ABSTRACT
Imaginative geographies are like gravity's rainbows. They map the twists and turns of engagements and estrangement. Robert Cooper hesitates over the place of the United States in his geographical imaginary, the rupture between America and "old Europe" over the war in Iraq makes his reluctance all the more revealing, but Elias Sanbar makes no bones about saying that "globalization is in the process of transforming everywhere into a domestic American space". Imaginative geographies are thus doubled spaces of articulation. Their inconstant topologies are mappings of connective dissonance in which connections are elaborated in some registers even as they are disavowed in others. Borders are not only lines on maps but spacings dispersed across multiple sites, embassies, airports, detention centers - that radically contort conventional mappings of territory. Even hybrid "borderlands" bear the scar tissue of those boundaries.
