Topic
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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TL;DR: In this article, Jaudon draws together recent reassessments of the history of the senses by anthropologists and challenges to secularism by political theorists to unsettle these texts' easy dismissal of the strange sense perceptions and bodily capacities that obeah cultivated among enslaved persons.
Abstract: In a recent journal issue, Jordan Alexander Stein and Justine Murison observe that work on non-Protestant religions has the potential to upend conventional accounts of religion's place in British America. Taking up that challenge, Jaudon's essay discusses Revolutionary-era literary representations of obeah, a creole religion practiced by enslaved persons in the British Caribbean, arguing that such narratives use religious experience to craft an alternative transnationalism. Works such as William Earle's 1800 novel Obi; or, The History of Three-Fingered Jack and similar chapbooks, penny-dreadfuls, and pantomimes share a common fascination with the occult forms of sensation obeah enabled, explaining away these experiences as misrecognitions of a stable material reality. Jaudon draws together recent reassessments of the history of the senses by anthropologists and challenges to secularism by political theorists to unsettle these texts' easy dismissal of the strange sense perceptions and bodily capacities that obeah cultivated among enslaved persons. In their anxious attempts to debunk obeah, these narratives record what Jacques Ranciere calls a "dissensus": a clash between competing models of sensory perception. Such moments of sensory disjuncture posed a significant threat to a colonial order that claimed universality for its sense perceptions. Obeah narratives indicate that embodied religious experience constitutes a sensual alternative to what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon terms the "Westphalian imaginary" of a world mapped into nation-states. By recharacterizing religion as an alternative to the nation instead of something that circulates across its boundaries, Jaudon suggests new maps for transnational inquiry-ones that focus on the sensual relations religions forge or forbid between their adherents' bodies and the nation-state's world.
32 citations
Book•
20 Jun 2006
TL;DR: The early years of the Zapatista insurgency are described in this article, where the project of Autonomy, Constituent Power, and Empire is discussed and discussed in detail.
Abstract: Preface 1. Zapatista Chronicle 1.1 The Early Years: Prehistory of the EZLN 1.2 Zapatista Chronicle 1994-2001 1.3 'Check'!... but not 'Mate' 2. Theories and Perspectives on the Zapatista Insurrection 2.1 Gramscian Approach 2.2 Laclau and Mouffe's Theory of Discourse 2.3 Academic Autonomist Marxist Approach 2.4 Non-Academic Radical Left Perspectives 2.5 Problems and Limitations of the Readings of the Zapatistas 3. The Project of Autonomy, Constituent Power and Empire 3.1 Ontological Theses 3.2 The Imaginary of Autonomy 3.3 From Radical Imaginary to Constituent Power 3.4 Genealogical Moments: The Re-mergence of Autonomy 3.5 Empire: The World Order 4. On Revolutionary Subjectivities 4.1 Fidelity to an Event 4.2 The Event and Constituent Power 4.3 Not Just Any Event 4.4 Constructed Situations 4.5 Zapatistas: An Evental Situation 4.6 The Three Subjects of Fidelity 4.7 Towards a Future Event 5. Reading the Zapatistas Critically 5.1 Revolutionaries or Reformists 5.2 Zapatista Nationalism 5.3 Zapatistas and the State 5.4 Zapatistas and the Global Struggle 5.5 Autonomy's Black Holes 6. Indigenous Imaginary and Zapatista Masks 6.1 Indigenous Metaphysics 6.2 Language and Reality 6.3 Maya Epistemology 6.4 Zapatista Masks 7. Conclusion 7.1 Implications for the future 7.2 Towards a Theory of Militant Subjectivity References Index
32 citations
Book•
05 May 2020
TL;DR: A "Space on the Side of the Road" as discussed by the authors describes a "other" America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers".
Abstract: A "Space on the Side of the Road" vividly evokes an "other" America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers". To Kathleen Stewart, this particular "other" exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernisation, materialism, and democray. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women "just settin" track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated story-telling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of "just talk", Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal "space on the side of the road". It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by "progress". Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in "Let
32 citations