Messy moods: Nostalgia and other nagging feelings in Oscar Hijuelos's The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

Abstract

Critics tend to dismiss nostalgia as a “bad” form of feeling: its turn to the past is perceived as a disengagement from the present and as indicative of a generally uncritical or, worse, conservative stance. I show how Oscar Hijuelos's novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love puts pressure on critics’ reading of Cuban American nostalgia as a feeling that tells us how Cuban immigrants negotiate their past, but appears to say little about their present reality in the United States. Instead, The Mambo Kings suggests how nostalgia is tied to the specific context of Cuban American lives in the United States and the real and imaginary spaces assigned to them there. I maintain it needs to be apprehended in close relation to other structures of feelings, including the “ugly” feeling of racialized animatedness in the United States. Recognizing nostalgia's significance does not warrant a disengagement from how it relates to specific racial, political, sexual, class and gender formations – something for which Oscar Hijuelos's novel rightly has been faulted.