The Colonization of the Imagination

We commonly encounter phrases such as the ‘colonization of the imagination’ that seem to describe the ways by which discursive formations such as modernity, education, or development have come to be dominant interpretive grids in public consciousness. In their edited work Decolonization of Imagination: Culture, Knowledge and Power, for example, Pieterse and Parekh (1995) set out to explore the relationship between power and culture, domination and the imaginary, in the context of colonialism and its legacy. Work of this sort reflects notions of the social imaginary in the tradition of Castoriadis and Taylor, as discussed in the introduction of this collection. Here ‘shared mental life’ (Strauss 2006: 332) has come to be dominated by colonial imagery so that it requires purposeful intellectual activity to escape from these ways of imagining the world.

This idiom raises a number of questions, in particular, what were the means, methods and techniques by which imagination was ‘colonized.’ In the case of the multifold and ramifying notion of modernity, renderings of which have so powerfully influenced imagination throughout the globe, it is clear that it has not been through text and speech alone that this colonization has taken place. The transformation was also the result of the imaginative effects and possibilities generated by myriad objects, procedures and technologies. The wide range of instruments by which the notion of modernity came to dominate our representations of the world included the new experiences made possible by the industrial and scientific revolutions. In his Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt (1999), for example, James Ferguson examines Zambian experiences of disillusionment as the promise of industrial development evaporated; in doing so he reveals the importance of the urban lifestyles and environments generated by mid-twentieth-century industrialization for cosmological formation and transformation.

Mongolia also experienced the rapid growth of industrial and urban lifestyles in the second half of the twentieth century. After the Soviet-backed Mongolian People's Revolutionary Party (MPRP) took control of Outer Mongolia in the 1920s, the newly independent nation received the Leninist variant of modernism and set about installing all the trappings of the Soviet vision of the nation-state. Urbanization was rapid.