Politics Of Nostalgia Research Articles

“Remembering Is the Essence of What I Am”: Thomas Pynchon and the Politics of Nostalgia

ABSTRACTThomas Pynchon’s two most recent works, Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), have proven resistant to many of the critical approaches traditionally applied to his fiction. In recent years, a number of ways of reading late Pynchon have been proposed; this essay contributes to this ongoing re-evaluation by situating Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge as nostalgic works in terms of both genre and content. These are novels in which nostalgia is seen as both affect and effect, that is as a personal emotion and a political force. Nostalgia here is not simply an individual response to change, but has a potentially counter-intuitive political impact. Rather than operating as a conservative or even reactionary force, Pynchonian nostalgia offers a utopian reminder of alternate social and political possibilities in the face of neo-liberal hegemony.

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Subverting the Nation-State Through Post-Partition Nostalgia: Joginder Paul’s Sleepwalkers

With the advent of the Progressive Writers Movement, Urdu Literature was marked with a heightened form of social realism during the Partition of British India in 1947. Joginder Paul, once a part of this movement, breaks away from this realist tradition in his Urdu novella, Khwabrau (Sleepwalkers), published in 1990. Sleepwalkers shifts the dominant realist strain in the form and content of Urdu fiction to open a liminal “third space” that subverts the notion of hegemonic reality. Sleepwalkers is based on a time, many years after the Partition in the city of Karachi, and focuses on the “mohajirs” from Lucknow who construct a mnemonic existential space by constructing a simulacrum of pre-Partition Lucknow (now in India). This paper examines the reconceptualization of spaces through the realm of political nostalgia and the figure of the refugee subject “performing” this nostalgia. This nostalgic reconstruction of space, thus, becomes a “heterotopia” in Foucauldian terms, one that causes a rupture in the unities of time and space and the idea of nation-hood. The refugee subjects’ subversion of the linearity of time opens a different time in the narration of a nation that necessitates that the wholeness of the “imagined” physical space of a nation be questioned.

The Vulnerable Spectator

The 1970s ushered in a new cinephilic culture for viewers. In reviewing the films of this era, columnist Amelie Hastie is struck by their resonance for our current political realities and concerns surrounding civil rights, governmental authority, and personal surveillance. To the author, revisiting or integrating the 1970s into contemporary film culture is a political act born out of resistance to both present-day politics and historical narratives. Through her discussion of films including Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman, Gordon Parks's The Learning Tree, Barbara Loden's Wanda, and Diane Kurys's Peppermint Soda, Hastie finds a welcome response to the current era of grotesque political nostalgia enamored with the “greatness” of oppression, including the slavery of African Americans, the internment of immigrants, and the stripping of women's power.

Critical Nostalgias in Democratic South Africa

ABSTRACTEvidence suggests that some black residents in South Africa experience nostalgia for the racist and authoritarian apartheid regime. What dynamics generate apartheid nostalgia, and what work does it do? This article draws on in-depth interviews with black residents of impoverished urban townships and informal settlements. I argue that by eliminating formal racial discrimination and redirecting popular aspirations towards the state, South Africa’s democratic transition encouraged apartheid nostalgia, which residents deployed to criticize the post-apartheid state and imagine alternative possibilities. Far from uniform, nostalgic expressions focused on four objects: social protection, migrant exclusion, bureaucratic integrity, and white governance. Each object represented an aspect of the apartheid state that residents sought to resurrect. The analysis calls for a shift from a politics of regret, focused on shame for past atrocities, to a politics of nostalgia, which understands idealized projections of past objects as a terrain of struggle.

“Cry Clubs for Prentices”: (Not) Performing Riot in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday

ABSTRACTThis article situates Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) in the context of the London riots of 1595. By contrast with the more overtly festive Shrove Tuesday riots of the Jacobean period, this late sixteenth-century uprising constituted an overt threat to authority. Attention to this context provides a means of understanding the complex mixture of disorder and festivity which characterises Dekker's play. The article emphasises the text's complex temporality, arguing that it presents an idealised image not of contemporary London, but rather of its historical past. Through its representation of the livery company system and its structures of hospitality, the play offers an alternative to the socio-economic conflicts which defined early modern London. But these images of London's past are consistently situated in opposition to elements of tension rooted in the contemporary present. The result is a politics of nostalgia, which deploys the spectre of riot as a means to assert the necessity of a rejuvenated livery company system.

