What is called the imagination (from image, magi, magic, magician, etc.) is a practical vector from the soul. It stores all data, and can be called on to solve all our “problems.” The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as “things.” Imagination (image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image’s use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

—Amiri Baraka, “The Revolutionary Theatre”, Liberator, July 1965

Sarah Blackwood

Niki Kekos
June 3, 2019

Sarah Blackwood is Associate Professor of English at Pace University and author of *The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States* (UNC Press). Her essays and criticism have appeared in American Literature and MELUS as well as The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Pace University, Associate Professor