Nostalgic Narratives Research Articles

Memories of Action: Tracing Film Society Cinephilia in India

The inception stories of early film societies in India from the 1940s to the 1960s reveal how these groups initiated an access to international, art and alternative cinemas through a network of circulation and exhibition created separately from mainstream cinema markets thereby forming a parallel network of societies, foreign consulates, embassies, government institutions and the National Film Archive of India (NFAI). This paper navigates the early history and memories of film societies in an attempt to map the cinephiliac energy of the film society movement through their erstwhile network of film travel. Using experiences, criticism and narratives of nostalgia published in film society journals, this paper reimagines the routes traversed by art cinemas and their cinephiles, enumerating specific activities around the film object. Observing urban film societies where film society cultures were initially conceptualized, thrived and whose histories are relatively renowned but also traces some significant small town societies which made the most of these circuits of film travel reaching out to non-metropolitan centers effectively transforming backyards into screening spaces and widening the scope of community participation around art cinemas.

‘As If There Was No Fear’: Exploring Nostalgic Narrative in Bo Carpelan’s Novel Berg

This article addresses nostalgic experience and aims at a definition of nostalgic narrative through textual analysis. The target text is Bo Carpelan’s Berg (2005). The novel is analysed with narratological methods focusing on the narrative modes and the techniques of narrative mediation that invite a nostalgic experience in the reader. This side of the phenomenon—the textual aesthetics of nostalgia—has been explored by few scholars, whereas the contextual and cultural aspects of nostalgia have received a lot of attention. This article suggests further ways of analysing how a text evokes nostalgic experience, and thus considers the nostalgic experience of the reader as the definitive core of nostalgic narrative. The nostalgic experience in Berg is intense, reflective, and ambivalent. These qualities are produced on the level of both the narrative discourse and the story: by changes between the narrative modes and by the nostalgic and non-nostalgic content that builds and breaks the idealised narrative. The article suggests that more attention should be paid to the complexity of nostalgic narratives. Furthermore, it highlights that by creating reflectivity and contradictions, the non-nostalgic content also affects the nostalgic narrative.

Mitigating Disaster: The Aral Sea and (Post-)Soviet Property

Abstract The Aral Sea regression, the outcome of Soviet irrigation practices in Central Asia, is famous as one of the most serious ecological disasters of the twentieth century. This article examines Soviet policies to mitigate the sea's regression, in particular efforts to keep people in employment. I argue that property relations are intimately connected not only with the causes of environmental change but also with its effects, and explore this proposition through three case studies. First, I use archival materials to show how late Soviet bureaucrats framed the regression not as an environmental disaster but as a problem of living standards and employment, which shaped measures to address it. Secondly, I examine memories of the late Soviet period among fishermen in Aral villages, arguing that their experiences of the sea's regression were shaped both by their position within the Soviet fishery and by local understandings of property. Finally, I explore nostalgic narratives in the town of Aral'sk today, arguing that the history of environmental change is re-read through post-Soviet changes in property relations.

Nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers as a way of understanding responses to change

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on nostalgia in the narratives of vocational teachers. The aim is to understand the role of nostalgia as a mechanism for adapting to or resisting educational change. The paper is based on the secondary analysis of semi-structured interviews with 30 Estonian vocational teachers. In the teachers’ narratives, the nostalgia for the former vocational education system, which provided more autonomy and empowerment for teachers in their work, was overlaid with the nostalgia for a society with more stable family and work-life patterns and trusting attitudes towards vocational teachers. Although there were examples where the nostalgic narratives were strategically used to legitimize resistance to change, in most cases, nostalgia tends to serve as the mechanism for making sense of the educational changes teachers have been faced with. Nostalgia also contributes to making sense of oneself as a teacher in a new situation and collective identity building. It is argued in the paper that we should acknowledge the positive functions of nostalgia and create support mechanisms to facilitate sense-making and critical reflection upon the changes for teachers. Nostalgia should be recognized as a productive force indicating the contradictions in present reforms and practices and opening up new directions.

