Beyond Imaginary Geographies: Critique, Cooptation and Imagination in the Aftermath of The War On Terror

This paper considers the question of what it might mean to resist the ‘imaginative geographies’ of the War on Terror through a reading of the bestselling novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid (2007). Reading this novel against the claim that we are now at the ‘end’ of the War on Terror, the paper engages with how we might move beyond what Derek Gregory described as the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘civilization’ and ‘barbarism’ that represent the violent return of the colonial past (2004). The paper argues that critical attempts at resisting the imaginative geographies of the War on Terror, such as we find in this particular novel, often assume and reproduce an understanding of time as linear and progressive, the idea of time which Gregory points out makes these imaginative geographies possible. The paper argues that this becomes problematic when critical interventions risk reproducing the very understanding of political life that they set out to confront. Whilst it is an important political move to reveal the imaginative geographies at work in the War on Terror, the paper suggests that this approach also risks operating by confirming to a critical readership that which it already thought it knew. We are too easily led to the conclusion that what is needed is better representations of ‘others’ in the world, as just as enlightened, cultured, reasoned as ‘us’. The contention of this paper is that such critical responses fail to do anything to disrupt or trouble the split geographies of ‘us’ and ‘them’; rather, they keep them firmly in place and entrench them further. The paper argues that we need to revisit and unsettle the concept of imagination at work in the idea of ‘imaginative geographies’ to explore a way of thinking co-existence in world politics that cannot be understood within a unifying temporal framework. It is suggested that despite the closures identified in this novel, postcolonial urban literatures also provide many openings for thinking the ‘possibility that the field of the political is constitutively not singular’ (Chakrabarty, 2000, page 148)

Asymmetric Dimethylarginine, Endothelial Nitric Oxide Bioavailability and Mortality in Sepsis

Background: Plasma concentrations of asymmetric dimethylarginine (ADMA), an endogenous inhibitor of nitric oxidesynthase, are raised in patients with chronic vascular disease, causing increased cardiovascular risk and endothelialdysfunction, but the role of ADMA in acute inflammatory states is less well defined.Methods and Results: In a prospective longitudinal study in 67 patients with acute sepsis and 31 controls, digitalmicrovascular reactivity was measured by peripheral arterial tonometry and blood was collected at baseline and 2–4 dayslater. Plasma ADMA and L-arginine concentrations were determined by high performance liquid chromatography. Baselineplasma L-arginine: ADMA ratio was significantly lower in sepsis patients (median [IQR] 63 [45–103]) than in hospital controls(143 [123–166], p,0.0001) and correlated with microvascular reactivity (r = 0.34, R2 = 0.12, p = 0.02). Baseline plasma ADMAwas independently associated with 28-day mortality (Odds ratio [95% CI] for death in those in the highest quartile($0.66 mmol/L) = 20.8 [2.2–195.0], p = 0.008), and was independently correlated with severity of organ failure. Increase inADMA over time correlated with increase in organ failure and decrease in microvascular reactivity.Conclusions: Impaired endothelial and microvascular function due to decreased endothelial NO bioavailability is a potentialmechanism linking increased plasma ADMA with organ failure and death in sepsis

The dis/comfort of white British nationhood: encounters, otherness and postcolonial continuities

Recent work on the affective dimensions of nationhood, identity and belonging has often overlooked discomfort in favour of positive experiences of sameness and security. Contrary to this tendency, this paper, based on interview narratives produced with white British middle-class people in the suburbs of London, examines the role of discomfort in experiences of nationhood, as well as the nature and meaning of that discomfort. In the first part of thepaper, I demonstrate how nationhood becomes in and through uncomfortable encounters with other people, places and objects. Then, in the second part, I show how, for some, the experience of becoming national in encounters with the ‘other’ is itself experienced uncomfortably in the context of a postcolonial Britain where people are expected to ‘love themselves as different’. On the one hand, the paper challenges the idea of privileged national belonging as wholly comfortable. Yet, the analysis also exposes the relative comfort of white British people’s nationhood. The paper offers important insight into the uneven and hierarchical nature of contemporary nationhood and highlights the value of attending to the entanglement of comfort and discomfort in work on affective nationalism

