Imagined Past Research Articles

Reading Bauman and Retrotopia

The work of Zygmunt Bauman, insofar as it addressed the organizational world, saw it initially as a total institution, one in which the organization, as a specific entity defined by those activities it envelops, was focused on the central task of liquidation (Bauman, 1989). du Gay (2002) critically interrogated the bureaucratic character of this total institution in an influential thesis that ‘praised’ bureaucracy as a normative ideal of modernity. It is not, however, this debate with the ghost of Max Weber that has been of most concern to contemporary management and organization studies. Rather, it a later image of organization as decomposing, fragmenting, opening, reforming and deforming. In a word, organization is becoming more ‘liquid’, such that boundaries, choices and control are shifting in the direction of increasing fluidity and plurality. Key themes that are identified are those of liquid society, composing liquid ethics, liquid dynamics, liquid selves and liquid spaces and aesthetics. There are, however, outer limits to liquid modernity as they are enacted in terms of myths that Bauman refers to as leading to Retrotopia: a sickly nostalgia for an imagined past as a source of inspiration, a mythical utopia, where things were better managed and organized. Thus, the outer limit of a liquid society becomes a retrospective and backward looking utopia: Retrotopia, a myth whose contours are outlined and whose implications for management and organization studies are expounded.

The ritualization of heritage destruction under the Islamic State

This article develops the conceptual framework of the ritualization of heritage destruction to analyse and interpret the targeting of pre-monotheistic heritage sites and artefacts by the Islamic State. It draws upon anthropological studies of initiation rituals in violent male cults alongside literature on heritage destruction to conduct a systematic analysis of key Islamic State propaganda outlets. The analysis reveals that the heritage destruction wrought by the Islamic State functions as part of a broader process of ritualization that is instrumental in forming bonds between members and ensuring their allegiance. Such rituals serve multiple purposes: they physically and ideologically separate new recruits from existing social norms and laws; they breed a deference to leadership and create a unified identity towards the potentiality of violence; and they situate heritage destruction itself within a complex symbolic kaleidoscope of prescribed actions and specific attire, invoking connections to an imagined past and repeating the actions of their forbearers. The article concludes by noting that such analysis of the ritualization of heritage destruction is not only vital to understanding how groups such as the Islamic State successfully transform ordinary young men into a violent jihadist communitas, but also in further understanding, and responding to, such attacks on heritage sites.

Seditious Spaces

Seditious Spaces

Scientists’ Imagined Pasts and Historians’ Appreciation of Scientific Thought

AbstractHistorians should heed Adrian Wilson’s call for deeper study of the “imagined pasts” of science, but they should avoid thinking of those pasts as corrupted versions of professional history. The past (and future) that historians of science have often imagined for themselves casts them in a heroic role within the history of science, destined to diagnose and dispel flaws in scientists’ broadly accepted ideas about the nature of their enterprise. Abiding by this narrative with respect to scientists’ imagined pasts would lead historians to presume that flaws in scientists’ historical understanding are reflections of flaws in scientists’ thinking more generally. Simon Schaffer’s work on the evolution and “end” of natural philosophy is exemplary of the historiographical rewards to be expected from careful research into the totality of scientific figures’ understanding of their own work.

Science’s Imagined Pasts

AbstractScience entails history writing: scientists are continuously engaged in creating “imagined pasts” for their own specialisms, both on the small scale of the ubiquitous literature review and on a much broader scale. This aspect of science has been considered in very different ways in decades-old, yet largely neglected, contributions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Augustine Brannigan, and Simon Schaffer. Inspired by these pieces and by the missing dialogue between them, this essay argues that their concealment is itself an instance, on the broadest possible scale, of the power of “imagined pasts”—in this case the imagined continuity, inscribed in the very name of our discipline, between Isaac Newton and ourselves.

Using, Abusing, and Perusing the Past

Historians’ neglect of the imagined past is particularly surprising when one considers that, oftentimes, the process of constructing an imagined past is an interesting story in its own right. This essay argues that part of the reason for the scarce attention paid to science’s imagined past is the fact that the very existence of an imagined past questions the foundations of history writing. The remedy to the flaws of history is, the essay suggests, simply more history. We do not need to sweep the imagined past under the rug but, rather, to understand its dynamics as a genuinely historical process.

Response to Comments on “Science’s Imagined Pasts”

The four generous responses to “Science’s Imagined Pasts” here commented on fruitfully extend its argument. In particular, all of them resonate with—even though only one of them explicitly addresses—its concluding theme of the “second scientific revolution.”