Sociality and intergenerational transfer of older adults’ nostalgia

ABSTRACTInterest in nostalgia has blossomed, yet its nature in older adulthood and potential for intergenerational transfer to younger adults has remained neglected. In Experiment 1, we focused on the content of older adults’ nostalgic (vs. ordinary) recollections and asked whether older adults’ nostalgia could be transferred to younger adults. We showed that nostalgia expressed in older adults’ narratives was positively associated with nostalgia reported by young-adult readers. In Experiment 2, undergraduates read a nostalgic or ordinary narrative written by an older adult. Then they rated their own nostalgia as well as their perceived social connectedness, self-continuity, and meaning in life. Exposure to older adults’ nostalgic (vs. ordinary) narratives promoted concurrent nostalgia among young adults, along with associated psychological benefits (social connectedness, self-continuity, meaning). The findings illustrate the potential for intergenerational transfer of nostalgia through written narratives, and attest to the universality of nostalgic themes across younger and older adults.

Retiring to Spain: Women's Narratives of Nostalgia, Belonging and CommunityA.Ahmed. Policy Press, Bristol University, UK, 2015. ISBN 978‐ 1447313304 (paperback). £58.39. eBook available from http://policypress.co.uk/retiring-to-spain

Retiring to Spain: Women's Narratives of Nostalgia, Belonging and CommunityA.Ahmed. Policy Press, Bristol University, UK, 2015. ISBN 978‐ 1447313304 (paperback). £58.39. eBook available from http://policypress.co.uk/retiring-to-spain

Digital consumers as cultural curators: the irony of Vaporwave

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to address the question of cultural production, consumption and intermediation in the context of digital music.Design/methodology/approachThis research adopts an interpretivist, ethnoconsumerist epistemology along with a netnographic research design combined with hermeneutic analysis. Interpreting both the text view and field view of an ethnoconsumerist approach, the netnographic research design includes participant observation across multiple social media platforms as well as virtual interviews and analysis of media material. The context of application is a digital music subculture known as Vaporwave. Vaporwave participants deliberately distort fundamental aspects of modern and postmodern culture in a digital, musical, artistic and storied manner.FindingsHermeneutic analysis has identified a critical and nostalgic narrative of consumerism and hyper-reality, evident as symbolic parallels, intertextual relationships, existential themes and cultural codes. As a techno savvy community embracing lo-fi production, self-releasing promotion and anonymity from within a complexity of aliases and myriad collaborations, the vaporous existentialism of Vaporwave participants skirts copyright liability in the process. Accordingly, Vaporwave is documented as blurring reality and fantasy, material and symbolic, production and consumption. Essentially, Vaporwave participants are shown to be digital natives turned digital rebels and heretical consumers, better described as cultural curators.Research limitations/implicationsThis research demonstrates a more complex notion of cultural production, consumption and intermediation, argued to be more accurately described as cultural curation.Practical implicationsAs digital heretics, Vaporwave participants challenge traditional notions of modernity, such as copyright law, and postmodern notions such as working consumers and consuming producers.Social implicationsVaporwave participants present a case of digital natives turned digital rebels and consumer heretics, who are actively curating culture.Originality/valueThis interpretive ethnoconusmerist study combining netnography and hermeneutic analysis of an online underground music subculture known as Vaporwave shows digital music artists as cultural curators.

“Bitches Ain’t Gonna Hunt No Ghosts”: Totemic Nostalgia, Toxic Fandom and the Ghostbusters Platonic

In March 2016, the trailer for Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot debuted online and suffered the unfortunate accolade of being the most disliked trailer in YouTube history. Popular news media, including professional, pro-am, and amateur commentators, picked up on the resulting online kerfuffle as clear indication that there is something rotten in the state of fandom. Feig himself frequently turned to the echo chamber of social media to denounce fans as “some of the biggest arseholes I’ve ever met in my life”. Addressing fans that singled out the reboot as “ruining my childhood,” Feig poured fuel on the fire by criticising such a perspective as merely the product of “some whacked-out teenager,” overdramatic, pathological and, perhaps more pointedly, “toxic”. In so doing, Feig—and, by extension, the cast of the Ghostbusters reboot—replicated and re-activated traditional stereotypes of the fanboy —living in his mother’s basement and obsessing over trivial entertainment. This article takes the claims of “childhood ruination” seriously to examine what is at stake for fans of the original Ghostbusters film. Despite the organs of online media heavily criticising fanboys as misogynistic relics and sexist heathens, often in aggressive ways, I argue that fans’ affective, nostalgic attachment to the first Ghostbusters film—the “primary cinematic text” (Bernard, 2014)—forms a crucial component of fans’ “self-narratives” (Hills, 2012) and “trajectories of the self ”. By drawing on empirical work on “nostalgic narratives” conducted in the psychology field, I argue that it is not simply toxicity that drives these fans to defend the fan-object from being colonised by an invading text, but, rather, what I am terming as totemic nostalgia , a form of protectionism centred on an affective relationship with a text, usually forged in early childhood. Threats to the Ghostbusters totemic object, then, “can thus be felt as threats to these fans’ self-narratives” (Hills, 2012, p. 114).

