Arjun Appadurai‘s considerations on the work of imagination in modern societies are some of the most interesting and compelling passages of his book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. According to the anthropologist “imagination has broken out of the special expressive space of art, myth, and ritual and has now become a part of the quotidian mental work of ordinary people in many societies”.
Appadurai focuses in particular on collective imagination, as a tool to create diasporic public spheres through which globalized and often deterritorialized citizens share the same social imaginary.
As an Indian-born American academic, the scholar has been experiencing first-hand what it means to deterritorialize one’s ethnic and cultural background on a different context, and his particular case could be a perfect example of fulfilled American dream. But again the collective, massive dimension of imagination-induced agency is what really makes the difference in comparison to more ancient times: “the images, scripts, models and narratives that come through mass-mediation [...] make the difference between migration today and in the past”. Also, the American dream is all-too-real in our globalized times, and more in general “these new mythographies are charters to new social projects, and not just a counterpoint to the certainties of daily life”.
But migration to a richer country is not the only inherent phenomenon to the rise of imagination as a social practice, and the examples that Appadurai makes are not all positive. There are diasporas of hope, terror, despair.
In support of his thesis that modernity hasn’t seen a total victory of science over religion, as foretold by German scholars such as the Frankfurt school and Max Weber, he mentions Khomeini and the infamous outrage surrounding Salman Rushdie‘s Satanic Verses in the muslim world. We could easily add Al Quaeda and the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy as other instances of diasporic rage, but what’s important here is the relationship between media and social imaginary.

Relying on Benedict Anderson‘s notion of “imagined community” (or, as he calls them himself, “community of sentiment”), which can also be built by printed or electronic media, Appadurai explains that “global processes involving mobile texts and migrant audiences create implosive events that fold global pressures into small, already politicized arenas, producing locality in new, globalized ways”.
Such locality can be generated through different feelings or actions (resistance, irony, selectivity), but they are all rooted in collective imagination. Even more importantly – and even more so with electronic media – diasporic public spheres make agency transnational, going beyond nation-states. The micronarratives of media in fact “domesticate the megarhetoric of delelopmental modernization, [...] allowing modernity to be rewritten more as a vernacular globalization and less as a concession to large-scale national and international policies”.
In other words, imagination is an important factor in globalization and should not be underestimated, most importantly because of its implications in the process of identity-building.

At this point I would like to step back from Appadurai’s analysis of modernity and collective emancipation via the manufacturing of common myths, approaching a different dynamic (or, as we might better phrase it, a dysfuncion) of the imaginary.
The examples made so far are all “imagined communities” or “communities of sentiment” to the extent that they project each individual as a member of the specific community, and at the same time the sum of all the members as a sort of projected community. There is not only the profile of the individual members, each of whom has something in common with all the others, but there is also a collective profile of the community itself, a sort of imaginary, sometimes fabricated macro-individual who often has a particular spokesperson or underlying principles constituting its foundation. To use a rather extreme example, we might say the “Al Quaeda Project” is the destruction of the Western paradigm as an ideal, and such purpose can be considered as a “vertical” parameter to measure how well their own “modernism” (cause) is going. Also, said purpose defines the group itself.
We might make less extreme examples of separatist movements or diaporic nations, but the important thing to point out here is that imagined communities are often defined by a “vertical” purpose, a direction in which to tend. There are some exceptions though, some communities that are indeed children to a globalized imaginary, but at the same time lack that verticality, the urgence to define the group as a primary need.
A good example of this second kind of imagined communities are street gangs.

As pointed out by one of the gangsters interviewed by Stacy Peralta in his very insightful documentary Bloods and Crips: Made in America, gangs began to gain power in Los Angeles after the Black Panther Party disbanded. But while the emancipation of African-Americans was the primary goal for the party, the Crips and the Bloods soon began to kill each other for turf. Instead of a “vertical”, “modern”, emancipatory goal, gangs had a more “horizontal”, “postmodern” (or maybe we should just say “short-sighted”) focus. A gang and its color may constitute a community, but a red or a blue bandana doesn’t have any other claim than its self-evident difference from another equivalent rag. By defining their communal identity mainly on an arbitrary parameter such as a color, gangs like the Bloods and Crips gave up the emancipatory plan that made the Black Panthers an imagined community with a direction.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tXHLQSmIpI&hl=it_IT&fs=1&]

Interestingly enough, despite the lack of a focused social and ethnic drive to better community life, the style, signs and colors of LA gangs have been channelled by the media (like films and hip hop music) and have fascinated youth worldwide. Nowadays sets of Crips and Bloods are known to be present even in Holland, where apparently the members are of Surinamese origin. This is pretty significant: being Suriname a former Dutch colony, Surinamese-Dutch Crips are experiencing a double deterritorialization.
Despite the worldwide diffusion of the LA gang imaginary, its heaviest effects are probably felt in Central America. In El Salvador, two LA-born gangs have been slaughtering each other ferociously for years now, all because of different signs and numbers tattoed on their bodies. Signs and numbers that have been decided many miles and checkpoints away: la Dieciocho derives from LA’s 18th Street Gang, while MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) was also founded in the City of Angels, but its most characteristic sign, the devil’s horns, was inspired by heavy metal music.
These gangs, now widespread in Salvador, were imported as a sort of franchise: some Salvadorians migrated to the States, wound up being gang members, were deported back to Salvador. Then they recruited more people to go back to the US, only to be deported again. This cycle of deportations has actually fueled the gang phenomenon in El Salvador, while it hasn’t really made the situation North of the border any better: the maras are spreading across the whole North American territory regardless of how many gangsters are sent back, and the process is making the drug trafficking network tighter.
The Salvadorian examples are particularily moving, as they show the way fascination for a globalized imaginary of violence can become all-too-real, even beyond borders, and give way to a bloodshed comparable only to a civil war (to learn more on those gangs you should watch the movie Sin nombre (2009), and deceased Christian Poveda‘s La Vida Loca).

As we have seen, Arjun Appadurai’s notion of imagination as a social practice can be applied to very different phenomena, but we should make the due differences between imagined communities with an identifying direction (be it constructive or disruptive) and the ones who share mainly an aesthetic code and economic interests. If the first ones represent a way to claim agency through the interface of social imaginary, the second constitute a more ambiguous and politically segregated alternative.