The Imaginary

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

Still Walking, Still Brave: Mapping Gender, Race, and Power in U.S. Western History

Abstract: This essay highlights several interdisciplinary works about gender, race, and power in U.S. western history that utilize analytic tools generated by women9s studies and women9s history and considers how these recent works are charting new pathways for future research about U.S. western women9s history. The theory of intersectionality, articulated by black women9s studies, has been particularly useful in addressing the complexity of how gender, race, and power have informed women9s lives in the U.S. West. However, several of the scholars producing this exciting work do not identify or locate their work as U.S. western women9s history. One reason may be the existence of an "American western history imaginary," an ideological construct that currently dominates the field and scholarship. The essay addresses what is at stake in challenging this imaginary for U.S. western women9s history.

Subjectivity LTD: The Discourse of Liability in the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856 and Gaskell's Cranford

Abstract: With the passage of the Joint Stock Companies Act of 1856, "a sort of legal monster" was born; composed of many people, and yet legally considered "as one single person," the limited corporations allowed by the Act vexed the notions of subjectivity then current in economic and legal discourse.' In allowing the individual members of corporate bodies to limit their financial responsibility for the debts of those corporations, the Act distinguished sharply between private and public identities-as one contemporary commentator wrote, the investor in a company "and his family" no longer need fear being "stripped of every earthly thing which they possess, even to their very beds. "2 Disengaging and protecting the private elements of subjectivity from the public, the Act paradoxically retained for the corporation as a whole a legal facsimile of the undivided individual. The emergent, limited corporations were thus designed on a model of identity which they themselves, in their very formation, help to antiquate. In debating the limitation of liability, both the members of Parliament and witnesses before the various Select Commissions appointed to consider the issue drew on novelistic vignettes, emblematic stories of individual characters ruined by their investments in failed joint-stock concerns. Speaking of a Blue Book on the issue, Robert Lowe remarked that "a hurried glance at the contents might make a man fancy he was reading a novel."3 The Times, in a diatribe against unlimited joint stock firms, accused these concerns of being fictional creations, composed of "imaginary Higgenses, Wiggenses, and Thompkinses," characters created by "a stroke of the pen." In its own richly imaginative fiction, The Times created a house "taken by the multifarious representative of [a] nascent company in a part of town with which he has the fewest associations." In its physical organization, this house clearly displays the division of public and private within a geographically dispersed economy:

Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879

Abstract: Fleshing Out America: Race, Gender, and the Politics of the Body in American Literature, 1833-1879. By Carolyn Sorisio. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2002. Pp. x, 299. Cloth, $44.95.)The study of race and gender has been a staple of historical and literary scholarship for roughly forty years now, and the study of the body for at least half that long. In her recent book, Carolyn Sorisio adds to this tradition by comparing the contributions of seven writers to the process of defining the body in the mid-nineteenth century: Lydia Maria Child, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Walt Whitman, Harriet A. Jacobs, and Martin Robeson Delany. In this published form of her 1996 doctoral dissertation, Sorisio argues that these authors helped to "flesh out" political and social understandings of the body, giving specific forms to the disembodied conception of personhood at work during the revolutionary era.Sorisio's methodology is distinct from that typically employed by historians and literary historicists and merits early mention. Although Sorisio provides some brief historical setting for each subject, as an overall strategy, she eschews contextualizing individual authors in favor of gathering disparate authors into a "contact zone" where they might speak to each other in ways not always provided by history. As she explains, her entire approach is guided by the "overall inquiry that dominates this book: Can we combat the disturbingly divisive nature of the politics of the body through the imaginary space that literature provides" (12)? Sorisio wants her methodology to strike a balance between investigating these texts "in their own right" and forging "answers to some contemporary pedagogical and theoretical problems" (2).In its narrative design, the book is structured around a concern with the dynamic between science and literature in defining the body. Sorisio wishes to avoid the extremes of both pure physiological essentialism and complete social construction. After a chapter in which she reviews the late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century scientific discourse on the body, highlighting the issues of race and gender, she gives a chapter to each of her principle authors. The scope of the project-seven different authors-necessarily makes much of the analysis of any given writer significantly derivative from previous scholarship. However, as Sorisio works through a running summary of existing work on each author, she provides the reader with her own contribution in the form of synthesis of this scholarship and comparisons among the seven writers.Each author pursued a different strategy in addressing race and gender as they gave specific shape to the body. In looking at the bodily dimensions of slavery without succumbing to voyeurism, Child successfully navigates the treacherous waters of propriety awaiting any women of her period who entered the literary sphere, especially if they were talking about black bodies. As a black woman, Harper used temperance rhetoric to deflect readers' gaze away from black bodies and refocus it on the shortcomings of whites. Emerson's commitment to establishing a common foundation across racial lines comes at the cost of reifying the era's dichotomies of gender, eventually undermining his racial egalitarianism. In avoiding such a gendered distinction, Fuller draws on ethnography to address tensions in her feminism by symbolically transferring "politically detrimental aspects of corporeality onto the bodies of Native Americans" (146). …

Highways, heroes, and secular martyrs: the symbolics of power and sacrifice

Abstract: This article examines the subtle and not so subtle shifts in Canadian political culture that have taken place in, through and alongside the so-called ‘return’ of the Canadian warrior. It begins from the contention that while the racialised dimensions of the post 9/11 Canadian security state have been well analysed elsewhere, the gendered dimensions have not been fully explored. This article explores the re-emergence of a sacrificial imaginary in Canadian culture through an examination of seemingly irreconcilable accounts that have emerged of the Canadian security state – one that reads ‘Canada’ through the story of the torture and repatriation of Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, and one that tells the story of ‘Canada at War’ through the warrior's return. It examines both in terms of the tensions and instabilities they reveal in the Western liberal imaginary and in terms of the ways in which they collectively operate to redefine the aesthetic borders of the Canadian political community. The article argues that the sacralisation of violence which has refound this political community has been enabled by a remasculinised aesthetic that delimits the ‘progressive liberalism’ which animated the Canada of Old – ostensibly in order to protect it.