Counterimagination

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

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.

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.