Abstract
In the more than three decades since Anderson’s influential study appeared, the discourses and social restructuring associated with neoliberal globalization have assaulted the vision of the coherent nation-states that is so crucial to Imagined Communities. Many discussants have debated the thesis that national sovereignty has been eroded in favor of global ‘flows,’ scouring literary, filmic, and other representational works for figures that express a global imaginary. While this quest for emergent geopolitical aesthetics often stimulates vital readings of the structure and effects of social units larger than the nation-state, the accelerated and futurological tendencies of such mapping projects sometimes also obscure an inverse tendency— the revival of certain medieval figures that provide another sort of friction with a nation-state imaginary.