Are Trees Rooting for Us? The Heritage of Greening in Qatar

AbstractThis article considers the emergence and role of “heritage trees” in Qatar. I suggest these trees are emblematic of a cultural heritage discourse that constructs a specific relationship to the landscape, one that is simultaneously informed by an imagined past and a desired future. I contextualize this development within the phenomenon of “survivor trees,” a global discourse that mobilizes a heritage rhetoric about anxieties of loss and desires for adaptation, in order to account for the recent appearance of “heritage trees” in Qatar as part of its efforts to build and mobilize its citizens’ support for a sustainable future. This discussion highlights the ways in which heritage discourses may be mobilized as powerful technologies in the construction of environmental imaginaries.

Keats’s Sense of Family History: Isabella and The Eve of St. Agnes

ABSTRACTRomantic impulses govern the fraught, family histories in these poems on conflicts that disrupt or threaten loss to lovers. In Isabella Keats explores a young woman’s resistance to her brothers’ machinations. In The Eve of St. Agnes Madeline confronts an uncertain future, either in her family’s bastion or in Porphyro’s domains. The attention to romantic energy in both poems discloses Keats’s entrance into the manners, attitudes, striking poses that dominate the participants in mercantile and feudal realms. To what these participants say and do, he contributes elements of dirge, musical instruments, furnishings, stark landscapes, and historic accounts of cruelties and exploitation. Mythical allusion, unexpected humour, dream dialogue contribute to the embrace of the inexplicable. The texture of the poems argues that Keats’s engagement with family history is a recognition that the milieus he creates have an afterlife, that the recovery of an imagined past is not limiting but has currency for his own time future generations. His engagement with family history also draws him to his own circumstances, for, he turns to his own romantic desires, writing to George and Georgianna Keats that he believes that he will be among the English poets.

Gap Creek’s Celebration of Women’s Subjugation

Abstract Through tropes of work and sex, Robert Morgan’s Gap Creek: The Story of a Marriage normalizes violations perpetrated by men against women. The book is set around the turn of the twentieth century, so as the protagonist, Julie, relates her story, it becomes a journey into an imagined past when women were women and knew how to help men become men, in the purest patriarchal sense of the terms. While Julie is cast as a strong mountain woman who is to be commended for her physical strength, maturity, and common sense, what actually underlies her admirable character traits is the novel’s approbation for her subservience and silence. Yet since its publication in 1999, the novel has enjoyed immense popular appeal as well as critical praise. I argue that Morgan’s insider status and his use of a contentedly subjugated woman narrator obfuscate the book’s sexist ideology.

Anglophone cookbooks and the making of the Mediterranean

ABSTRACTThe Anglophone cookbook writers Elizabeth David, Claudia Roden, and Paula Wolfert situate Mediterranean cookery at the intersection of science, history, literature, and art. In conversation with one another they build a discourse of Mediterranean food that binds up cooking and eating with cultural identity. To establish their authority as experts over the wide and varied Mediterranean zone, David, Roden, and Wolfert reach for an elusive unity across the sea, presupposing not only a shared history but an imagined past in which the Mediterranean presented a single cuisine and, by extension, a single culture. In suggesting the possibility of eating one's way into knowledge of a culture, each author stresses her own deep ties to the Mediterranean, sidestepping the fundamental ambiguity of these links. The Mediterranean their writing creates echoes this ambiguity, its lacunae bringing into relief the constructed nature of the “Mediterranean diet” and the unified Mediterranean it imagines. This construction is rendered available for readers via the doubled consumption of Mediterranean food and Mediterranean culture.

Askesis and the logic of the spiral

ABSTRACTThis essay sets out to demonstrate a strong connection between eros and askesis in Foucault’s writings. Analogous to Huffer’s argument about eros, I suggest that askesis does not invoke a return to an imagined Greek past, but operates generatively to destabilize subjectivity and normativity. Askesis is central to Foucault’s methodology and, indeed, askesis and eros, two terms that Huffer depicts as “strange” and “untranslatable,” are both requisite for the projects of political, social, and personal liberation toward which Foucault labored.

Freedom of expression in Egypt: how long hair, pink shirts, novels, amateur videos and facebook threaten public order and morality!

AbstractFreedom of expression suffers from a ferocious crackdown in Egypt because of gaping narcissistic injuries to a chauvinist, patriarchal national psyche that has been repackaged in Egypt's early post‐colonial years. Decades of cultural and socio‐economic decay has torn Egypt's stereotypical psyche between claims of grandeur and righteousness on the one hand and a reality of failures and debasement on the other hand. Dislocated, many Egyptians are desperate and willing to submit to any comforting system of meaning. Their alienation and sense of shame drive them to seek a clean origin and to disavow reality, a state that is conducive to an obsession with blaming the other, or the minority or the neighboring communities, for instigating this shame. There is a symbiotic deadlock of the impossible return to an imagined past and the feared submission to an ill‐defined new. This creates a state of neurosis where the two essentialist “selves” propagated by the religious and neoliberal elites are meant to preserve a status quo under the benevolent hand of the father/dictator. A challenge to this setup means also a challenge to the father whose protection is sought and loathed in such a torturous neurotic state whose end or dissolution could mean to many the end of the world as they know it. For Egypt to get out of this quagmire, deep political and institutional reforms will have to evolve through social resistance and transformation. This will take time because ultra‐nationalism and patriarchy are instrumentalized and integral to deep vested material and psychological interests.

