counterimagination

English

Etymology

From counter- +‎ imagination.

Noun

counterimagination (countable and uncountable, plural counterimaginations)

1. An imagination that contradicts or opposes another imagination.
   • 2012, L. Modisane, South Africa's Renegade Reels, page 33:

     This preoccupation, it appears, was to challenge official constructions of blackness and to create oppositional or counterimaginations of black identity.

   • 2013, Jocey Quinn, Learning Communities and Imagined Social Capital:

     In order to forge networks with these strong women, and potentially make globalized links with them, at both a material and imagined level, first they must be taken out of the limited categories Western imagination (and Western academic disciplines) have cast them into, by a process of counterimagination.

   • 2019, Robert Donahoo, Marshall Bruce Gentry, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor, page 139:

     In the midst of their flirtation, the reader senses counterimaginations at work: the young men sing their evangelical hymns, “I've Got a Friend in Jesus” and “The Old Rugged Cross,” in response to which the young women literally chant the medieval Latin hymn “Tantum Ergo,” written by Aquinas.