Imaginative Construction Research Articles

Outside/Inside Fantastic London

Neil Gaiman's (2000. London: Headline) Neverwhere and China Miéville's (2007. London: Macmillan) Un Lun Dun are contemporary fantasy novels which create and explore fantastic doubles to the modern city of London. The fantastic mode provides symbolic literalization of any city's tendency to estrange its citizens, to promise and simultaneously deny an absolute belonging which is impossible because of the city's scale. The refraction of the real-world city into its symbolic fantasy counterpart, and in particular the crisis of belonging and agency suffered by the protagonists who move from one realm to the other, become political tools for the exploration of power, difference and control. Both Gaiman and Miéville investigate the city as a space of hybridity, as well as London in particular as an imaginative construct realised as a series of images. Their fantastic Londons playfully invert these images while emphasising the disenfranchised and rejected aspects of the real-world city, interrogating and subverting notions of accepted order. The protagonists of both novels ultimately embrace and validate the other city, which is established as valuable despite its apparent construction as a subaltern realm; however, the classic polarisation of the fantasy genre into self/other dichotomies is more prevalent in Gaiman's mythologised realm than Miéville's more Marxist awareness. Nonetheless, both texts successfully use fantastic Londons to explore and interrogate notions of sanctioned and unsanctioned cultural identity.

Imagining womanhood: psychodynamic processes in the ‘textual’ and discursive formation of girls’ subjectivities and desires for the future

This article emerged in the course of a doctoral study that focused on the role of literary and filmic texts in constructing adolescent girls’ subjectivities and desires for womanhood. Analysing data drawn from both text and subject, the study focused on the discursive choreography of girls’ imaginary constructions of their mature adult selves. Aspects of the research data, however, were not so readily understood in terms of discourse, prompting the need for alternative explications of subjectification from a psychoanalytic perspective. Drawing on the recent work of Nancy Chodorow to analyse girls’ descriptions of their favourite texts and imagined futures, I demonstrate how subjectivity is a personal as well as cultural construction. Girls’ experience of themselves as gendered subjects is not simply a direct internalisation of stories and characters but a complex psychodynamic process whereby texts and other cultural and discursive phenomena are given emotional tonality and personal meaning. These personal meanings are just as powerful in the formation of subjective gender as are discourse and culture.

In Search of Subaltern Consciousness

“In Search of Subaltern Consciousness” starts from the undeniable truth that the representation of society's Other (often now referred to as “subaltern”) is always a mediated, partial, and imaginative construction, especially by writers who, by the very fact of their literacy, belong to an elite. Focusing on the central example of the revisionary Indian historical project of subaltern studies, the essay argues for the value to historical study of the more dramatic, speculative, and open-ended ways of representing subaltern consciousness that literature can contribute, even to revisionary history. A broad context comes from consideration of a wide range of fiction and non-fiction writers, including Orwell, Nehru, Gandhi, E. P. Thompson, Premchand, and Chekhov. The diverse examples demonstrate that the search for subaltern consciousness remains a continuing, if always elusive and complex concern of the humane imagination in many diverse prose genres, only artificially separable from each other.

Book Review: Imaginative Constructions of the Nation

Book Review: Imaginative Constructions of the Nation

New and Useless

The purpose of this article is to advance research on creativity in organizations by developing a psychoanalytic perspective from which creativity may be understood as an imaginary construction of the self. This self aims at producing the new and useful yet fails to do so. The useful is only marginally so, and many of the interactions designed to ensure usefulness result in socially useless activities. The article suggests, however, that from a psychoanalytic perspective, the failure of the imaginary is also useful. It is useful to the creative person as subject of the unconscious providing opportunities for struggles with otherness and alienation. Such struggles allow respondents to experience their creative potential and produce something beyond organizational kitsch. The implications for the theory and practice of organizational creativity are discussed.

O ciúme em “Sarapalha”

O estudo do “ciúme”, paixão que se manifesta no conto “Sarapalha”, de João Guimarães Rosa, é objeto de análise deste trabalho. Os pressupostos teóricos são os da semiótica francesa. Objetiva-se descrever a dimensão sintática do ciúme, que revela a intensidade do sofrimento dos sujeitos afetados pela paixão – Primo Ribeiro e Primo Argemiro – em relação à perda do objeto-sujeito amado, Prima Luíza, para um rival comum. Busca-se descrever também o esquema passional canônico do ciúme na cena enunciativa, que capta o momento da revelação de Argemiro a Ribeiro a respeito do amor platônico que nutrira por Luíza. Ribeiro, ciumento caracterizado pelo apego exclusivo, assume o papel do observador avaliador social e não perdoa Argemiro, apesar de o papel de rival, que ele atribui ao primo, ser uma construção de seu imaginário.
 
