Contemporary Imagination Research Articles

Xenotransplantation, xenozoonosis and contemporary imaginings of monstrosity

This paper considers contemporary imaginings about monstrosity surrounding xenotransplantation and zoonosis. The impact of human-to-human organ transplantation on identity is considered, and provides context for consideration of possible effects of animal-to-human transplantation and zoonotic disease on human identity. The paper looks at ways in which fearful imaginings about monstrosity, xenotransplantation and zoonosis have been conjoined with ideas about the animal, feminine and racial other, and have pointed to the possibility of significant social disruption as well as destabilisation of body and self. The conclusion to the paper includes consideration of some of the implications of such monstrous imaginings for tissue transfer.

Humanitarianism

This article argues that humanitarianism is a theme in the popular culture and politics of contemporary Britain which repays close analysis. Humanitarianism is identified as a strand of the ‘social imaginary’ through which conceptions of Britishness seek to understand the world and the place of Britain within it. Commitment to the social imaginary is secured through ‘group charisma’ which ties social subjects to it by means of assertions about the unique importance of the nation in the moral improvement of the world. This article identifies humanitarianism as a theme through which Britain deals with postcolonial melancholia and the problems of being an ‘old country’ marginalized in the present. The focus of the discussion is on two films: the cinema release Amazing Grace (2007) which focused on the 19th-century abolition of the slave trade and the broadcast film The Girl in the Café (2005) which was, in its turn, a romance about the eradication of world poverty. It is proposed that if these two films are subjected to cultural and social as opposed to textual analysis it is possible to explore why humanitarianism is so important to contemporary imaginations about — and commitments to — Britain.

A landscape with objects: private game reserves, game lodges and the ‘New Safari’

This paper investigates the proliferation of high‐end private game reserves in Africa as the manifestation of an emerging economic but also symbolic and emotional investment in the value of nature. Increasing concern for ‘the environment’ along with anxiety about the future of individual species has given the game reserve a special place in the contemporary global imagination. Through analysis of some of the ephemeral texts through which these fantasies and anxieties about nature are articulated – an advertisement, some publicity material and a design monograph – this paper explores a number of different objects which serve to mediate the relationship between the public and nature. Both the 4×4 whose increasing popularity seems to parallel that of the game reserve, and the carefully designed and decorated game lodges offer examples of the complex way in which the experience of nature needs to be mediated by objects in order to confirm nature as a site for the rediscovery of authenticity. Around the game lodge, I argue, there emerges a new discursive mode for articulating Africa, and South Africa’s relationship with the world, a novel aesthetic known as the ‘New Safari’. This design category goes beyond design to construct a moral and experiential fantasy in which conservation not as a practice but rather as an imagined value makes possible a disturbing reconceptualisation of the relation between the national and the global.

Ritual as a Mode of Production: Ethnoarchaeology and Creative Practice in Hindu Temple Arts

This essay examines some of the ethnoarchaeological evidence of contemporary South Indian Hindu temple and image-making practices to show how they can contribute to a more adequate understanding of ancient South Asian monuments and their aesthetic qualities. Without such concrete evidence, a contemporary historical imagination, by default, is understandably liable to represent the past as a series of discontinuous, creative innovations produced by individualised creative agents. Even where the names of such agents have not been preserved, as in the case of ancient India, their cosmogonic function is still likely to be presumed in narrative forms that portray discrete temporal discontinuities as primary signifiers of value. However, the rituals of temple production in South India function as a mode of creative practice that diverges profoundly from modern economic mythologies including those of creative personhood (‘possessive individualism’) and intellectual property rights. While these are presently becoming universalised and naturalised through the forces of globalisation, they affect, but do not organise, contemporary practices of temple production. On the other hand, they do threaten to organise the contemporary understanding and valorisation of ancient monuments to the extent that they are being fetishised, exoticised and commodified as tourist destinations, national heritage and collectables.

