 citations

Book
15 Dec 2010
TL;DR: A sweeping inquiry into post-Cold War American literature and theory, Cosmodernism argues, cautiously but persuasively, for the rise of a new cultural paradigm against the backdrop of accelerating globalisation as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: A sweeping inquiry into post-Cold War American literature and theory, Cosmodernism argues, cautiously but persuasively, for the rise of a new cultural paradigm against the backdrop of accelerating globalisation. Moraru calls this paradigm ""cosmodern."" He uses the term to account for what seems to be gradually challenging the postmodern over the last twenty-odd years. Not so much a well-structured movement yet, cosmodernism is chiefly a critical construct enabling Moraru to articulate representative literary-theoretical interventions of the past two decades into a reasonably coherent model. The coherence inheres, he shows, in a certain ""relational"" imaginary, which the critic canvasses by placing a wide range of authors and works in, across, and against the material-conceptual networks of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and other areas of contemporary U.S. intellectual history.

55 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
Davina Cooper1
01 Mar 2017-Antipode
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; take its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and address what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced.
Abstract: Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished-for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.

55 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: In this paper, a collection of essays about Indian diaspora literature is presented, focusing on the diasporic imaginary and the respective traumas of Indian expatriate writers.
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. …

54 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
2023563
20221,296
2021145
2020180
2019178
2018199