 Palavras chave: Paixão. Ciúme. Esquema passional canônico.

Imagining multilingual schools: languages in education and glocalization

I. INTRODUCTION 1. Weaving spaces and (de)constructing ways for multilingual schools: The actual and the imagined - Ofelia Garcia, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Maria Torres-Guzman II. PEDAGOGIES, VALUES AND SCHOOLS 2. Identity texts: The imaginative construction of self through multiliteracies pedagogy Jim Cummins (OISE, University of Toronto) 3. Imagining multilingual education in France: A language and cultural awareness project at primary level - Christine Helot (Institut Universitaire de Formation des Maitres) and Andrea Young (Institut Universitaire de Formation de Maitres) 4. Reclaiming multilingual America: Lessons from Native American youth - Teresa L. McCarty (Arizona State University), Mary Eunice Romero (Arizona State University), Ofelia Zepeda (University of Arizona) 5. Attitudes towards language learning in different linguistic models of the Basque Autonomous Community - Feli Etxeberria-Sagastume (Universidad del Pais Vasco/ Euskal Herriko Universitatea) III. EXTENDING FORMAL INSTRUCTIONAL SPACES 6. Back to basics: Marketing the benefits of bilingualism to parents - Viv Edwards (University of Reading) and Lynda Pritchard Newcombe 7. Popular education and language rights in indigenous Mayan communities: Emergence of new social actors and gendered voices - Karen Ogulnick(Long Island University) IV. TENSIONS BETWEEN MULTIPLE REALITIES 8. Imagined multilingual schools: How come we don't deliver? - Elana Shohamy (Tel Aviv University) 9. Monolingual assessment and emerging bilinguals: A case study in the U.S. - Kathy Escamilla (University of Colorado) 10. The Long road to multilingual schools in Botswana - Lydia Nyati-Ramahobo (University of Botswana) V. NEGOTIATING POLICIES OF IMPLEMENTATION 11. Nichols to NCLB: Local and global perspectives on U.S. language education policy - Nancy Hornberger (University of Pennsylvania) 12. Cultural diversity, multilingualism and indigenous education - Luis Enrique Lopez (Universidad Mayor de San Simon) 13. Multilingualism of the unequals and predicaments of education in India - Ajit K. Mohanty (Jawaharlal Nehru University)

More Than a Creative Beginning: An Assessment of Gordon Kaufman’s In the beginning ... Creativity

/n the beginning . . . Creativity provides us with thought-provoking summary of the theology of Gordon D. Kaufman, Professor Emeritus at Harvard and the distinguished author of ten prior books, including Essay on Theological Method (1975; third edition 1995), Theology for Nuclear Age (1985), and In Face of Mystery (1993).1 To some extent In the beginning. . . Creativity may be viewed as compact version of the earlier In Face of Mystery, which is about three times as long and treats many of the same topics. Kaufman identifies In the beginning . . . Creativity as a kind of experiment in thought,2 but the book does advance consistent, balanced argument which supports several theological conclusions. The book is therefore eminently useful both for those who need concise introduction Kaufman's doctrine of God and for those who wish know how his thinking has evolved during recent years. In the beginning . . . Creativity consists of Preface and five chapters, the first of which is Prologue and the last an Epilogue. The Preface outlines the remainder of the volume, presenting at the outset several of the author's characteristic ideas that God may more profitably be viewed not as personal being but as serendipitous creativity; that human beings are inherently creatures-in context, inescapably located in network of bio-historical processes; and that theology should be undertaken neither as quest for apodictic certitude nor as the meticulous interpretation of sacred texts, but as an endeavor in imaginative construction, whose essential purpose is enable us to

