Nostalgic Desire Research Articles

Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree by Jarrod Hayes

Reviewed by: Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree by Jarrod Hayes Martin F. Manalansan IV Jarrod Hayes. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 340pp. Queer Roots for the Diaspora: Ghosts in the Family Tree maps, traces, and unearths the literal and discursive queer (im)mobilities and (un)settlements inherent in the idea of diasporic dispersal and the desire for roots. By utilizing multiple literary, cinematic, anthropological, and musicological archives around diaspora and a fascinating focus on the exigencies of diasporic rooting and rootedness, Jarrod Hayes offers critical and elegant [End Page 500] limnings of various compelling theoretical questions—specifically, the shifting notions of queer self-making and the normative boundaries that attempt to circumscribe them. At the heart of this study is a delineation of the shifting renditions of diasporic roots, its queer dimensions, and their eventual unraveling. In addition, Hayes continues and extends previous works by scholar such as David Eng, Gayatri Gopinath, and Kobena Mercer in juxtaposing queerness, minoritarian identity, and postcolonial/neoliberal contexts as they question and disrupt the linearity of personhood, familial and national filiation, and origins. Homi Bhabha once engaged with James Clifford’s notion of travelling cultures by noting that while travel, movement, and mobility constitute one of the major pillars of diaspora and migration, this focus or major strand unwittingly downplays the problematic of roots and settlement whether by choice or by forceful, if not violent, prescription. Therefore, roots are not just anchors that emplace migrants and other subjects to place but are related to actions, histories, desires, and feelings that struggle to emplace and hook queer migrants into place. The compulsion to settle is complicated by the exigencies of nation and family, which often makes the ideals of roots and the processes of rooting impossible to attain. In the end, diasporic roots are really about queer rootings or the strained struggle in developing emotional and cultural anchors to tether the migrant to an ever-changing set of structures that are in the midst of their own erosion, uprooting, displacement, and very survival. Jarrod Hayes does a magnificent job of exfoliating the queer processes of genealogical roots and rooting through a series of readings of diverse texts from a Francophone and Anglophone cinematic tradition and literary works from the Franco-Caribbean, Africa, Middle East, Canada and the United States. The very organization of the texts follows, among others, Hayes’s biographical and professional trajectory so as to end with a kind of cultural and literal homecoming. Hayes suggests that the yearning and anticipatory restlessness in settling and rooting oneself are productive for a theoretical and conceptual clarification of the complex ties between diasporic movement, settlement, and queerness. The Latina queer theorist Gloria Anzaldua, in her discussion of the border-crossing migrant, often joked about homophobia as the fear of home. Such negative feelings and the attendant violence around deviant sexuality, home, domesticity and family are the fueling forces that compel travel and movement away from sites of identification and rootedness. But they also conversely (and paradoxically) restrain, seduce, and induce [End Page 501] diasporic return. One of the fascinating aspects of Hayes’s readings is the weaving together of contradictory narratives such as the desire to leave home and the lure of return, sutured with a messy and paradoxical travel itinerary or route. Such desires traverse across and around mazelike paths yet always wind up returning to a destination that troubles ghostly ties and identities that are variously related to the trauma of racial difference, ethnic violence, material deprivation, and sexual aberration. Hayes argues that queer diasporic dispersal and return do not necessarily lead to an affirmation of roots and routes but rather to a critical questioning of the absolute viability, truth, and reality of the queer migrant’s ontology and history. In other words, to follow the ghostly tracks of where one comes from is to realize that the point of origin is not as clear or pristine as one remembers it to be. Moreover, the need to narrate these roots or originary nodes comes not from the nostalgic desire to remember but from the desire to...

“Absence has not abated your love”:1 the nostalgia for an idealized aristocracy in The Castle of Lindenberg during the Romantic era

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a popular thirst for sensation wed to historic anxieties about political and social unrest infused gothic literature and art. This article examines the texts of nine abridgements of Matthew Lewis’s novel The Monk (1795) between 1798 and 1823 as projecting the trials of sympathetic aristocratic characters who encounter natural and supernatural disruptions that are depicted in their thirteen illustrations; in these texts, the disruptions represent threats to the established order through the inappropriate exercise of power. The combination of text and illustration in these abridgements (primarily chapbooks), variously entitled The Castle of Lindenberg, Raymond and Agnes, and The Bleeding Nun, reflect a nostalgic desire for leadership by a threatened, idealized aristocracy that combines traditional heroic characteristics of romances with Enlightenment values of reason and compassion.