The politics of imagination and the public role of religion

The aim of this article is to show that, in order to understand the new public role of religion, we need to rethink the nexus, often neglected by contemporary philosophy, between politics and imagination. The current resurrection of religion in the public sphere is linked to a deep transformation of political imagination which has its roots in the double process of the reduction of politics to mere administration, on the one hand, and to spectacle, on the other. In an epoch when politics is said to be simply a question of ‘good governance’, of good administration within a neo-liberal consensus, the paradox is that of a lack of political imagination which goes hand in hand with its hypertrophy through the media. This article tackles this paradox, by firstly discussing the nexus of politics, imagination and religion and, secondly, by analysing their contemporary transformations. In conclusion, the thesis is illustrated through the analysis of some contemporary examples.

Looking for the Good Fight: William T. Vollmann's An Afghanistan Picture Show

William T. Vollmann is one of the most ambitious U.S novelists and essayists of the past twenty-five years. At his most admirable, Vollmann is a writer who crosses boundaries of nation, class, culture, and doctrine to understand and represent those on the other side, while acknowledging how those same boundaries protect his own privileges. Yet Vollmann's work is often troubling. Both his investment in the exotic and his tendency to generalize contradict his desire to empathetically represent “others,” and they are linked to another troubling aspect of Vollmann's work, which is the focus of this essay: how the way he represents himself—his border-crossing, empathetic narrative persona—is invested in the symbol and myth of American character, and especially the American character abroad. I argue that Vollmann both critiques and reinvents this archetypal character in a book based on a trip he made to Afghanistan and Pakistan when he was twenty-two years old: An Afghanistan Picture Show: Or, How I Saved the World. I suggest that Vollmann's narrative persona, which he develops in Picture Show, is a reflexive representation of the American abroad as a well-intentioned failure, a character that resonates with the contemporary imagination of U.S. foreign relations.

Gunpowder and gardens: reading women in The Proposition

The John Hillcoat-directed, Nick Cave-penned film, The Proposition (2005), is most instantly recognizable as one recent reinterpretation of ‘the western’ cinematic genre, which makes the focus of this article on its representation of the garden and female corporeality unlikely. Yet, The Proposition is not a stock transferral of ‘the western’ to contemporary imaginings of late nineteenth-century colonial Queensland, and an attentiveness to the peripheral interest of The Proposition in the garden and female bodies, rather than the climactic show-down in the main street (which never occurs in Hillcoat's film), raises tangential but telling issues about borders and migration in a settler context that are perhaps not the anticipated subject of a film that ostensibly turns around its eponymous proposal: the murder of one outlaw brother by another to save the life of a third male sibling.

‘Globalization’ and regional(ist) cinema in Western India: Public culture, private media, and the reproduction of a Hindu national(ist) hero, 1930s–2000s

Much has been written on the relations between cinema and nationalism, and the former's crucial role in shaping people's imaginations of the nation. In comparison, the ways in which regional and national cinemas may interact, compete, or conflict with one another have been little documented. This article seeks to fill a gap in studies of media, regionalism, and nationalism by exploring a suggestive example of the making of a locally‐based regional cinema with a national(ist) ambition in western India, 1930s–1990s. It focuses on the work of Bhalji Pendharkar and his representation of Shivaji, a seventeenth‐century hero‐warrior and founder of the Maratha nation. Drawing on spectators' retrospective recollections and impressions of these films and the powerful part they seem to have played in contemporary imaginings, I show how the Marathi film maker's essentialization of ‘Maratha/i‐ness’ served as a ‘projected fulfillment’ of a nation ‘desired and absent’, yet in the making. Furthermore, I explore how these cinematographic narratives of the Maratha/Indian nation drew on, and how they resonated with, structures of feeling and sensory configurations relevant to viewers at the time. In tracing the subsequent trajectory of the filmmaker's cinematographic legacy, 1990s–2000s, I explore the attendant anxieties of generations of Marathi‐speaking viewers as well as the use to which new technologies are concomitantly being put. Further contextualization of these usages is offered in light of current redeployments of regional and national identifications in the face of technological (and cultural) globalization.