Backward glances: Feminism, nostalgia and Joan Braderman’s The Heretics (2009)

Although nostalgia is a much-maligned orientation to the world, feminist scholars including Heather Hillsburg (2013) and Kate Eichhorn (2015) have argued that it might be recuperated for feminist ends. This article mobilises the call to rethink nostalgia through an analysis of the feminist stories and storytelling in Joan Braderman’s 2009 film, The Heretics. A documentary about a feminist collective founded in New York City in the 1970s, The Heretics sets up a way of thinking about feminism’s past that is steeped in nostalgia. Throughout the film, Braderman maintains that the 1970s were ‘a time when everything seemed possible’. By contrast, she assesses the moment in which she makes the film as a time in which ‘fear corrodes even the young’. As feminist viewers of the film who did not (indeed by virtue of age could not) experience feminism in the 1970s, we initially read the nostalgic narrative of loss framing the film with suspicion. By drawing on feminist scholarship on nostalgia and feminist storytelling, however, we argue that nostalgia can function in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) would call a reparative mode that enriches the relationships that feminist scholars, activists and cultural workers bear to feminisms’ pasts.

Deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: Storytelling in the Trump era

Characterizing Trump supporters either as “duped” by Fox News or as speaking from their lived experience misses the fact that both are true. We draw on scholarship on narrative and on the media to trace the ways in which elite-produced stories simultaneously reflect and forge a political common sense. We argue that narrative’s allusiveness (the fact that stories work by calling up other stories) helps to explain why stories produced by media elites come to feel as if they reflect people’s experience. The fact that people often share stories as a way of building collective identity, for its part, helps to explain why stories’ plausibility may be relatively unimportant to those people. Both features of storytelling are intrinsic to the form, but their political effects have been sharpened by two significant changes in the media landscape: the rise of right-wing media outlets and the profusion of user-shared digital news. We trace these developments as a way to make sense of Trump’s electoral support in 2016.

Nostalgia Serves as a Psychological Resource for Mothers of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Pilot Study

The current study examined whether nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, serves as a psychological resource for mothers of children with ASD (autism spectrum disorder). Twenty-six mothers of children with ASD were asked to complete measures of well-being during an initial visit. Over eight weeks, mothers were asked to write about their experiences with raising a child with ASD, which were coded for the use of nostalgic language. The results revealed that mothers who reported being lower in positive affect and parental well-being had increased nostalgic narratives over time. There were no significant findings for negative affect and life satisfaction. THis work provides a first step in understanding the relationship between nostalgia and mental health. Specifically, nostalgia may serve as a potential intervention to improve the well-being of parents and children with ASD.

Nostalgia narratives? Pejorative attitudes to welfare in historical perspective: survey evidence from Beveridge to the British Social Attitudes Survey

