Political Imagination: Making Discipline Personal

• In Event: Poster Session: Foundations of Political Theory I

Abstract

The paper asks, how do unjust and unequal political communities maintain their structures of hierarchical power? It turns to Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Benedict Anderson to argue that power and imagination are related and co-constitutive. The paper argues that political imagination is related to power because it is a tool by which power becomes personal. Imaginative practices personalize a structural, systemic power dynamic, often one that is unequal or dominating.
The paper is anchored in the historical examples of race relations in the US. By turning to scholars of race, the paper traces how practices that involve the imagination keep in place a system of racial domination. Following Joel Olson, race can function as a disciplinary power and political imagination works to sustain an unequal racial order.
The paper puts forth an account of political imagination as iterative, intersubjective, and anchored in material objects and everyday practices. Understanding political imagination this way gives attention to the ways that dominated groups experience their political worlds and the ways that exclusive and unjust political orders are sustained by everyday practices. The stakes of this project are to creolize political theory and to gain tools for achieving justice.

Author

• Gauri Wagle, Royal Holloway University of London