Material Memory: The Politics of Nostalgia on the Eve of MAGA

Material Memory:The Politics of Nostalgia on the Eve of MAGA Bryan D. Price (bio) Charlottesville Click for larger view View full resolution On the evening of August 11, 2017, images began coming over the internet and cable news transoms of mainly young and serious-faced white men carrying torches and chanting "you will not replace us"—a phrase with a European provenance geared toward Muslims—along with the anti-Semitic derivation, "Jews will not replace us," and the Nazi-tinged incantation of "blood and soil." They were marching in a column toward the Rotunda on the University of Virginia's campus in Charlottesville, which houses a statue of the school's founder, Thomas Jefferson. This torchlight march bearing the ritualism of a midnight ride by the Ku Klux Klan or even a Nazi rally—many of the participants displayed Nazi paraphernalia—was a precursor to a rightwing demonstration the following day to protest the [End Page 103] impending removal of a memorial to the Confederate General, Robert E. Lee. That day's rally erupted in violence culminating in the death of a young woman. As the chaos unfolded, the former Klansman and past member of the Louisiana House of Representatives, David Duke, told a news reporter that the rally would "fulfill the promises of Donald Trump." This vague comment seemed to draw even closer together the ideologies of the President and his most fervent white nationalist supporters, who had gathered that day in an unashamed display of a self-conscious white supremacy the likes of which seemed hidden away in our nation's id. When the President failed to condemn the far right participants who precipitated much of the violence—or differentiate between the far right protesters and the liberal counter-protesters—it seemed to confirm the fears of many that President Trump's ideological predilections were intimately bound up with a particularly virulent strain of nativism, if not outright white supremacy. MAGA Much of what many have found so alarming about the recent turn of events has to do with the ways in which this confluence of whiteness and what it means to be American is inflected by the contested nature of collective memory. The instigation, for instance, of the Charlottesville debacle had to do with the civic worthiness of a Robert E. Lee statue, an object in which many see a distillation of Southern courage and heritage, and yet others see a monument that commemorates a time of mythical white unity, erected, like many Confederate monuments, as a symbol of the power, awe, and terror of white supremacy. The President, since Charlottesville, has made the protection and celebration of Confederate monuments a dominant feature of his culture war posture known, if only euphemistically, as Trumpism. Trumpism is by no means a precise ideology—at least not yet—but in a very broad way it is characterized by an indifference to suffering, fear-mongering about perceived outsiders, the exacerbation of existing cultural fissures in order to undermine any kind of consensus, the aestheticization of violence, and, most important for the purposes of this essay, a revanchist need to reclaim the hegemony of a largely patriarchal whiteness lost to liberalism's meddling desire to topple it. This longing is characterized by the deeply nostalgic slogan Make America Great Again, shortened to the quickly mutating neologism MAGA, a phrase that, if one is troubled by this recent reckoning with American Fascism, chills the blood. In this climate of MAGA, it is difficult not to see battle lines drawn across the arc of time in which we ask ourselves what constitutes not only America and greatness, but at what temporal point did it all turn so wrong? Even if we believe that history is cyclical and dynamic, as I do, it is hard to argue that this particular moment is not characterized by some kind of intense and rare malaise. Given this feeling of melancholy across the ideological spectrum, it is natural to seek out critical shifts or even ruptures where time breaks and we are prompted [End Page 104] to gaze back over the abyss. As our horizons of expectation concerning future happiness have become constrained, a reaction, for many...

Ностальгія як феномен культури

The article is devoted to the observation of the cultural phenomenon of nostalgia, its social, psychological, ethical and general philosophical aspects. It is shown that nostalgia is based on value-laden memory that helps us differ pleasant and unpleasant, useful and useless, meaningful and meaningless. This value-laden memory has its ethical dimension that deals with moral tradition, our concepts of good and evil, justice and injustice, sense of life and sense of death. We may say that ethical memory is a part of a larger “cultural memory” that enables every kind of social and individual identity. Due to nostalgia the generation`s continuity is established. In the act of nostalgia a person recalls the past but also rebels against actual state of presence. It is affirmed that our time-arrangement of “bad presence” and “good past” is possible because of ontological time regress. Nostalgizing for the past, a man is trying not only to mythologize the latter, but to resurrect it symbolically. Nostalgia’s faith in revival contains a hope for annihilation of time and triumph of eternity. We may call it an archetypical need, a manifestation of ancient mythological and religious motive of death and resurrection. Longing for past accompanies mankind during all its history and especially rises in the postmodern culture – in forms of metaphysical, political and aesthetical nostalgias. Metaphysical nostalgia is the lust for Logos, (God, meaning, truth, the good and the beauty) in the post-nihilistic absurd world, where god is claimed to be dead, and all supreme values are seemed to be devalued. It is also longing for the sacred reality, the being, that postmodern culture is lacked. Political nostalgia is the lust for the real power, subconscious desire for its increasing, expanding, absolutization. Aesthetical nostalgia is the sadness for the art as symbolic hierarchical structure with definite cultural and historical code as today we observe fakes and simulations, chaos and “metastases of cultural codes” (J. Baudrillard).