Jensen and Tyler (2015) have powerfully argued that 'anti-welfare commonsense', fuelled by negative political and media discourse stressing welfare dependency and deception, has buttressed support for social security reform in recent years. Along with many other academics they point to the hardening of public attitudes towards welfare state provision and how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' have been reintroduced into popular debates. We identify four distinct threads within this scholarship. First, there is an argument that public attitudes have shifted from an earlier post-war welfare imaginary and settlement to an anti-welfare consensus. Second, this hardening includes a growing prevalence of 'othering'. The third thread is the broadening of this moral and disciplinary gaze to include groups, such as disabled people, who until recently were not subject to the same amount of stigma as other types of benefit recipients. Fourth, is the impact of pejorative welfare discourses on the self-identity and attitudes of disadvantaged groups. While a growing body of evidence makes it increasingly difficult to argue against suggestions that there is a hostile body of anti-welfare sentiment in the UK, what is often implicit in the analysis of pejorative contemporary attitudes to welfare is the view that there was once a 'golden age' of the welfare state when public support was more fully behind a strong set of social security benefits provided as a social right of citizenship. Whether this was the case is a moot point however. Few studies have tried to piece together the attitudes to welfare of the general public during the consensus era. We attempt to undertake such a task here, drawing on ad hoc attitudes surveys and polling data in particular. Specifically, we focus on how notions of the 'deserving' and 'undeserving poor' play out in this data, pointing to some key continuities found in contemporary and historical public attitudes to welfare.

Negotiating the Past at the Kitchen Table: Nostalgia as a Narrative Strategy in an Intergenerational Context

Abstract Stories that elderly people tell about their lives often touch upon their experiences of a changing world and the ways in which people cope with different transformations. In her doctoral research, the author examines the life narrative of a female laborer, the author's grandmother Elsa Koskinen, born in 1927. Koskinen-Koivisto argues that nostalgia functions as a narrative strategy to highlight the importance of values such as social responsibility and togetherness. In addition, nostalgic narratives can be seen as reclamation of agency, an attempt to control change. This article examines nostalgia as a complex narrative strategy, paying attention to the situations in which nostalgia occurs in the interaction between two generations, and considers how the past is represented for younger generations and how the nostalgic reminiscence can be interpreted.

Escritas à deriva: memórias escolares nas redes sociais virtuais

O tempo das tecnologias digitais revolucionou os olhares, as atenções e as emoções dos sujeitos na história da escrita/leitura, ressignificando, portanto, as funções e as relações do usuário junto à tela do computador. Quando se navega na internet, também é possível se deparar com narrativas saudosistas, nostálgicas; o ex-aluno se apropria da palavra, da cultura e dos meios para relatar a sua vida. Nesse território virtual, o usuário almeja colocar em cena as suas histórias escolares. Mas quem são estes sujeitos? Quais os significados e intenções que os usuários atribuem aos seus textos? Navegando nas Comunidades do Orkut do Colégio Militar do Rio de Janeiro e do Colégio Marista São José do Rio de Janeiro foi possível refletir que o conjunto dessas escritas digitais permite ao pesquisador encontrar descrições variadas sobre a vida cotidiana escolar. Valho-me dos estudiosos Castillo Gòmes (2000), Vinhao (1997), Chartier (2002), Bauman (2011), e Lejeune (2009) para me ajudar a pensar que os sujeitos também se constroem nos diversos suportes de escrita.

Filling in the ‘floating gaps’ in the history of the Greek Orthodox community of Ayvalık: A study in cultural memory

Abstract During the second half of the eighteenth century there was a significant increase in the Greek Orthodox Christian population in the region of the western coast of Asia Minor, which was accompanied by the establishment of new settlements and the growth of existing ones, as Ayvalık. In the following article we will study both the formation of this city’s ‘tradition of origin’ and its various transformations in the course of time. Ayvalık’s cultural memory was neither fixed nor unified since members of subsequent generations, as well as members of different sociocultural groups, often tended to fill the emerging ‘floating gaps’ according to their, sometimes, competing political agendas. In doing so, they formed nostalgic narratives by making use of certain elements of local and national history, myths and legends, folk tradition, religion and culture in order to mobilize groups and form identities.