The curator, the investor, and the dupe: Consumer desire and Chinese Cultural Revolution memorabilia

This article examines the discourse surrounding the collection of Cultural Revolution memorabilia in the contemporary People’s Republic of China. The author focuses on the emergence of three key discursive figures: the collector/curator, the collector/investor, and the collector as dupe. At issue in the construction of each of these figures is the unsettling force of consumer desire, its ethics and negotiation. In the case of the curator and investor, the author considers the mechanisms through which consumer desire is decentered in the name of historical responsibility and exchange value, respectively. These mechanisms of deferral are contrasted to the often nostalgic desire embodied by the dupe, but this figure and his or her consumer desire are in fact crucial to the discourse of collection as a whole. Indeed, despite claims to the contrary, the dupe bespeaks an enduring quest for a mode of interaction between person and thing outside the bounds of commodity exchange.

An Analysis of Taiwanese Immigrants' Health Care Choice – Obamacare or Taiwan National Health Care

AbstractDue to recent policy changes in the USA and Taiwan, Taiwanese immigrants residing in the USA face a choice of continuing to receive health care in the USA or returning to Taiwan for treatment care. This study uses a quantitative survey to explore the association between recent health policy changes and the health care choice of Taiwanese immigrants residing in the USA.These findings indicate that there are statistically significant associations between a variety of factors and the Taiwanese immigrants' desire to return to Taiwan for health care under the new national health insurance plan (2nd NHIA). The variables positively associated with a desire to return to Taiwan for health care include the length of domicile and residence required to receive benefits, a nostalgic desire to return to Taiwan, the lower cost of health care in Taiwan, and if the respondents had come to the USA before 1996. The negatively associated variables include having a job in the USA, having a desire to return to Taiwan to live after retirement, the language preference in communications with a doctor, and a preference about the best place to receive dental treatment. The study reveals the dynamics behind the health care decision‐making of Taiwanese immigrants and particularly their choice of whether to seek care in the USA or in Taiwan.

Textual Bodies, the Digital Surrogate, and Desire: Guillaume de Machaut’s Judgment Cycle and his Protean Corpus

This article explores the overlapping experiences of Guillaume de Machaut’s medieval manuscript readers and modern viewers of the digitized codex to argue that they share a nostalgic desire for a multi-sensorial and intimate encounter with the textual body. This study first considers Guillaume’s disgruntled reader in the Jugement dou roy de Navarre before turning to later readers who reenacted her desires when dealing with Machaut’s manuscripts. Finally, nuancing complaints that digitization distances us from the manuscript artifact, I consider how the digital surrogate reignites a desire for the textual body that defined the late-medieval reading experience.

OUTSOURCING PROGRESS: ON CONCEPTUAL MUSIC

AbstractThis article addresses the phenomenon of New Conceptualism, otherwise known as conceptual music, or Konzeptmusik, and locates it within the German new music scene of the last decade. It is suggested that conceptual music may perhaps be a contradiction in terms, representing a nostalgic desire for the semantic strength of conceptual art. In particular the article focuses on Johannes Kreidler's 2009 work, Fremdarbeit, and scrutinises the composer's claim to have ‘outsourced’ the composition of the work to India and China. The significance of this – whether actual or fictional – as an example of globalisation is examined and set within its political and economic context.

Black bile in Bohane: Kevin Barry and melancholia

ABSTRACTKevin Barry's novel, City of Bohane, presents the west coast of Ireland gripped in the hyper-violence of a dystopian urban future. This article argues that the novel's power structures, seemingly redolent of unrepentant brutality, epitomise an excessive melancholy; a failure of mourning that causes the city and its inhabitants to stagnate in aggressive, nostalgic desire. Relations to the past, to the self, the desired other and power in City of Bohane are inextricable from discourses of melancholic loss, lack, identification, gender, violence and the fetish, and by reading Barry's work through Freud's, Agamben's, Žižek's and Butler's theorisations of the melancholy, we explore the tensions between desire, loss and black bile.