Re-imagining the rural: From rural idyll to Good Countryside

Rural studies have highlighted a rural idyll as something to which many aspire, perhaps as a vision of a good place to live or as a repository of values. But harking back to an imagined past is recognized as normative and power-infused, often serving the interests of the powerful. How far should this nostalgia for an imagined golden age of indeterminate date inform a vision for a desired future? This paper seeks to begin, and indeed to provoke, discussion of what might constitute visions for rural futures, or our collective imaginaries of rural places into the twenty-first century, of a Good Countryside to work towards. What morality might underpin such imaginaries? And how might we approach such a task? One approach might be to employ utopian thinking as a means of identifying and imagining desired alternative futures, drawing upon Levitas' argument for utopia as a form of anticipatory consciousness - the not yet - in contrast to the essentially backward looking rural idyll. Four registers from urban studies - repair, relatedness, rights, re-enchantment - are then taken as a point of departure for deliberation on what morality might underpin a Good Countryside, and whether this might differ between urban and rural contexts. A discussion ensues on how to proceed in practice, both in eliminating evils and in pursuing collective forward dreaming and anticipatory consciousness, for example through place-shaping or networked rural development. Finally, the discussion reflects on what scholarly and practical roles rural sociologists might play in these processes.

The role of memory in populist discourse: the case of the Italian Second Republic

ABSTRACTCento Bull's paper takes as its starting point Ernesto Laclau's and Chantal Mouffe's conceptualization of populism as counter-hegemonic, and argues, with reference to the Italian case, that populism not only takes the form of a rejection of the establishment and political elites, but also entails a construction of ‘the people’ that requires, as well as the development of empty signifiers as shown by Laclau, also the deployment of common myths based on a collective memory of an imagined past. Cento Bull therefore argues, in line with Ritchie Savage, that the role of memory in populist discourse has been underestimated. Specifically, many populist movements and leaders engage in a fundamental redefinition of who constitutes ‘the people’ accompanied by mistrust and demonization of the Other, which is predicated upon (and justified with recourse to) a reimagining of the nation's and/or democracy's ‘founding moment’. Furthermore, many populist movements make use of a political rhetoric revolving around the ‘anti-subversive impulse’ and aimed at instilling fear and a sense of being under threat.

Playing cowboys and Indians: the therapeutics of nostalgia

The term nostalgia was initially coined to describe a newly recognized form of homesickness so acute it was considered often fatal. Over time, the medicalized origins of nostalgia have disappeared and it would be unthinkable today to find medical professionals diagnosing patients with this condition. Nonetheless, contemporary usage of the term continues to reverberate with negative overtones, often suggesting suffering, melancholy or loss. This article presents a counter-case of nostalgia, considering the possibilities of nostalgia as a mode of therapeutics. Focusing on Czech trampers’ re-enactments of the imagined environments, personas, and activities of the American “Wild West”, the author argues that Czechs’ nostalgic re-enactments of so-called “Indian” or “cowboy” ways of life open up an imaginative horizon conducive to promoting physical and mental well-being. Much like drama therapy, these enactments enable participants to momentarily embody foreign personas and experiment with forms of masculinity and relations to nature that might otherwise be foreclosed to them. Such acts of nostalgic play are indicative, the author argues, not of an unhealthy detachment from the present but of an agentive and highly creative means of using imagined pasts to recast one’s sense of self in the present and future.

Gender, Authenticity, and Diasporic Identities in Adebayo’s Moj of the Antarctic and Iizuka’s 36 Views