The Catholic social imagination: activism and the just society in Mexico and the United States

reach of the Catholic Church is arguably greater than that of any other religion, extending across diverse political, ethnic, class, and cultural boundaries. But what is it about Catholicism that resonates so profoundly with followers who live under disparate conditions? What is it, for instance, that binds parishioners in America with those in Mexico? For Joseph M. Palacios, what unites Catholics is a sense of being Catholic - a social imagination that motivates them to promote justice and build a better world. In The Catholic Social Imagination, Palacios gives readers a feeling for what it means to be Catholic and put one's faith into action. Tracing the practices of a group of parishioners in Oakland, California, and another in Guadalajara, Mexico, Palacios reveals parallels - and contrasts - in the ways these ordinary Catholics receive and act on a church doctrine that emphasizes social justice. Whether they are building a supermarket for the low-income elderly or waging protests to promote school reform, these parishioners provide important insights into the construction of the Catholic social imagination. Throughout, Palacios also offers important new cultural and sociological interpretations of Catholic doctrine on issues such as poverty, civil and human rights, political participation, and the natural law.

Composing Time: Zeno's Arrow, Hindemith's Erinnerung, and Satie's Instantanéisme

The concept of linear time as an irreversible succession of events dates back to the late 18th century. Though fundamental to the experience of music written thereafter, time's pure linearity was dented by technologies of mechanical reproduction during the early 20th century. Imagining possible temporal zigzags provided modernists such as Paul Hindemith and René Clair with mechanical paradigms through which to explore the manipulation of time and motion—as infinitely divisible properties—in the decade that witnessed Lindbergh's transatlantic flight, the first radio broadcasts, and an increasing addiction to Edison's Duplex Telegraph wire. Apart from the modernism that exists on the historical timeline, this essay looks for a structural homology between historical and musical events in attempting to establish a distinct “modernism of time” for the 1920s; it argues that differing concepts of time were reflected in certain pieces from the early 20th century. Hindemith's one-act operatic epigram Hin und Zurück (1927) plays with conceptions of time as a narrative of reversal from domestic disaster to “happy beginning.” The music, running forward and backward, evokes different processes of memory to illustrate this “Time Axis Manipulation” as it is intuitively lived by the stage characters. Clair's contrasting Dadaeque film Entr'acte (1924), set to Satie's music, is an illogical picture sequence that also embodies a construction of time, Instantanéisme, but denies that it can be understood. Both works were conceived as proportional, imperfect mirror forms, indicating an implicit temporal reversal, though from antithetical perspectives. Drawing on the master paradigm of Zeno's arrow, this enquiry explores qualities of musical and visual time as both construction and manipulation of the modernist imagination.

Vitality rediscovered: theorizing post-Soviet ethnicity in Russian social sciences

Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited.

Imaginative Experience: A Narrative-Dialogic Ethnography of the Community Who Adores Its Idol

Managing customer loyalty becomes an important activity in marketing management. One of the reasons is that loyal consumers tend to make good financial performances to producer. Unfortunately, gaining a loyal customer is not a trivial activity since there are gaps to understand consumer experience comprehensively. To fulfill the gaps, this article explores imaginative experience of the community who adores its idol in the light of cultural perspective. The members of the community who adores its idol experience the imaginative experience. The author argues that those phenomena are cultural perspective, because they are meaningful to the members. Through narrative-dialogic ethnography, the author builds the concept of imaginative experience that through the imaginative media, the members do narrative-dialogic between “the realm of areal” and “the realm of afotik” then activate the imaginative relations in “the realm of aktinik”. Every member constructs its imaginative relations into imaginative constructions formed in a personal story. Managing imaginative experience could benefit the company. It can be the “Imaginative Experience Management” (IEM) that accommodates imaginative consumers’ experiences with the company’s products deeply and sustainably through managing the story of its consumers’ imaginative experiences. It can also be linked to the customer loyalty programs. In this matter, IEM should be integrated with brand management.

Kinderwille, Elternwille: Arrangiertes Eheglück bei Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, in der Sozialgeschichte und Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts

Among the dichotomies which shape our view of 19th century society is the dichotomy of the arranged marriage and the marriage based on love. It is, however, not always easy to tell, to what extent this dichotomy stems from the observation of historical fact and to what extent it is a construction of the textual imagination and particularly of literature. The paper explores the role of the arranged marriage and opposite concepts in social history, the philosophical works of G. W. F. Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer and in German literary texts of the second half of the 19th century which are generally described as texts of bourgois realism. With regard to social history it questions the usefulness of a clear cut dichotomy between arranged and romantic marriages. It also argues that one cannot simply associate arranged marriages with economic considerations and romantic marriages with a complete neglect of economic factors. With regard to Hegel and Schopenhauer the paper shows that they both had a high opinion of arranged marriages, although for different, even opposing reasons. With regard to literary texts of the second half of the 19th century it analyzes, how they reject arranged marriages, yet at the same time search for forms of social stability which arranged marriages are supposed to guarantee. The paper also attempts to show, how social history and the writing of social history and the philosophical and literary texts interact.