Conflicting Nostalgia: PerformingThe Tale of Ch'unhyang(春香傳) in the Japanese Empire

In the Japanese empire in 1938, an imperial-language theatrical adaptation of a folktale from colonial Korea,The Tale of Spring Fragrance (Ch'unhyang chŏn)opened to rave reviews in major metropolitan cities throughout Japan. The performance's popularity ignited an encore run later the same year throughout colonial Korea. The play was commissioned by Murayama Tomoyoshi and his Shinkyō Theater Troupe in Japan. The script was penned in Japanese by Chang Hyǒkchu, a bilingual writer from the colony. This article examines a forgotten moment of colonial “collaboration” between Korea and Japan when the two countries’ literary histories converged in a widely publicized performance across the empire. By reading the tensions between parallel yet unbridgeable nostalgic desires between Japan and Korea, and measuring the gap between the consumption of the tale as trendy “colonial kitsch” and timeless “national tradition,” the performance can be read not as the embodiment of harmonious imperial assimilation as touted at the time, but as performing its anxieties and breakdown. This article further considers the significance of the failed collaboration and translation across colonial divides for postcolonial relations.

Remaking Yamato, remaking Japan

Recent years have seen the development and production of several Hollywood remakes of Japanese cultural commodities, among which are some based on sf Japanese animations. Some of these remakes have provoked criticism from fan communities for their ‘whitewashing’ of casts, settings and storylines. Given the hegemonic position that Hollywood occupies within the world-media system, these criticisms are undoubtedly warranted. Yet insofar as they operate on the basis of a politics of representation, they at once run the risk of fetishising a notion of Japanese authenticity that re-inscribes mutually reinforcing techno-orientalist and cultural nationalist undercurrents in the discourse surrounding Japanese animation. My essay argues that rather than an approach that privileges notions of originality and authenticity, the transnational cultural politics of remakes and reboots can be more effectively apprehended when the intertextuality built into the very structural logic of the sf genre is properly recognised. Taking up the recent live-action remake of Space Battleship Yamato (2010) as an illustrative example, I suggest that the nostalgic desire and staging of retroactive continuities that drive both its story and its critical reception call attention to its repetitions of tropes from not only the preceding titles from within the Yamato franchise, but also a longer legacy of nautical adventure stories from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Informed by this textual genealogy, I highlight the text’s engagement with the linkages between the history of imperialism and the formation of sf as a genre in Japan and beyond.

Thomas Hardy and desire: conceptions of the self

Preface Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction: Hardy and Desire House and Home: Nostalgic Desire and the Locus of the Self Desire, Female Amity and 'Sapphic Space' Sexual Desire and the Lure' of the Erotic Poor Men and Ladies: Aspirational Desire As You Like It: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Expression of Desire Art, Aesthetics and Masculine Desire 'Scanned Across the Dark Space':Poetry, Desire and Aesthetic Fulfilment Notes Bibliography Index

Workers, Gentlemen and Landowners: Identifying Social Class in The Professor and Wuthering Heights

This article interrogates class definition in two nineteenth-century novels: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor. In my analysis of The Professor I draw attention to Charlotte Brontë’s preface as a point of departure from which to criticize the novel’s ostensible realism. In Wuthering Heights, I argue, certain characters masquerade as members of the working class while signifying something much different. I show that whereas Wuthering Heights conceals within it a nostalgic desire for an England where the industrial working class as an identifiable, organizable body does not yet exist, in The Professor it is precisely their existence that constitutes that novel’s ‘not said’. I conclude by arguing that on the one hand Emily Brontë contains her unease by retreating into the past, whereas Charlotte Brontë evidences an unease with a sector of society whose existence can never be disputed. She camouflages it not only by privileging the virtues of capitalism but also by showing that it is members of the capitalist class who will inherit an idealized and sanitized England.

Embodied Knowledges: Synesthesia and the Archive in Monique Truong's Bitter in the Mouth

Subjects of twentieth-century Western modernity are “in need of archives,” Jacques Derrida writes in Archive Fever (1995). The characteristics of archive fever are numerous: “It is to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive. . . . It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement” (91). In other words, symptoms of archive fever include the desire for that which is elusive (“right where it slips away”), as well as nostalgia not for the past in general but for the moment of origination and beginnings. Archive fever seeks knowledge that might secure us ontologically and epistemologically through an encounter with a primary self. But why are we in need of archives—defined for the purposes of this study not as specific places of documentation but as general “meaning-making system[s] that [allow] for some statements to be enunciated and others to lack intelligibility” (Ferguson)? Certainly, archives are intimately intertwined with our desire to locate ourselves, to make visible the residue of the past as it informs the present, and to make sense of legacies (historical, intellectual, and affective) that intimately inform our sense of ourselves as subjects. Yet archives have been called into question over the past several decades in discourses as wide-ranging as performance, queer, feminist, and postcolonial studies. Such critical work identifies the archive as a formulation by which the ephemeral and the personal are erased in favor of the enduring and the state-sanctioned. Nevertheless, despite our legitimate suspicions of the way the archive inevitably facilitates the consolidation of authority and the erasure of difference, we cannot leave the archive behind. As Derrida argues, “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory. Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its

