The Return of Imagination

In the last decade or so, the word imagination has been coaxed out of exile and welcomed back into scholars’ vocabulary. Like its long-humiliated cousins sympathy, empathy, beauty, humanism, cosmopolitanism, and universalism, imagination is in the process of being exonerated for a long list of supposed crimes and credited with an equally long list of social and political capabilities. As early as 1994, Martha Nussbaum made an impassioned plea for a cosmopolitan education that would nurture in children their “capacity to recognize and respond to the human, above and beyond the claims of nation, religion, and even family” and help to create a society that “encourages us to make the imaginative leap into the life of the other.”¹ More than a dozen prominent scholars wrote responses to Nussbaum’s seminal essay “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” and most of them disagreed with her, often on the grounds that she overestimated the willingness of human beings to leap into the lives of distant others, much less to take responsibility for them.² Yet by the mid-2000s, cosmopolitanism had become a keyword in postcolonial studies, and so had imagination. Paul Gilroy’s After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (2004), Edward W. Said’s Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity (2005) and Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) all work to restore intellectual dignity and real-world political energy to the act of imagining other lives and minds, which we perform every time we have new conversations, read books, listen to music, watch movies, or in Said’s words, engage in “the practice of identities other than those given by the flag or the national war of the moment.”³

Like Said and Nussbaum, Gilroy and Appiah argue that practicing unfamiliar identities creates forms of self-estrangement in which “the strangeness of strangers goes out of focus and other dimensions of a basic sameness can be acknowledged and made significant.”⁴ In other words, the attempt to imagine others, either face-to-face or mediated by representations, disrupts and refocuses routine perception in a way that reveals the foreignness of the familiar and the intimacy of the strange and thus allows people to see the “basic sameness” that unites them. Imagining cleanses the eye. These arguments quite radically shifted the conversation about the ethics and potential of social imagining in a postcolonial and globalized world, but not everyone is convinced that imagination is capable of the labor assigned to it. In a short response to Nussbaum’s “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism” called “The Difficulty of Imagining Other People,” Elaine Scarry claims that people are far less imaginatively gifted than Nussbaum believes.⁵ What the history of social contracts shows, Scarry argues, is that people are very good at hurting one another and very bad at the kinds of “generous imaginings” that connect rather than divide (99). She writes: “There exists a circular relation between the infliction of pain and the problem of otherness. The difficulty of imagining others is both the cause of, and the problem displayed by, the action of injuring” (102). The inability to imagine strangers makes it possible to harm them, and once harmed, they become increasingly unimaginable. And so the cycle of injury spins.

Paul Gilroy raises a similar problem when he claims: “Racial difference obstructs empathy and makes ethnocentrism inescapable. It becomes impossible even to imagine what it is like to be somebody else” (70). If race thinking obstructs imagination, then Gilroy argues that we must find ways to change how we imagine, and that to do so, we must draw upon the resources of our own minds rather than the laws and policies of any state.⁶ But here, too, there are complications to consider. Imagination and empathy are not quite synonyms, but the two are often...