Citizenship without community: time, design and the city

This article engages with the concept of design as a way of re-working the standard understanding of citizenship as what takes place within a political community. In doing so, the paper draws on recent attempts to rethink citizenship as ‘acts’ rather than status (Isin & Nielsen, 2008) and seeks to bring that work together with attempts at reimagining community as ‘encounters’ and ‘confrontations’ rather than that which is contained within a bounded space (Nancy, 1991, 2003). Specifically, the paper argues for an approach that is attentive to ideas of time and seeks to open up an idea of community that avoids the requirement of commonality. Using a focus on citizenship as a temporal phenomenon, the article suggests that designers have engaged with ideas of time as multiple, fragmented and splintered, and that these form useful material for reworking ideas of community beyond something that can be calculated. The article offers a study of two sites of memory drawn from the city of Berlin, Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenmann’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and an art installation by the artist Gustav Metzger called ‘Flailing Trees’, exhibited at the Manchester International Festival of 2009. Gathering material offered by these designs, and a tradition of writing the city as a splintered social space, the article explores the different forms of community that circulate and are instantiated at these ‘sites of memory’ and argues for an understanding of community without unity

The persistence of nationalism: from imagined communities to urban encounters

This is a book about the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism. The book offers a detailed study of how contemporary attempts by theorists of cosmopolitanism, citizenship, globalism and multiculturalism to go beyond nationalism often reproduce key aspects of a nationalist imaginary. It argues that the challenge of resisting nationalism will require more than a shift in the scale of politics – from the national up to the global or down to the local, and more than a shift in the count of politics – to an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. In order to avoid the grip of ‘nationalist thinking’, we need to re-open the question of what it means to imagine community. Set against the backdrop of the imaginative geographies of the War in Terror and the new beginning promised by the Presidency of Barack Obama, the book shows how critical interventions often work in collaboration with nationalist politics, even when the aim is to resist nationalism. It claims that a nationalist imaginary includes powerful understandings of freedom, subjectivity, sovereignty and political space/time which must also be placed under question if we want to avoid reproducing ideas about ‘us’ and ‘them’. Drawing on insights from feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as critical approaches to International Relations and Geography, this book presents a unique and refreshing approach to the politics of nationalism

Weighing heavily in-between

Responses to images by Angus Boulton

Politics through a web: citizenship and community unbound

What happens to citizenship when the nation and the state are no longer assumed to be the inevitable starting points from which politics is defined? This paper considers how a refusal of the nation as political community and a questioning of the state as guarantor of rights and responsibilities reconfigure our understandings of citizenship. We do this by taking as a metaphor and analytical entry point an art installation developed by artist Tomás Saraceno titled 14 Billions (Working Title). Forming an exaggerated version of a black widow spider’s web, this installation offers us a way of engaging politics in relational terms. Inspired by this installation, we ask: how are the categories of citizenship and community troubled or reconfigured when we address sociality and politics from a relational perspective? In which ways does 14 Billions prompt us to address questions of spatiality, power, coexistence, and contestation differently from those accounts of citizenship that remain wedded to the state as a contained geographical unit and to the nation as an imaginary of political community? And finally, how might this web installation suggest an intervention into the broader problematic of ‘citizenship without community’ that forms the focus of this theme issue? We address these questions by way of an engagement with the ‘lines’, ‘gaps’, and ‘tension points’ presented by 14 Billions and argue that an understanding of citizenship as based upon membership appears inadequate when we address politics through a web. In so doing, we contend that the provocation of citizenship without community presents a challenge that does not simply demand a shift from the nation to the state or the reaffirmation of a rights-bearing subject; rather, this provocation leads us to argue that politics involves more than a search for inclusion and recognition, whilst the web installation offers us a way in to thinking about politics through heterogeneous sites and moments of encounter