Marginalized groups require imaginary re-territorialization before they can mobilize against exclusion

Evidence

This is an enormous act of what I want to call imaginary political reidentification, reterritorialization and reidentification, without which a counterpolitics could not have been constructed. I do not know an example of any group or category of the people of the margins, of the locals, who have been able to mobilize themselves socially, culturally, economically, and politically in the past twenty or twenty-five years who have not gone through some such series of moments in order to resist their exclusion, their marginalization. That is how and where the margins begin to speak. The margins begin to contest, and the locals begin to come to representation. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 228

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘imaginary political reidentification, reterritorialization’ — a core mechanism in the identity-politics vocabulary.
• XREF: The claim that counterpolitics depends on an imaginary re-grounding parallels orientalist/decolonial accounts of how colonized subjects must first reclaim narrative before political contestation. — connects to: Real inclusion in coalitions paradoxically requires marginalized groups to have separate space. — Michelle I. Gawerc, Coalition-building and the forging of…, 204; Marginalized scholars must accept powerful groups border-crossing into their terrain despite real risks.