New York Undead: Globalization, Landscape Urbanism, and the Afterlife of the Twin Towers

A tricky business, that of understanding New York. The city is always on the move, forever shifting. (Mario Maffi) Although the two towers have disappeared, they have not been annihilated. Even in their pulverized state, they have left behind an intense awareness of their presence. No one who knew them can cease imagining them and the imprint they made on the skyline from all points of the city. Their end in material space has borne them off into a definitive imaginary space. (Jean Baudrillard) Cityspace A metropolis forever in the making, New York City is a constant reminder of the mutability of urban landscape and the radical impermanence of the city. Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, the city has also become a notorious symbol of the links between globalization and violence. These issues, as they relate to post-9/11 New York, inform an urban landscape architecture project called Lifescape. Under construction since 2008, Lifescape is an ambitious, long-term plan to transform the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (Figure 1) into a public park and recreation area. There are two reasons for this interest in a project to rehabilitate a garbage dump, and both are connected to a broader interest in the interplay between the material and imaginary spaces of the global city. First, Lifescape marks a significant effort to reclaim and re-imagine a derelict landscape that is connected in both material and symbolic ways to the lived space of the city. second, following the events of 9/11, the wreckage from Ground Zero was transported to the Fresh Kills Landfill, which was specially reopened to accommodate the 1.2 million tons of material. As one commentator has noted, Fresh Kills ... is not just the place where, for more than 50 years, the rest of the city sent its potato peels, broken dishes and every kind of household trash. For several months after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the sad bits of busted buildings and broken lives were sifted on mound 1/9 of Fresh Kills, piece by shattered piece. (DePalma 1) Crucially, the Lifescape project acknowledges the presence of these remains and envisions a commemoration of the Twin Towers and the recovery :. effort in the form of a giant earthwork monument. How this monument evokes the memory of the towers and how it connects the park's landscape back to New York's cityscape remain significant concerns. Lifescape's transformative vision and, in particular, its plans for a 9/11 earthwork monument illuminate the ways in which the Twin Towers continue to haunt the contemporary imagination, exerting an almost ghostly presence over the skyline of New York. The argument is that Lifescape works simultaneously to reveal and conceal the mutability of urban landscape, attesting not only to the extraordinary versatility of urban space but also to the imaginative ways in which-responding to an experience of collective trauma-such space can be recycled, renewed, and remade in the present era of 21st-century green, global connectedness (Hamilton 14). As such, the Fresh Kills Landfill relates in a number of interesting ways to New York as a global site. The most obvious connection is that, as the location of the World Trade Center Recovery Operation, Fresh Kills played a key role in the federal investigation of 9/11 and its efforts to understand how and why New York's symbolic center of transnational corporate capitalism succumbed to terrorist attack. In the process, Fresh Kills also bore witness in the most detailed and intimate way possible to the violence and horror involved in the destruction of the vertical architecture of globalization. Over a ten-month period, during which the landfill was designated a federal crime scene, the debris from Ground Zero was meticulously sifted and sorted in search of human remains, personal effects, and objects of everyday life. The resulting process of inspection and introspection-fueled in the national imagination by both the media and traveling exhibits such as the New York State Museum's WTC Recovery Exhibition-contributed to wider public efforts to work through the trauma of 9/11. …

Antropología y ciudad: hacia un análisis crítico e histórico

Departing from a theoretical discussion of the relationship between anthropology and the city, we problematize the foundations of both urban and anthropological studies. Rather than viewing the city as a stable and universal category, we emphasize the possibilities anthropology has to approach cities as products of historically-situated social practices. We illustrate this proposal by focusing on urbanistic projects in the city of Bogota during three historical moments and by analyzing contemporary imaginations of the cities of the future.

Producing Postman Pat: The popular cultural construction of idyllic rurality

This paper concerns the popular cultural representation of English rurality. It focuses upon Postman Pat, a popular cultural phenomenon which has come to be routinely cited as exemplary and iconic of contemporary imaginings of the English countryside as idyllic. The idea that Anglocentric popular culture (re)produces this sort of ‘rural idyll’ – and that these idylls are particularly laden with cultural and ideological baggage – has been well rehearsed. However, this paper considers a question which has too often been overlooked or taken for granted: how, exactly – and I mean literally, actually, in detail, in practice – does this sort of idyllic rurality come to be constructed? Through conversations with two key figures in the creation of Postman Pat, the paper begins to develop an understanding of some of the everyday, banal, nitty gritty practices, decisions and encounters which must be understood as fundamentally part of the production of (this) ‘rural idyll’.