“The Clearing”: Conversations at the Wabash Center

Abstract. The study of religion seeks to understand life and life practices, which means that it is internally suited to dynamic teaching‐learning methods such as exploration, conversation, and imaginative construction. Wabash Center hospitality enables reflective conversations about the nature of our craft, the shape of our vocation, and the direction of our discipline.

Gardens of Auto Parts: Kingsolver's Merger of American Western Myth and Native American Myth in The Bean Trees

Outside was a bright, wild wonderland of flowers and vegetables and auto parts. Heads of cabbage and lettuce sprouted out of old tires. An entire rusted out Thunderbird, minus the wheels, had nasturtiums blooming out the windows like Mama's hen-and-chicks pot on the front porch at home. A kind of teepee frame made of CB antennas was all overgrown with cherry-tomato vines. (Kingsolver 45) Junkyards and gardens: how could two such diametrically opposed worlds flourish together? Seemingly, one would preclude the possibility of the other. Abandoned wrecks would jeopardize new tomatoes, while spilled oil would poison the fertile ground, debilitating the delicate burgeoning of a squash blossom. How can anyone tend a garden in the midst of rusted auto parts? How can growth occur in the midst of abandonment? In the mythology that surrounds the American West, one of the primary expressions of the western experience has been the male's desire to move. Whether by horse, wagon, raft, or even later by car, action typifies the male western hero, who feels a powerful desire to hit the open road. Action and adventure are tied tightly with the need to be mobile. Adventures do not happen at home; you have to go find them. In contrast, women have been connected rather loosely to the male western archetype despite their presence on the frontier. Rather than a symbol of movement, the female experience has been firmly rooted in the image of the garden. Annette Kolodny has perhaps furthered this construction the most by exploring women's idealization of the garden on the frontier. She states in The Land Before Her that women gained access to the U. S. West by connecting themselves both literarily and figuratively with the garden. Embodying both the characteristics of the natural and procreative, gardens evolved into symbols of the home. Cultivating a garden in the West provided women a claim or admittance into a masculine world, if only to a portion of the experience. As a garden must have constant attention, movement is difficult for those who garden. Women, therefore, gained access to the frontier, yet were excluded from the adventure that men sought. Despite the obvious oppositions, Barbara Kingsolver finds a way to unite the possibilities of a garden with the opportunities of adventure in The Bean Trees, her novel about a woman's migration from the American South to the American West. Merging these characteristics: the desire for movement and the desire to tend a home, Kingsolver is able to express a female voice that has heretofore been lost or subsumed by the white male experience. In many ways, Kingsolver creates a character who becomes that individual Kolodny speaks of at the end of The Land Before Her, for Kingsolver's main character becomes both adventurer and domesticator (Kolodny 240). By combining these two figures, Kingsolver fashions a new American mythology that unites both male and female imaginative constructions. The attempt is not an easy one, as access to the West has almost always been achieved, whether the individual is male or female, through performing white masculine constructions. In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins points out the difficulty women have had in gaining admittance to this masculine world, especially access to the role of the hero. Her findings reveal female desire for this access through women's own attempts to imagine themselves within the western landscape and culture. Tompkins notes that some women found imagining inclusion impossible, but for those who could, awkward manipulations would take place in order to create a place for the female within this world: One friend said she loved Bonanza so much that she had to invent a female character so that she could participate as a woman ... Another friend told me she could identify with male heroes but only the nonwhite, non-WASP ones, Tonto and Zorro. (16) Clearly, the struggle to find inclusion in this myth of adventure is difficult; still the passage proves the desire of women to claim in some real sense the ideology represented in our imaginative constructions of the American West. …

Aesthetics of Alienation: Reassessment of Early Soviet Cultural Theories by Evgeny Dobrenko