Memorialization, Memorabilia, and the Mediated Afterlife of Ada Reeve

This paper explores the differing levels of control over representations of Ada Reeve's mediated and ‘ghosted’ afterlife. Confessional memoirs that strategically frame the star persona for posterity provide her with the most immediate control. However, the star can become recruited to new assertions of cultural nationalism, which desire to claim coherent genealogies, public celebration, and commemoration of a star's afterlife. This, paired with nostalgic desires for past ‘golden ages’, also mediates strategic interests in her imbricated identity. Similarly, the star's mediated afterlife inevitably becomes susceptible to repositioning by theatre managements, the media, family, fans, and the public when their revisionist agendas make new assertions for the star's image after death in various immediate political and social contexts, and as communal encoded memory. Martina Lipton is Research Fellow (Australia) at the University of Warwick and Honorary Associate Lecturer at the University of Queensland. She has published several articles in Australasian Drama Studies, Contemporary Theatre Review, New Theatre Quarterly, and Popular Entertainment Studies on pantomime and popular theatre performers, and her paper ‘Localism and British Modern Pantomime’ is in A World of Popular Entertainments: an Edited Volume of Critical Essays (2012).

The Use of Talisman in William Butler Yeats’s Poetry: A Signifier of the Objet Petit

Yeats’s poetry is quite rich in the imagery of loss, yearning for the glorious and distant past, and a search for identity. The Tower is almost emblematic of the poet’s disillusionment with the modern and of his nostalgic desire for the long-forgotten past. This article intends to analyse the social, political and psychological reasons underlying the sense of loss pervading through the particular book and in order to keep reliability of the order of poems or their presence in the book, The Variorum Edition of Alspach and Allt, including the final texts, will be used, otherwise it would be rather difficult to follow the poems as Yeats is notorious for his revising his poems and even the order of the poems in his books.

“What are we doing here?” Nostalgic Desires for a Cosmopolitan Sensory Aesthetic in the Amsterdam-based Psytrance Scene

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The Time and Place of Nostalgia: Re-situating a French Disease

The history of nostalgia as a clinical category has many highly specific national stories. This paper traces an aspect of this history, examining aspects of nostalgia's changing meanings in nineteenth-century France. Nostalgia was a disease triggered by displacement, which became medically and politically important after the French Revolution, when military surgeons encountered epidemics of nostalgia in the armed forces. Understood as a form of pathological homesickness, the category straddled environmental medicine and emerging ideas about insanity. The diagnosis became particularly important to Idéologue writers as a case study in regulating and redirecting the emotions, demonstrating the efficacy of their new "moral" treatments and an ability to generate patriotic attachment to the new nation state. Over the course of the century, nostalgia disintegrated as a medical condition reflecting a decline in environmental explanations for disease within medicine, and increasingly plastic meanings attached to nostalgic desire.

Vintage Entertainment: Nostalgia, the Archive and the Disappearing Pleasures of Collective Television Viewing

At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. (Boym 2001: xv)

The Shame of the Nation: Performing History in Schiller, Manzoni and Byron

This article inquires into what is at stake in A.W. Schlegel’s call for Romantic drama that is both “truly historical” and “thoroughly national”. While Schlegel suggests that historical drama should make an audience feel “shame” at the inadequacy of the present in relation to the national past, much Romantic historical drama depicts the past as a time of revolutionary failure in which modern liberal nations might have been born but were not. Using Schiller’s Wallenstein, Manzoni’s The Count of Carmagnola and Byron’s Marino Faliero, This article suggests that Romantic drama represents the “shame” of the past to stage the nation as part of an ongoing historical process rather than as a fixed product. The author suggests that one of the primary ways in which Romantic drama does this is through the meta‐theatrical representation of crowd scenes that depict spectators who stand in for the play’s audience, and thus force actual audiences to recognize their own places within history. This paper thus reads Romantic drama’s cultivation of shame not as a nostalgic desire to return to the past, but as an effort to open the present towards an always uncertain future.

