Professional Documents
Culture Documents
INTRODUCTION
INTERN ATIO N AL
journal of
CULTURAL studies
Re-imagining communities
for what we already do (or do not do); what we must do (or not do); or
what we must retain (or give up).
The articles collected in this Special Issue are primarily concerned with
interrogating community by posing community as a question rather than
a solution. How are some communities imagined as more desirable than
others? Which communities survive and which do not? How are communi-
ties an effect of power or of the claiming of spaces by some bodies and not
others? The articles were all first presented at a conference on Re-Imagin-
ing Communities, held at the Institute for Womens Studies, Lancaster
University, in May 2002. The conference was characterized by a critical and
generous debate one that was inspired both by a shared recognition that
the question of community does matter, but also by a lack of consensus
about what it is that is promised by community. Clearly, the question of
community has cropped up in many different disciplines: in philosophical
debates about ethics, in political debates about citizenship and rights, in
anthropological debates about new forms of kinship and in sociological
debates about the impact of social changes on experiences of community
life. The question of community has also been crucial to diverse political
movements and theoretical frameworks: feminist, queer, black, postcolonial
and indigenous practices and theories have critically reanimated what it is
that community might mean for those who are already recognized as
others. In this issue, we aim to create a space in which the different kinds
of work that are being done on the question of communities can be brought
together. This is not to say that there are distinct areas of work that should
now speak to each other, as if they hadnt before; rather, the question of
communities has cropped up in different places, but not in the same way,
and to track the unevenness of its appearance may be an instructive way of
thinking about the work that the word communities does, as well as what
it could do, in the work that we do.
The contexts that have affected the editing of this Special Issue are not
simply academic, but also worldly; the questions raised at the conference
and in this issue respond to the times and are timely. Recent appeals to
community, although not new, are deeply implicated in political projects
that may reshape the very world in which we live. In Britain, for example,
much emphasis is put on the promise of community within public policies
and popular debates about the forging of a new Britain for the 21st
century. The narrative of community cohesion that is exercised here is a
familiar one; the community promises to deliver modes of being together
and having together that are grounded in sameness, reciprocity, mutual
responsibility and a form of mutual connectedness and attachment. We
might note that such a narrative is not specific to the UK. The promise of
dialogue its good to talk functions as a guarantee to produce
community, which in turn is represented as the solution to dispersal, disaf-
fection and marginalization. This community is a moral community, a
References