The Outlaw-Knight: Law's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and The Dark Knight Rises

The Outlaw-KnightLaw's Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Dark Knight Rises Cynthia Nazarian (bio) In Christopher Nolan's 2012 film The Dark Knight Rises, the hero begins as an outlaw, and an outlaw masquerades as a hero. Their names, Wayne and Bane, rhyme; they belong to the same secret martial order; both wear masks and love the same woman. As the plot unfolds these figures move between the same spaces, appropriating each other's weapons and motivations. Although the film embeds them in an allegorical discourse in which one represents justice and the other uncontrolled violence, their differences are often surprisingly minor. Legal and political theorists as varied as Walter Benjamin, Robert Cover, and Giorgio Agamben have asserted the inseparability of law and violence. In the modern state, Benjamin claims, "all violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving" (287). How, then, does the state's violence distinguish itself from others, and how does it come to legitimize its own vision of law as "justice"? The problem is far older than Nolan's film. This essay explores a figure I term the "outlaw-knight," a curious hybrid who reappears from the early days of modern statehood to uncover a fundamental indeterminacy at the heart of state-sanctioned law and violence. The outlaw-knight is a fantasy of political nostalgia, one that reifies the processes and problems of modern state formation by turning to an idealized form of feudalism. This figure marks periods of political change with a backward-looking critique of modern statehood through the figure of the individual aristocratic hero. It appears in the early modern period notably as the Knight of Justice in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1596), written at a pivotal point of nostalgia for a feudal aristocratic past amid the centralization of the sixteenth-century Tudor monarchy. The outlaw-knight persists in modern cultural forms like the [End Page 204] American Western and superhero films, reifying the conflicts between violence and the law in the modern democratic state. A look at Book 5 of Spenser's Faerie Queene, John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Rises (2012) will illustrate how, in varied historical and political circumstances, the outlaw-knight returns to mediate clashes between rival laws, rival forms of violence, and rival symbolic interpretations, asserting the hybridity and indeterminacy of the state's means for dealing with threats to its sovereignty. As an early modernist, I want to argue for the importance of addressing precursors and histories of both political concepts and aesthetic figurations in modern cultural forms. Parsing their politics without also examining the past that these works call up and strategically idealize or misrepresent provides only a partial view of their artistry and political maneuvering. Although there are other examples of the outlaw-knight, I have chosen these three very different texts because of fundamental similarities in their genre and mode. First, all three of these works politicize nostalgia, idealizing a premodern past in order to criticize their contemporary politics. Furthermore, they romanticize the same past, the European chivalric Middle Ages. Second, these three works rely on fundamental similarities in genre and narrative technique, which they derive from that premodernity. They are nostalgic not only in their themes and figures but, much more intrinsically, at the level of their form. The epic-romance genre of The Faerie Queene, shared by the two films, particularly suits reflection on statehood in transition or under threat. Combining the wandering narratives, amorous escapades, aristocratic subjects, and heroic ascendancies of romance1 with the nation-building, collectivizing concerns of epic, The Faerie Queene's mixed genre is inherently backward looking.2 The heroism of the aristocratic individual is the central drama of all three works considered here, told in the form of quest narratives that deliberately project modern political concerns onto medievalized but equally politically freighted narrative landscapes. Third, all three of these works write epic-romance in the allegorical mode: their narratives follow emblematic dynamics in which characters are clearly referential, figuring larger social and political ideas.3 I propose that Ford's and...