612 Reviews intentmay have a polemical element, but her writing and argumentation aremea sured and underpinned by a secure and detailed grasp of her material. This book is an important contribution toTsvetaeva studies, and its examination of an over looked aspect of thepoet's work should provoke many readers to return to the texts itdiscusses, open tonew insight and wary of categorical judgements. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER KATHARINE HODGSON Aesthetics ofAlienation: Reassessment ofEarly Soviet Cultural Theories. By EVGENY DOBRENKO. (Northwestern University Press Studies inRussian Literature and Theory) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 2005. XX+I52 pp. $79.95. ISBN 978-0-8IOI-2025-9. Aesthetics ofAlienation is offered to the English-speaking audience as a sequel to Evgeny Dobrenko's two larger studies of early Soviet culture, The Making of the State Reader and TheMakingof theState Writer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, I997, 2000). In the introduction the author himself describes the trajectory connecting his earlier work to this latest volume: after considering the formation of Socialist Realism firstfrom the side of the consumer, then from the side of the pro ducer, one more side remains to complete the triangle of the literary process. The 'missing link' is thatof literary theory and criticism,whose 'sociology' Dobrenko sets out toexplicate. 'Without it,the sociology of literaturecannot be considered complete: between thewriter and the reader exists amost significant cultural institution,which under Soviet conditions had itsown specifics. In fact, the idea for thisbook was born out of necessity to determine the social parameters of theaesthetic debates' (p. xiii). Neat as this sequential progression appears, Aesthetics ofAlienation stands as an odd piece among Dobrenko's publications. Those familiarwith theRussian textof TheMaking of the State Writer will realize immediately that theauthor's newest book is a translation of the long firstchapter of Formovka sovetskogopisatelia (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, I999). Excluded from the 2000 English edition, thischapter (originally entitled 'Utopii tvorchestva' [Utopias of creativity]) iswhat now appears as a separate volume under the title Aesthetics of Alienation. Since thebook will appeal toSlavists, some ofwhom are likely tobe familiarwith Formovka sovetskogopisatelia, it remains amystery why the text's actual origin isnever acknowledged. This oddity aside, thebook does hold as an independent, ifshort,monograph, struc tured in a logical and comprehensive way. Each of itsmain chapters examines one of themajor literary-artistic groupings of the I920S (Proletkult, RAPP, LEF, Pereval) and theirplatforms. In each, theauthor traces a development he considers essential for understanding post-Revolutionary culture and itskinship with theculture of Socialist Realism: the eclipse of the 'creative personality' and the freedoms traditionally asso ciated with artisticwork. Dobrenko sees thisprocess unfolding on twodistinct levels: the socio-political, where a new class of literaryproducers aspires to replace the old artistic intelligentsia; and the ideological, where thenew elites' claim tocultural hege mony iscodified inaesthetic theories and artistic projects. The relation between these two levels isnot unlike the relation between base and superstructure in the cliched Marxist scheme: primary and ultimately determinative is thepolitical struggle,while aesthetic thought does littlemore than justify and rationalize the base (sic) drive to power. Beneath the imaginative constructs and radical projections of thevarious liter ary theories,Dobrenko unveils a rather 'prosaic' predicament: theirauthors' inability tocompete with theclassics, the subconsciously feltimpotence when confronted with the traditional norms of artistic value. This impotence comes first,and only then, as a sort of defence mechanism against it, there appear Proletkult's projects forcollective MLR, I02.2, 2007 6I3 writing, the 'life-building' of LEF, RAPP's imperative of 'restraint', etc. Dobrenko asks again and again thatwe look past the utopian content of these ideas and see, instead, theirquite pragmatic function: to rewrite the rules of artistic practice, so that theybe advantageous to the class of lumpen-literati promoted by theRevolution. Dobrenko navigates effortlessly through thevarious currents of cultural theory of the I920S, tracing them to theirconfluence (and extinction) in the 'petrifiedutopia' Stalinist Socialist Realism. His knowledge of primary material is, as always, im pressive, ifoften counterbalanced by a penchant for quotations, whose frequency threatens the conceptual cohesion of thewhole. Conceptually, the study's main vul nerability is its adherence to pre-critical convictions about 'genuine' art-the tacit background against which the 'ersatz art' of theproletarian writers and the...