“A Very Moloch of a Baby”: Left to Be Minded in Dickens

Research Article| January 01 2016 “A Very Moloch of a Baby”: Left to Be Minded in Dickens Tamara Silvia Wagner Tamara Silvia Wagner Tamara S. Wagner is associate professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Her books include Victorian Narratives of Failed Emigration: Settlers, Returnees, and Nineteenth-Century Literature in English (2016), Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction (2010), and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004). She has also edited collections on Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand (2014), Victorian Settler Narratives (2011), and Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009). Wagner is currently working on a study of babyhood in Victorian culture. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Nineteenth Century Studies (2016) 29 (1): 71–97. https://doi.org/10.5325/ninecentstud.29.2015-16.0071 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Tamara Silvia Wagner; “A Very Moloch of a Baby”: Left to Be Minded in Dickens. Nineteenth Century Studies 1 January 2016; 29 (1): 71–97. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/ninecentstud.29.2015-16.0071 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressNineteenth Century Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2015-16 Nineteenth Century Studies Association2015-16Nineteenth Century Studies Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

日本人はノスタルジアを経験しうるか？

Japanese people’s experience of nostalgia was investigated and difference between nostalgia in Japan, and in English-speaking countries were compared. Undergraduate student participants (N＝61) were divided into three conditions: “nostalgic recollection”, “ordinary recollection”, and “positive recollection”. Content analysis indicated that consistent with previous studies, Japanese students describe more about themselves, or about a relationship with a specific person during nostalgic narratives than in other narratives. However, the proportion of description including acceptance of the past was lower than in previous studies. Results also indicated that less positive and more negative affect were observed in the nostalgic recollection condition than in the other two conditions. In addition, there was more “bittersweet” affect in the nostalgic recollection condition. Furthermore, no appreciable differences were observed in the three conditions in relation to the three major functions of nostalgia―self-esteem, meaning in life, and perceived social support. We have discussed the necessity for exploring the uniqueness of nostalgia in Japan compared to that in English-speaking countries.

Nostalgia as vehicle for legimitization and critique of post-socialist transformation

In this paper we seek to address the meaning of the recurrent stories of pre-WWII owner of a famous chocolate factory in Warsaw, Poland, that occur in biographic narratives of the company’s contemporary employees. Our point of departure is the question concerning the functions and meanings of these nostalgic narratives of the business leader that most of today’s employees never had a chance to meet. Taking into account a broader perspective of the history of the company E. Wedel – which was first a family business, then in the 2nd half of 20th century has been a state-owned enterprise under socialist regime and finally an icon of the privatization program – we propose an understanding of nostalgia as (1) means of legitimizing capitalist “rules of the game” (cast as “returning to the golden era of Polish interwar capitalism”) by the subsequent MNCs that took over Wedel, and (2) a reflexive tool for the employees who express their criticism towards the foreign owners by pointing out to differences between t...

Nostalgia as a practice of the self in post-socialist Serbia

This article analyzes nostalgic narratives of railway workers in a provincial town in Serbia. It grounds its analysis in a particular theoretical understanding of neoliberalization, focusing on dispossession and its consequences in post-socialism. It provides an account of the specific historical context of socialist Yugoslavia and Serbia after the breakup of Yugoslavia within the wider capitalist system. It views this context as a field of force in which the hegemonic process takes place, and which circumscribes the possibilities for contestation and consent. Finally, it develops a conceptual distinction between the nostalgia of the aspiring middle class on the one hand, and working-class nostalgia on the other, and presents the interlocutors’ narratives as part of the latter. The author argues that nostalgia should be seen as a protean form that should always be studied in connection with the material and social location from which it is uttered. He aims to show that nostalgic narratives in present-day Serbia function as a technique of the self, understood as a practice through which specific kinds and capacities of thought are cultivated, forming a type of adaptable subjectivity against the backdrop of post-socialist neoliberalization.

Ruin Lust and the Council Estate

Arinze Kene's domestic drama, God's Property (Soho Theatre 2013), is set on a council estate in Deptford, South East London in 1982. The play focusses on the aftermath of longstanding racial tensions in the area that led to the 1981 Brixton Riots - a series of violent confrontations between the police and, primarily, members of the local African-Caribbean community. This article positions the council estate as an archetypal contemporary ruin. I provide an analysis of God's Property, which examines the complexities thrown up by the paradoxical estate narratives of nostalgia and ruin and the particular complications that the historical and current context of race and racial difference in South East London adds to these narratives. I offer an autoethnographic reading of the performance, framing my analysis within a lived understanding of South East London. In this way, I propose that the council estate setting of the play coupled with the realist detail in which the domestic space was depicted evoked a complex nostalgic affect that we might consider within a paradigm of ruin aesthetics.