counterimagination

noun

An imagination that contradicts or opposes another imagination.

Scrabble 23

Meanings

nouncounterimagination (countable and uncountable, plural counterimaginations)

plural counterimaginations

  1. countableuncountableAn imagination that contradicts or opposes another imagination.

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

    2012, L. Modisane, South Africa's Renegade Reels, page 33
    2 more examples

    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.

    2013, Jocey Quinn, Learning Communities and Imagined Social Capital

    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.

    2019, Robert Donahoo, Marshall Bruce Gentry, Approaches to Teaching the Works of Flannery O'Connor, page 139

Origin

Cite this entry
APA

counterimagination. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 3, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/counterimagination

MLA

“counterimagination.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/counterimagination. Accessed November 3, 2026.

Chicago

WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “counterimagination,” accessed November 3, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/counterimagination.

Source: counterimagination on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.