Retrotyping and the Marketing of Nostalgia

Abstract

Nostalgia is a multifarious phenomenon. Although it is always in some manner a response to social and cultural change, and particularly to the increasing divergence between experience and expectation that has developed in the modern and late-modern periods, it becomes manifest in a wide range of forms, with the feelings, meanings and values associated with it being dependent on specific social and historical contexts. We have sketched out the general scope of these different kinds of nostalgia elsewhere, stressing the importance of distinguishing between them and showing how nostalgia may develop and be deployed as a source of creative renewal or critique of changed conditions within the present (Keightley and Pickering, 2012, chapters 4 and 5). In this chapter we want to move in an alternative direction to the reflexive applications of nostalgia and discuss what is involved in its commercial exploitation. While this is part of a broader commodification of the past, which any extended treatment would have to account for, we shall take just one specific example of it here in order to show, in close detail, precisely how nostalgic feelings and values can be manipulated for quite different ends and under quite different conditions from those which give rise to them in the first place. In identifying and understanding the precise mechanisms by which nostalgia is commercially exploited, we hope that this will help us, within the field of memory studies, to refine our use of nostalgia as a conceptual and analytical category.