As feminist scholarship has well established, gender does not exist independently; instead, it is a category that comes into being through its multiple intersections with ethnicity, nation, sexuality, and other identities. For this reason, it is particularly important to examine diasporic women's negotiations of identity, and the multiple categories and oppressions under which they live. Mojisola Adebayos 2006 play Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey and Naomi Iizukas 2002 play 36 Views both make significant contributions to the drama of women in the diaspora, but neither has been given the scholarly attention one might expect. Moreover, despite their different national and cultural focuses, these plays bear a number of striking similarities. They use similar theatrical techniques to explore diasporic women's experiences and the vast variety of ways that women in the diaspora use diverse literary and artistic traditions to renegotiate their identities. As part of this negotiation, both plays portray women who subversively and self-reflexively reimagine women of the past, and both plays consistently emphasize the inauthenticity of these imagined pasts. Furthermore, the plays suggest that engaging with women of the past can be a catalyst for diasporic women to reexamine their own identities and desires in ways that challenge the intersection of oppressions that Black British and Asian American women face. Thus, this inauthenticity does not diminish the relevance of these women of the past to modern diasporic identities. To the contrary, it is precisely by foregrounding the inauthenticity of the women of the past that these plays reveal the complexities of the intersections of gender, diaspora, and sexuality. Drawing on Nira Yuval-Davis's work on diaspora and the politics of belonging and Katie King s work on the co-constitution of past and present, I argue that both plays exemplify the political potential of inauthentic reimaginings of women of the past. These plays reimagine women of the distant past in ways that undermine the desire for authenticity and direct access to history; in doing so, they offer a reconceptualization of the relationship between past and present that draws attention to, rather than erases, diasporic women's multiple identifications. Diasporic Identity as Textual Odyssey Moj of the Antarctic: An African Odyssey is a one-woman show in which the actor-playwright plays a character called Moj, named after the author herself. The play was first performed to strong reviews in November 2006 at the Lyric Hammersmith in London, directed by Sheron Wrey, and was later performed at the Oval House Theatre and Queer Up North, as well as on a British Council tour of Southern Africa, all with Adebayo as the solo performer. Moj begins the play as a slave in the antebellum American South, and then proceeds to take a series of journeys to various corners of the Atlantic Ocean in search of her freedom and, arguably, her identity. The lone performer also plays the roles of the characters Moj interacts with, as well as a griot character called The Ancient, who begins, ends, and comments on the play. Using multimedia and engaging audience participation, the play shows the experiences and resonances of its various shifting characters, all the while weaving into the dialogue quotes from Herman Melville, Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, Ernest Shackleton, John Milton, and many others. (1) Moj's narrative begins while she is working as a slave; she is tasked mostly with housekeeping, a position she obtained because she is also the daughter of the slave owner. Moj develops a loving but forbidden sexual relationship with another slave, a woman named May. May was illegally taught to read by a previous owner, and as their relationship develops, she teaches Moj to read and to love literature, thus spurring in Moj both intellectual and sexual awakenings. Moj proceeds to quote and occasionally mock the words of famous authors in her father's library and also to write erotic and romantic poems to May, interacting with literary traditions in ways that are often playful or even subversive. …

William Kuskin Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to ModernityRecursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity. William Kuskin. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xv+278.

<i>William Kuskin</i> Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity<i>Recursive Origins: Writing at the Transition to Modernity</i>. William Kuskin. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013. Pp. xv+278.

Yiddish endangerment as phenomenological reality and discursive strategy: Crossing into the past and crossing out the present

Yiddish has been spoken by millions of Ashkenazic Jews since approximately 1000 C.E. Over the past two centuries, the number of Yiddish speakers within secular Jewish “metalinguistic communities” has diminished while numbers in Hasidic Orthodox communities have been growing. Yiddish is therefore unique in the “endangered language” landscape, challenging prevalent classifications used to describe levels of language vitality. This article analyzes Yiddish “endangerment” as a phenomenological reality and a discursive strategy. Metalinguistic community members engage in ‘nostalgia socialization’, crossing temporal boundaries to connect with authorizing sources of past European Jewish communities; they create alliances with an imagined past while maintaining boundaries with a distant present. Yiddish therefore illuminates how languages are constructed through communities' experiences of loss, fragmentation, and recreation.

Domestic Gothic: Genre and Nation in Charlotte Smith's The Old Manor House

Abstract‘The Gothic novel’ is by no means a coherent entity, but it has its genesis in a turn to an imagined past. In considering late 18th‐century Gothic fiction, the impact of the broader historico‐political discourse surrounding the Gothic should be taken into account. Understanding this as a diverse and contested genre preoccupied with national history refocuses attention on a range of texts that are usually considered atypical of the Gothic, and turns a spotlight on novels that use Gothic tropes in domestic, British settings. It creates an especially rewarding approach to the fiction of Charlotte Smith, in which Gothic imagery is used to explore superstition, heritage and oppression in contemporary Britain. This article focuses on The Old Manor House (1793), arguing that to define the Gothic primarily in relation to Ann Radcliffe's novels of terror is to elide the other implications of the genre's key images, language and themes. In this novel, Smith uses several manifestations of the Gothic to create a sustained exploration of history and romance, of the mythmaking process that goes into the creation of personal and national identity, and to interrogate political systems of property and power.