ABSTRACT
Programs of organized, political violence have always been legitimized and sustained through complex imaginative geographies. This term—following Foucault (1970), Said (1978) and Gregory (1995)—denotes the ways in which imperialist societies tend to be constructed through normalizing, binary judgments about both foreign and colonized territories and the home spaces which sit at the heart of empire. Edward Said (1978, 2003), for example, argues that imaginative geographies were crucial in sustaining Orientalist treatments of the Arab world as Other among Western colonial powers. Such imaginative geographies, as Derek Gregory (2004: 18) puts it, work by “fold[ing] distance into difference through a series of spatializations.” They operate “by multiplying partitions and enclosures that serve to demarcate ‘the same’ from ‘the other.’” And, as “imaginations given substance,” or “architectures of emnity,” they do geopolitical work by designating the familiar space inhabited by a putative ‘us,’ and opposing it to unfamiliar geographies inhabited by the putative Other—the ‘them’ who become the target for military or colonial power (ibid.).