Imagining the Moor in Medieval Portugal

�� ��� For medieval Portugal, Africa was familiar and strange, a known place across the modest parcel of the Mediterranean between the Algarve and Ceuta, and, farther south, an unknown expanse of land that glimmered black under the equatorial sun. And for Portugal, like for Spain, Africa was part of the demographics and history of Iberian culture in the figure of the Moor, at once an “other” and a closer, more intimate presence. Jeffrey J. Cohen reminds us of the “cultural work” of the Saracen (one of the medieval terminological possibilities for “Moor”), “whose dark skin and diabolical physiognomy were the western Middle Ages’ most familiar, most exorbitant embodiment of racial alterity” [189]. Cohen argues, therefore, that the Saracen (grosso modo) existed in a network of literary and ideological productions of western Europe; in the case of Iberia, the Moor was sometimes but not always a Saracen and was both a figure of alterity and of familiar ity and sameness, less an aprioristic other and more of a figure that could be variously othered as a marker of boundaries including “race,” spirituality, and sexuality. While this essay does not take on the idea of racial alterity per se, it does assume the notion that in the literary culture of Portugal blackness, in some manner, informed constructions of the Moor. My purpose here is to delineate an understanding of the Moor in medieval Portugal as a construct that resists easy categorizations as an undifferentiated figure of otherness, a consideration that culminates with the work of Gomes Eanes de Zurara (1410?–1474?), the first chronicler of Portuguese exploration into (west) Africa. To this end, I will briefly consider the Moor in representative examples from the livros de linhagens (genealogical books) and the cantigas d’escarnho e de mal dizer (poetry of mockery and insult, hereafter abbreviated CEM), not so much in order to trace a direct influence between these texts and the work of Zurara but to provide an idea of how the Moor was variously fashioned in earlier texts. The analysis here is not exhaustive nor conclusive but suggestive, and is meant to indicate how the Moor—and the idea of the Moor—in Portugal can add to critical conversations on the imaginative and ideological constructions of the Moor and of Africa and its inhabitants. The formulations of national and cultural identities in European texts of the Middle Ages and Renaissance 1 that in some way engage Africa and the African have increasingly 1. “Renaissance” is increasingly being replaced with “early modern” as many scholars have noted as a way of indicating, inter alia, a more theoretically inflected approach to the study of this general time period. All critical labels are conveniences and therefore shift as the methodologies, assumptions, and objectives of scholars change. I agree that, under the rubric of “early modern studies,” an array of provocative work is being produced; the designation brings with it an invigorating refurbishment of critical postures toward the centuries following the Middle Ages. Yet a note of caution should also be sounded, since “early modern” can imply that what scholars in the field do is only worthwhile insofar as it inevitably relates to the “modern.” Modernity thus becomes the teleological justification and arbiter of value for anything preceding it. A large part of the appeal of the cultural productivity and mindsets of the centuries preceding modernity (and this includes the Middle Ages) is precisely that which is different, alien, strange to the modern world and in

Toward a Medicine of the Imagination

This paper re-visits the medical history of the imagination and contemporary attitudes toward complementary and alternative medicine to consider three uses of the imagination: (1) imaginary medicine, in which wishful thinking, colorful metaphors and inflated expectations lead people to pursue forms of healing with little rational support; (2) imagination as medicine, in which the creative capacities to construct new images work to reshape and reposition the self; and (3) a medicine of imagination, which is directly concerned with the interactions between imaginative constructions of the self, the psychophysiology of image and metaphor, and the politicsof healing practices.

Queer and Now: The Queer Signifier at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre

In his 1995 essay, “Theorizing a Queer Theatre: Buddies in Bad Times,”RobertWallace suggests that Buddies in Bad Times Theatre is an“imaginative construction”whose“theatrical subjectivity,” like itsmandate, is not fixed, but has been constantly evolving since the company began to produce work in 1979 (137).Wallace goes on to argue that Buddies underwent a “literal and figurative reconstruction of [its] theatrical subjectivity” (138) when the company renovated and moved into its current home at the Alexander Street Theatre Project in 1994 and changed itsmandate to nominate itself a “queer theatre.” Using Wallace’s essay as a point of departure, I examine the interim decade at Buddies to chart the shifting meaning of the term queer as it has been employed to define the company’smandate from1994 to the present.

INVOCANDO DEUSES NO TEMPLO ATENIENSE: (Re) inventando tradições e identidades no Maranhão (1940-1960)

Analisamos processos de invenção e reinvenção da maranhensidade, mostrando que, em meados do século XX (1940-1960), o mito da Atenas Brasileira é reatualizado, o Maranhão e o maranhense são ressignificados a partir de temas e sentidos daquela construção imaginária: novas letras refletidas de velhas imagens e transformadas em revelações da maranhensidade.