All under heaven KANO: The politics of nostalgia and the making of a new Taiwanese identity in Wei Te-sheng’s Taiwan-Japan trilogy

Abstract This article explores the highly contested topic of nostalgia for the Japanese colonial period in contemporary Taiwanese popular culture and the ways in which colonial nostalgia participates in contemporary identity politics in Taiwan. By analysing three of Wei Desheng’s recent movies that engage in different ways with aspects of the colonial past, this article illustrates how the creative use of nostalgia helps to challenge certain cultural and political narratives that have hitherto dominated discourses of identity in Taiwan. Focusing in particular on Wei’s baseball period-drama KANO, this study shows that nostalgia in Taiwanese cinema is not a singular trope whereby the bygone colonial era is uncritically eulogized, but a complex cultural practice through which issues such as Taiwan’s position in a globalizing economy, a new emphasis on diversity and multi-culturalism, and finally contemporary politics vis-à-vis mainland China are negotiated. The colonial past, far from being a stable, monolithic historical memory, thus constitutes a constantly shifting discursive space in which questions of national identity can be addressed from a number of angles.

The politics of nostalgia: Perils and untapped potentials

The author considers the role of nostalgic ideology in the 2016 presidential election, drawing upon the theorizing of nostalgia in psychoanalysis.

The Myth of the Circuit Rider: American Methodist Autobiography and the Croaks of Nostalgia

Many Methodist circuit riders published their autobiographies in the mid-nineteenth century as an attempt to recreate the “zeal” of the earlier decades of American Methodism—and to lament the comfortable mood they perceived within their newly respectable middle-class denomination. This article demonstrates how and why “the circuit rider”—as a mythic figure or literary trope—was created and maintained, especially through autobiographies. It argues that they were not disinterested chronicles but arguments about the true character of the denomination. Most broadly, it uses memory studies to study the role of narrative in producing a politics of nostalgia.

Transmedia as experimental ethnography: The Exit Zero Project, deindustrialization, and the politics of nostalgia

How might “transmedia” approaches—or working across media—fit into histories of textual and visual innovation within anthropology, and what might they contribute to the discipline in the current moment? I explore this question through the Exit Zero Project, which includes a book, documentary film, and planned interactive website that examine the impact of deindustrialization on Southeast Chicago and the relationship between industrial job loss and expanding class inequalities in the United States. While the book and film take an “autoethnographic” approach, the website is based on collaboration with a local museum. I argue that transmedia ethnography both provokes new research questions and supports a growing interest in public anthropology by offering diverse spaces for engagement with subjects and audiences.

Book review: Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition, written by Wen-chin Ouyang

Book review: Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel: Nation-State, Modernity and Tradition, written by Wen-chin Ouyang

Post-Soviet Nostalgia in Russian Cinema An Analysis of Aleksey Balabanov's Cargo 200, Karem Shakhnazarov's the Vanished Empire and Vladimir Menshov's Envy of the Gods

Over the last decade Russia has developed a modern film industry that has been recognized internationally as one of excellence and prestige. This was clearly illustrated in 2003 when Andrei Zviaginstev’s film The Return won the coveted Venice Golden Lion Award. In recent years Russian cinema has been a popular and profitable enterprise for a country that suffered such a collapse and national identity crisis. The loss of a Soviet identity created a sudden nostalgia for Soviet films, or more importantly nostalgia for the era of economic stability which these films have come to represent. This thesis consists of two parts. The first part delves into the phenomenon of Soviet nostalgia by deploying Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko’s article, The politics of Nostalgia: a Case for Comparative Analysis of Post-Socialist Practices and is divided into three subsections. Section one attempts to present a definition of nostalgia as it is experienced in post-Soviet culture and society. Section two covers the various practices in which nostalgia can manifest itself. Section three illustrates how nostalgia can be either reflective or restorative and what implications this has for a possible revival of the Communist regime. The second part of this thesis focuses on my analysis of three recent films that depict the Soviet era with varying degrees of nostalgia: The Vanished Empire, Envy of the Gods, and Cargo 200. In order to connect the two parts of this thesis, I present information on how nostalgia is capitalized on as a cinematic technique using an article by Slavoj Žižek, Pornography, Nostalgia, Montage; A Triad of the Gaze.

