Parmi les domaines du politique, l'imaginaire est un champ trop souvent négligé, alors qu'il est un élément essentiel de la construction des identités politiques et de la formation des consciences politiques. Cet ouvrage propose une analyse de l'imaginaire, considéré comme un principe d'explication du monde exprimé en particulier par les mythes et les idéologies. Les différentes significations de l'imaginaire politique s'inscrivent dans des engagements et dans des pratiques de pouvoir dont les spécificités historiques et culturelles contribuent à structurer les espaces publics. Pour tenter de comprendre l'imaginaire et de lui donner du sens, L'imaginaire politique présente des méthodes d'approche fondées sur la sémiotique et sur l'analyse des discours et des images des acteurs politiques et des médias. Il expose la place qu'occupent dans le débat public et dans les pratiques politiques l'utopie, la peur et les autres formes de l'imaginaire politique.

The present volume offers a contemporary, multicultural approach to the controversial relationship between politics, media and society. The contributors here analyse such links from a variety of different perspectives, and represent perspectives from various countries across Europe, Asia, North America and South America. Despite their geographical diversity, they manage to reach a common language in their studies, offering a re-positioning of the study of media, society and politics. The new perspectives offered by this volume will be of interest to any media studies scholar, because they bring to light new ideas, new methodologies and results that could be further developed. It allows readers to explore these unique insights, and to easily digest the content and acknowledge the impact of media on society and politics.

Explores conceptions of politics in early modern France, and the controversies the word 'politique' attracted during the Wars of Religion.

George L. Mosse (1918-99) was one of the most influential cultural and intellectual historians of modern Europe. A refugee from Nazi Germany, he was an early leader in the study of fascism and the history of sexuality and masculinity, authoring more than two dozen books. In ContemporaryEurope in the Historical Imagination, an international assembly of leading scholars explore Mosse's enduring methodologies in German studies and modern European cultural history. Considering Mosse's life and work historically and critically, the book begins with his intellectual biography and goes on to reread his writings in light of historical developments since his death, and to use, extend, and contend with Mosse's legacy in new contexts he may not have addressed or even foreseen. The volume wrestles with intertwined questions that continue to emerge from Mosse's pioneering research, including: What role do sexual and racial stereotypes play in European political culture before and after 1945? How are gender and Nazi violence bound together? And what does commemoration reveal about national culture? Importantly, the contributors pose questions that are inspired by Mosse's work but that he did not directly examine. For example, to what extent were Nazism and Italian Fascism colonial projects? How have popular radical right parties reinforced and reimagined ethnonationalism and nativism? And how did Nazi perpetrators construct a moral system that accommodated genocide? Much like Mosse's own work, the chapters in this book inspire new interventions into the history of gender and sexuality, Jewish identity during the rise of the Third Reich, and the many reincarnations of fascist pageantry and mass politics.

The figure of the dictator looms large in representations of postcolonial Africa. Since the late 1970s, writers, film-makers and theorists have sought to represent the realities of dictatorship without endorsing the colonialist cliches portraying Africans as incapable of self-government. Against the heavily-politicized responses provoked by this dilemma, Bishop argues for a form of criticism that places the complexity of the reader's or spectator's experiences at the heart of its investigations. Ranging across literature, film and political theory, this study calls for a reengagement with notions - often seen as unwelcome diversions from political questions - such as referentiality, genre and aesthetics. But rather than pit 'political' approaches against formal and aesthetic procedures, the author presents new insights into the interplay of the political and the aesthetic. Cecile Bishop is a Junior Research Fellow in French at Somerville College, Oxford.