Imagination is where the Contest Lies for a Better World
National identity and imagination are one in the same
Today’s attacks on higher education are directly connected to the assaults of Civil Rights. At base, the desire to control institutions like higher education and print media stems from the same desire to control who ‘counts’ as a citizen and who does not. The phenomena of identifying who belongs and who does not—whether speaking of higher education institutions or in a country—is the practice of border-management to include and exclude. That border-management is the practice of nation-definition and building through imaginations and subsequently actions and policies.
The role the imagination plays should not be minimized. Edward Said’s major point in Orientalism is that the Western world imagined the East in a way that was totally divorced from reality, but that dictated policy for over two centuries. Likewise, from “The Declaration of Independence’s” first line that America is ‘dedicated to a proposition,’ to “The Gettysburg Address’” proclamation that the nation was conceived in liberty to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream,” those at the forefront of political movements have inspired cultural imagination to manifest new realities. But even more so, King believed in America as a concept—a vision that had not yet manifest in reality. “When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” His consternation, like many of ours, was that the disconnect between what was promised and the urgency on delivering on that promise was too great to reconcile with rhetoric of the current moment.
King was right to illustrate that struggles for justice are struggles for the imagination. For the imagination and justice permeate the nation’s approach to democracy requires activation of those whose complacency is a form of power—the moderate who is not inclined to act because they are comfortable. When Dr. King Jr. wrote that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” he was stating the need for those who are complacent to become activated. Rapper Chuck D observed that for such activation to occur requires the imagination to be jump-started: “minds are the real estate of the 21st century.” Both understood that the battle for belonging involves both policy and imagination—how we understand our past, present, and future.
The intersection of nationhood and imagination has been theorized by some of the foremost scholars on national identity. Two of the most helpful thinkers about how a collective imagination creates perceived groups out of individuals and subsequently imagined nations are Benedict Anderson and Ernest Gellner. In “Imagined Communities,” Anderson claims that the increase in intensity of print culture from the mid- to late 1800s, allowed “people to think about themselves, and to relate to others in profoundly new ways” through the imagination.[1] This leads him to define nations not as lands with borders and policies and politicians, but as ‘imagined communities.’ Herein, Anderson illustrates the importance of media culture in how people consider themselves as part of a nation. He also underscores the importance of human imagination in establishing nations.
Similarly, Gellner believes that a division of labor allows print and media to be owned by an elite, who then create that same material in their own image and from their own perspective; they thereby manifest a national identity in limited and power-based fashion. The division of labor, that is, establishes a specific people, usually in racially homogenous terms, as the elite representatives of the nation-state.
In sum, there is no political sphere that is separate from the educational sphere—there are actors attempting to shape meaning and using their different powers of thought, finance, and media to do so; and in so doing they construct an imagined nation, one that will reflect contemporary versions of what an elite identity is. Often this reflection of an elite identity is not sinister in motive, but does have sinister outcomes. Hence, this elite identity plays a role in creating and being created by past, present, and future contestations for what can be considered ‘a’ national identity. For “[t]he basic deception and self-deception practiced by nationalism is this: nationalism is, essentially, the general imposition of a high culture on society.”[2]
Today, in 2026, there is not such an inspirational call so much as a cultural malaise and assumed futility when the future of social justice in America is considered. However, that malaise does not have to remain. There are visions for a more socially just future. Those visions need only a toolbox with which to unpack how politics, funding, cultural mindset, and higher education work to maintain the status quo or disrupt it. We can create that anew.
[1] Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities.” In Nationalism, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, 90-91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.
[2] Ernest Gellner. “Nationalism and Modernization.” In Nationalism, edited by John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, 90-91. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994.