Consumed Nostalgia: Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism

Abstract

“Why is our novelty culture,” Gary Cross asks, “so fixed on memory?” (p. 2). Drawing on numerous telling episodes, anecdotes, and examples, this breezily written book attempts to provide an answer by combining historical methods, including textual and social analysis, with a wide range of evidence gained through his personal encounters with collectors, workers in the heritage industry, hot-rod aficionados, and more. Cross views a boom in “consumed nostalgia” as the most characteristic form of personal memory over the last half century. An increasingly fast-paced capitalism, Cross argues, has fueled and accelerated a plethora of changes since World War II. This maelstrom of transformation has led individuals to focus on the fleeting here and now while simultaneously producing forgetfulness through celebrations of innovation that blocks the emergence of a stable sense of history. In a highly individualized, increasingly fragmented, and ever-shifting society, personal nostalgia, Cross continues, provides an antidote to the pressures of a modernity in which many people feel adrift. He labels the variant of personal memory that the United States has generated under these circumstances as “consumed nostalgia” not just because it manifests itself via the purchase, collection, possession, restoration, and sale of commodities; a succession of nostalgia waves have also been intimately linked to corporate interests that have proven very savvy at simultaneously stoking and commercially exploiting the widespread sense of historical dislocation.