A relic of its own past: Mesopotamia in the British imagination 1900-14

For British travellers in the early 20th century, Mesopotamia was a place replete with cultural references. As they traversed the region, Britons saw the remnants of Mesopotamia’s ancient history and civilizations all around them, but they found it difficult to understand how a land that they understood to be the progenitor of their own ‘western’ civilization could now appear to them to be poor and ‘primitive’. In order to cope with the incongruence between ancient Mesopotamia - the object of their nostalgic desire - and their experiences of contemporary Mesopotamia, travellers engaged in a two-fold process of acquisition. On one level of this process, artefacts of archaeological significance were transported to European museums. On another level, those elements of Mesopotamia’s history that were seen to be progenitors of a ‘western civilization’ were understood to be exclusively a part of a ‘western’, rather than an ‘eastern’, or Mesopotamian cultural heritage.

“Give me that voice again… Those looks immortal”: Gaze and Voice in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes

IT HAS, BECOME A COMMONPLACE IN ROMANTIC CRITICISM TO UNDERSTAND Keats s poetry as profoundly shaped by commodity culture. (1) For some critics, Keats is the parvenu, fatally cut off from the cultural and material capital of the gentleman poet. (2) For others, he is a poet who shamelessly revels in consumer culture, a middle class consumer immersed in the sensuousness of the commodity. Ayumi Mizukoshi, for example, argues that Keats is invested in a bourgeois of conspicuous (3) According to this view, Keats was not primarily a political poet, much less a radical, but instead remained a poet of sensuous pleasure until the end of his career (8). Critics such as Nicholas Roe, however, have attempted to show that Keats was more politically radical than many have recognized. (4) This essay examines Keats in the context of the commercial culture that fascinated him but does not assume, as Mizukoshi does, that this fascination ends with acceptance and full engagement. Rather, I join those critics who see a more critical edge in Keats's work. Keats's immersion in commodity culture leads to an important critique of the type of object relations that turns people into things. Keats's 1820 romance, The Eve of St. Agnes, offers a provocative alternative to how things operate in commodity capitalism. Proposing a romance that breaks out of the courtly love tradition, the poem undermines the kind of enjoyment associated with consumption. (5) In The Eve of St. Agnes, Keats develops his critique by opposing the promise of fulfillment proffered by luxury objects with a form of romantic love that depends on lack. The poem critiques the power of luxury objects to intimate an enjoyment that promises ultimate plenitude, a fulfillment approached, although never fully achieved, both through the dangers of competition and through ascetic deferral. These two modes of consumption lead to the same nostalgic desire for a full jouissance. The poem, however, offers a different form of enjoyment marked by the awareness of death and lack. The lovers come to recognize the insufficiency of the beloved and the failure of courtly love fantasies. By discovering an erotic love that recognizes lack and mortality, the lovers come to reject their dependence on the promise of plenitude that keeps them in thrall to a system of competition and hierarchy. Burst Joy's grape against his palate fine Keats's poetry is fascinated with things. Kurt Heinzelman argues that Keats seems to be totting up a poetic catalogue of cultural artifacts, fetishized as commodities for the use of his own individual imagination. (6) For Carlyle, Keats's tendency to fill everything to the brim speaks of a miserable creature, hungering after sweets which he can't get (7) or for Yeats of a schoolboy with his nose pressed to the sweetshop window (Heinzelman 159). For Heinzelman, this view him any capacity for self-criticism, denies him worldliness (159). In fact, Keats's interest in things is far cannier than some of his more condescending critics have recognized. In The Eve of St. Agnes, objects of luxury create a world in which everything appears to reflect and engage human desire. If humans enjoy in the castle, they are not alone. Every thing accompanies them in their sensations. The music is yearning like a God in pain (56) (8) and the carved angels, ever eager-eyed, / Stared at the celebration below (34-35). The luxurious chambers, ready with their pride, / Were glowing to receive a thousand guests (32-33). Here, things have desiring voices and desiring gazes that reflect the desires of the human inhabitants of the castle while also legitimizing and amplifying these desires. A system in which objects share the sentiments of humans, in which even the rooms feel pride and excitement (glowing to receive a thousand guests), creates the imaginary effect of a world in which everything exists to the measure of human desire, in which everything invites one to consume and enjoy. …