Normalising Nuclear War: Narrative Scenarios, Imaginative Geographies and Sites of Leisure in 1950s Britain

This chapter offers an interpretation of British regional civil defence activities in the 1950s. I argue that the persistent social impact of nationwide sociotechnical imaginaries of nuclear weapons cannot be fully understood without considering the localised social, geographical and discursive contexts in which civil defence was located and enacted. This chapter traces the ways in which a wider (officially maintained) sociotechnical imaginary appears to have been embedded in and intertwined with these localised contexts. After discussing the bespoke narrative scenarios created to frame civil defence exercises and offering analysis of their public representation, I focus on sites of leisure and forms of civic engagement linked to civil defence activity. Lastly, I turn to imaginative geographies to explore how sociotechnical imaginaries became localised in this era.

Constructing imaginative geographies in Genesis

This article considers Edward W. Said’s proposals on ‘imaginative geographies’ as suggested in his leading work Orientalism as a tool to analyse the ideological circumstances that shape geographical spaces in the Bible. My purpose is to discuss how these imaginative geographies are present in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis and how they have left their mark on the history of the interpretation of these texts and on the not always easy relations between members of the religious traditions inherited from the Bible (Hebrews, Muslims and Christians). I propose four types of ‘imaginative geographies’: (1) ‘Equalness’ is the way to represent what is considered as sharing the own identity. The geography of ‘Equalness’ defines the spaces of Isaac, Jacob and their families. (2) ‘Otherness’ is the way to represent the ‘Other’ as opposite or juxtaposed to one’s own identity. A common border is shared, thus kinship relationships can be established. It defines the spaces of Ishmael, Esau/Edom, Lot (Ammon and Moab) and Laban. (3) ‘Foreignness’ is the way to define what is strange, odd or exotic considered as external to the own identity, in a space set beyond even the space of the ‘Other’. Egypt is in Genesis a land of ‘Foreignness’. (4) ‘Delendness’ encompasses whatever claims our same space and therefore threatens our survival and must be destroyed (delendum). As such, processes of annihilation and dominion of Israel on Canaanites and Sichemites are justified.Contribution: The article applies Said’s ‘imaginative geographies’ as an identity mechanism for the creation of biblical literary spaces. A quadripartite classification (‘Equal’/‘Other’/‘Foreigner’/‘Delendum’) instead of the usual bipartite one (‘Equal’ vs. ‘Other’) is proposed and the consequences for the current coexistence between religious identities inherited from Abraham are shown.

What Is Moroccan Literature? History of an Object in Motion

What is Moroccan literature, where and when does it happen, and in what languages? In this essay, we tackle these questions by tracing the evolution of the definition of “Moroccan literature” from the first half of the twentieth century until the present. The earliest works of Moroccan literary historiography, such as ʿAbd Allah Kannūn’s al-Nubūgh al-maghribī fī al-adab al-ʿarabī (1937), situated Moroccan literature within the Arabic literary tradition and treated Moroccan literature as an important element in the “Arab-Islamic” identity promoted by the Moroccan nationalist movement. Since Moroccan independence in 1956, this definition of Moroccan literature has come under increasing pressure, as the languages and imaginative geographies of Moroccan literature have expanded to include new voices. In what follows, we consider these debates through a survey of a diverse corpus of literary-historical works that throw into question the linguistic, temporal, and spatial borders of Moroccan literature (and of Morocco itself).

Construction of Imagined Geographies Through Law: The Case of Judaization of the Negev Desert

This article draws on the postcolonial legal theories and the concept of imaginative geographies, aiming to shed light on the process of producing and realizing Israeli representations of the Negev Desert through the implementation of legal regulations. The focus is on chosen imaginations of the Negev Desert, researched here as a case study of material realisation of imaginative geographies. In the analysis, symbolic narratives, visions of spaces, and new categories, intertwined in legal acts as their foundations, justifications and goals are underlined. The conclusions of presented study show that imaginations and visions can be in fact reproduced in space through legal regulations, and in the analysed case law has three aspects: it is an expression of imagined geographies; it translates those visions into technical terms; and lastly, the implementation of its provisions becomes the main instrument of producing those representations in reality.