Cloaks of Invisibility: The Status of Arthurian Studies

The ongoing film, print, and merchandizing phenomenon surrounding J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series makes for a timely interrogation of medievalist, and particularly Arthurian, work. While many university scholars lament the dwindling attention and funds given to medievalist projects, the Middle Ages seems very much alive and well in its popular formations. Both youth and adult cultures are obsessed with the Middle Ages, even beyond the indication that we might perceive from the castle-inhabiting, wizarding narratives of Rowling that have made Harry Potter the best-selling series in publishing history. The fanaticism prompted and fueled by the Star Wars franchise and the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the cult following of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and its recent re-vivication in the Broadway production of Spamalot, also provide obvious signs of the popularity of the Middle Ages in the contemporary imagination. But there are numerous others to be found in television advertising: IBM, the U.S. Marines, Capital One Credit Cards, and Jack-in-the-Box restaurants each use medieval, and specifically Arthurian, ad campaigns. An IBM commercial, in which a patient relays an Arthurian dream of pulling the sword from the stone to a Freudian psychoanalyst may be the most telling in terms of the location of our medievalist fantasies in our dreams of work, functionality, and computer-assisted productivity. For all its vast distance and cultural displacements, the Arthurian fiction fully inhabits our post-Freudian unconscious and reappears in our dreamwork as well as our enjoyments. Most pervasively, and most consistently, the Arthurian dream inhabits our childhood and the enjoyments we produce for our children. Lego, Playmobile, Playskool, and Barbie have elaborately developed medieval world-building products. With Playmobile one can choose a multi-unit, elaborate 'King's Castle,' or a Viking ship, and re-enact Danish raids on the Angles or the Norman conquest. Playmobile's miniature accessories, which include crossbows, longbows, quiver with removable arrows, frothing beer steins, various helmets (some with nose plates), shields, plate armor, and detachable facial hair, enable a wide variety of historical play. (My children use the 'Fairy Tale Castle,' which appears to be a semi-Restoration-cum-Cinderella affair, to represent the French and mock up the Hundred Years' War with the very English King's Castle noted above.) This is but one example. Children's culture is saturated with medieval dolls, toys, books and imaginative costume of all kinds and levels of elaborateness (take especial note of the Magic Cabin catalogue and its array of medieval dolls, dress, and equipment for Waldorf educational play). Perhaps most recently and potentially most importantly, the world of video gaming takes the re-vivication of the Middle Ages to its greatest possibilities. Operating beyond the annual 'Renaissance Faire' that might be close enough to attend or the 'Medieval Feast' theme restaurants at various tourist attractions we might visit, we are able to inhabit medieval worlds to the furthest extent that our digital imaginations can reach through games like Everquest and Final Fantasy. Where such virtual medievalism poses technological anxieties, we can always turn to the back of the latest airline shoppers' magazine to buy a letter opener in the form of Aragorn's reforged sword, Anduril. Should one want a full-sized replica, one need only get on the mailing list (or website) for 'Museum Replicas Limited,' 'a division of the Atlanta Cutlery Corporation.' The array of 'historically accurate, battle-ready swords, daggers, axes and helmets,' as advertised on the cover of catalog #83, allows for a grown-up, real time version of any kind of Playmobile universe (pirates, vikings, etc.) or full participation in the detailed Hollywood visualization of one's favorite medieval book. These adult devices are not very different from children's products. …

Archives of the new possession: Spanish colonial records and the American creation of a ‘national’ archives for the Philippines

Through the Treaty of Paris in 1898, Spain ceded to the United States all its colonial authority over the Philippines, including its other colonies. The Treaty also placed in American possession the Spanish records kept in the various agencies of the former colonial administration of the islands. Upon assumption of its role as the new de facto colonial regime, the American insular government initiated the process of collecting the Spanish colonial records to be housed in a central repository that became the nucleus of the National Archives of the Philippines. An important aspect of understanding the context of archives in post-colonial Philippines is to trace its early beginnings and to examine the archives’ association with former colonial powers. Established against the backdrop of the shift in the continuum of colonial regimes, the archive is undeniably a colonial creation and a manifestation of colonial domination. For the contemporary imagination, however, its very presence represents a common and collective past that consequently contributes to the formation of a “national consciousness” and ironically reinforces the idea of nationhood of the formerly colonized territory.

