A Globalectical Imagination
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o Imagination is the most central formative agency in human society. An architect visualizes a building before he captures it on paper for the builder. Without imagination, we cannot visualize the past or the future. Religions would be impossible for how would one visualize deities except through imagination? It’s because we can imagine different futures that we can struggle against the present state of things. The arts and the imagination are dialectically linked. Imagination makes possible the arts. The arts feed the imagination in the same way that food nourishes the body and ethics the soul. The writer, the singer, the sculptor, the artist in general, symbolizes and speaks to the power of imagination to intimate possibilities even within apparently impossible situations. That is why, time and again, the state tries to imprison the artist symbolically and in reality limit the space of imagination of a society. Every imperial state has always wanted its citizenry to embrace the Leibnizian optimism: Why fret? We have the best of all possible worlds. Imagination is no respecter of boundaries of time and space. But the state can attempt to limit by killing, detaining, and exiling the artist, or by censorship. But the State is not the only force that can restrict the operation of imagination and the healthy consumption of the products of imagination. There are other ways of arresting the imagination or rather the full impact of its products. These need not be obviously political or intentionally aimed at such restrictions. The most common of these ways, and of which we may all be guilty from time to time, is putting the products of imagination in the prison house of a narrow view of the world or rather in the prison house of reading. This can manifest itself in the reading of any text, but it is often seen in the organization and reading of literatures, in the imperial tradition of the colonizer and colonized. Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 |
Essays in this Forum
Break out of the Prison House of Hierarchy!
by Mukoma Wa Ngugi A Globalectical Imagination by Ngugi wa Thiong'o World Literature and the Postcolonial: Ngugi's Globalectics and Glissant's Poetics by Duncan McEachern Yoon “You Are the Prisoner, the Discoverer, the Founder, the Liberator”: Contextualizing Decolonial Paths of Afro-Hispanic Literature in Latin America, Equatorial Guinea and Spain by Elisa Rizo Globalectics Beyond Postcoloniality by Carole Boyce Davies |