Magia Politica: Imagination in Contemporary Politics

In the theorization of Political Science, imagination has always been a segue to grasping different political constructs and yet rarely in the history of the field, is imagination developed or defined as an actual methodology. The state-of-art of imagination in Political Science provides an explanation to the development of modern historiographical knowledge, nationalism, and the modern social order respectively, and yet, nowhere in these texts do the authors provide a succinct definition of what imagination is. Through a multidisciplinary analysis of how politics is formed, I expand on the application of imagination as an epistemological method first by explaining how the term has been ephemerally mentioned in the political development of the social imaginary, proposing a definition of imagination that can be applied to a post-modern understanding of politics, and finally by analyzing two objects of study, the musical group Cuervo Mitotero y Los Traficantes de Folk and the dance company México de Colores which use imagination to visualize counter-current identities and narratives within the contemporary socio-political imaginary.