Becoming-Samurai

Becoming-Samurai

“Detox”, a mass delusion

Although microbiological in origin, it is totally illusory, a figment of our contemporary imagination. Yet it is discussed endlessly at dinner parties and discos. Advertised everywhere, it is fervently recommended by newspaper columnists and celebrity icons. Publishers and authors (some of whom should know better) make wads of money out of this fashionable fad. I am thinking of “detox”, a mass delusion that has spread from nowhere over the past decade and is now the subject of beliefs as firm as convictions that the sun will rise in the morning or that David Beckham is a footballer.

Virtual homeland?

This article analyses 68 songs from the free download music offer on the leading rightist web page designed for Croatian-speaking users. The selection of songs is taken as a specific intersection of fantasy images and discursive forms, in which one of the contemporary Croatian cultural imaginings is condensed. It is compared with imaginings from the last decade of the 20th century, which were the product of the socio-political elite’s strategy and, primarily, absorbed from the official media’s offer during the 1991-5 war in Croatia, but also from earlier official political memories.,

Seeing the self “in frame”: early new england material practice and puritan piety

I offer here a set of observations about the use of pictures in the Puritan devotional practice of self-examination. Specifically, I consider a cluster of seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century gravestone carvings and one oil painting, the Thomas Smith Self-Portrait (c.1670–91). Both kinds of artifacts, on stone and canvas, might well be described as means of “framing” the godly self. If Puritan diaries and journals, elegies and meditative poetry, biographies and autobiographies are literatures of and about the self, the gravestones and portrait painting that constitute my subject facilitate the performance of similar introspective labor. The fact that Thomas Smith likely painted his own resemblance while looking in a mirror represents only the most literal assertion of relations between his picture and the Puritan piety of self-examination. In approaching these material objects as “technologies of the self” (to appropriate a phrasing pursued by Tom Webster with respect to diaries), I also resituate them in particular environments and contexts and in relation to common practices and patterns of vision and behavior. I begin to suggest, furthermore, the intimate connections between these objects-in-place and other pictorial and textual forms of contemporary Puritan manufacture and imagination.

Liberalism at Bay, Conservatism at Play: Fear in the Contemporary Imagination

Liberalism at Bay, Conservatism at Play: Fear in the Contemporary Imagination

Slave Ethics and Imagining Critically Applied Anthropology in Public Health Research

For several years I considered myself a resident enemy alien of public health research. This polemical article explores this enemy alien subjectivity by looking at an ethnographic case showing how race is figured in public health research, and it asks what this subjectivity might suggest for a medical anthropology struggling to be both more public and interdisciplinary, and more fundamentally ethnological. As I imbue my enemy alien subjectivity with uniquely anthropological images and references, I ask medical anthropologists to reflect upon the specialized nature of a contemporary anthropological imagination and, while doing this, to look to the Nietzschean notion of slave ethics in order to engage with questions of how we might use this self-awareness to create various modes of “postcritical” practice in public health.

‘Civic’ police and the condition of liberty: the rationality of governance in eighteenth-century England

In this article it is argued that previous attempts to understand the organization of eighteenthcentury systems of police have failed to take into account the political implications of governmental organization. Examining the office of constable in terms of the contemporary governmental imagination reveals that concerns with the independence of the officers and the need to ward against ‘corruption’ are not simply practical requirements. The unpaid, sequential nature of eighteenth-century police service was defined in terms of the classical model of civic duty, which saw active participation in government and the rotation of public office as key conditions of the free state, and as such the liberty of the citizens. This vision of freedom as a condition of freedom from dependence or domination, not an absence of interference, was instrumental in defining the way the system of police was debated and reformed over the course of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Given that ‘police’ in this period represents a much wider programme of administration than the simple control of law and order, this has implications for our understanding of the structure of eighteenth-century government in general.