Dowagers, Debs, Nuns and Babies: The Politics of Nostalgia and the Older Woman in the British Sunday Night Television Serial

The extensive commercial success of two well-made popular television drama serials screened in the UK at prime time on Sunday evenings during the winter of 2011–12, Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–) and Call the Midwife (BBC, 2012–), has appeared to consolidate the recent resurgence of the period drama during the 1990s and 2000s, as well as reassembling something like a mass audience for woman-centred realist narratives at a time when the fracturing and disassembling of such audiences seemed axiomatic. While ostensibly different in content, style and focus, the two programmes share a number of distinctive features, including a range of mature female characters who are sufficiently well drawn and socially diverse as to offer a profoundly pleasurable experience for the female viewer seeking representations of aging femininity that go beyond the sexualised body of the ‘successful ager’. Equally importantly, these two programmes present compelling examples of the ‘conjunctural text’, which appears at a moment of intense political polarisation, marking struggles over consent to a contemporary political position by re-presenting the past. Because both programmes foreground older women as crucial figures in their respective communities, but offer very different versions of the social role and ideological positioning that this entails, the underlying politics of such nostalgia becomes apparent. A critical analysis of these two versions of Britain's past thus highlights the ideological investments involved in period drama and the extent to which this ‘cosy’ genre may legitimate or challenge contemporary political claims.

Keynesianism: Nationalist Ideology

This article argues that Keynesianism is best understood as an intervention in capitalist economic apologetics, an attempt to salvage marginalism, rather than as a real policy to attempt to save capitalism. Within this framework, Keynes's policy ideas are nationalistic. The post-war ascendancy of Keynesian ideology is then to be attributed to the geopolitical conditions of US capitalist world-leadership in the Cold War, rather than to an actual successful pursuit of Keynesian economic management. The continued attachment of large parts of the left to ‘Keynesian' stimulus proposals is merely a politics of nostalgia.

Memory, History, and Nostalgia in Berlin’s Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in Berlin is devoted to telling the 2,000-year history of Jews in Germany in a stunning building designed by Daniel Libeskind. It is Germany’s premier museum devoted to Jewish history and memory, but it is expressly not a Holocaust museum and most reference to the Holocaust is architectural. In its interactive and sophisticated exhibitions, the Jewish Museum represents contemporary international trends in museology and in many ways resembles the many Holocaust and other memorial museums around the world, one of the most prominent and striking international museological trends. However, in rejecting the categorization as a memorial museum and in focusing on a celebration of German–Jewish culture and history rather than the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Jewish Museum is what we might call a countermemorial museum. As such, it challenges the new norms around the creation of memorial museums and other sites of memory to be self-reflexive meditations on the negative past and its trauma. If memorial museums emerge from a particular orientation toward the past that Jeffrey Olick calls the “politics of regret” and claims is a major characteristic of our age, then the Jewish Museum might represent a parallel trend that we can call a “politics of nostalgia.” The museum serves, in many ways, as a screen upon which present-day Germany can project an idealized image of its past, masking some of the present tensions around German national identity and ideas of German multiculturalism. At the same time, the museum often seems to be in conflict with Libeskind’s building, which is infused with Holocaust symbolism and meaning.

“It May Be That There Is No Place for Any of Us”: Homosexuality, Communism, and the Politics of Nostalgia in Capote’s The Grass Harp

“It May Be That There Is No Place for Any of Us”: Homosexuality, Communism, and the Politics of Nostalgia in Capote’s The Grass Harp

Strindberg and Radicalism—Strindberg and the Avant-garde: A Hundred-Year Legacy

Strindberg and Radicalism—Strindberg and the Avant-gardeA Hundred-Year Legacy Anna Westerståhl Stenport and Eszter Szalczer Jag är socialist, nihilist, republikan allt som kan vara konträrt mot de reaktionära! Detta på känsel, ty jag är Jean Jacques’ intime när det gäller återgång till Naturen: Jag skulle vilja vara med och vända upp och ner på allt, för att få se hvad som ligger i botten; jag tror att vi äro så intrasslade, så förfärligt mycket regerade att det inte kan utredas utan måste brännas upp, sprängas, och så börja ett nytt! (Strindberg, August Strindbergs brev 166) I’m a socialist, a nihilist, a republican, anything that is opposed to the reactionaries! And from instinct, for I’m Jean-Jacques’ intime where a return to Nature is concerned: I’d like to join in turning everything upside down in order to see what lies at the bottom; I believe we are now in such a state, so dreadfully regulated, that things can’t be straightened out, it must all be burned down and blown up, so we can start afresh! (Strindberg, Strindberg’s Letters 77) This Is How the Thirty-One-Year-Old August Strindberg (1849–1912) presented himself to Edvard Brandes in response to the latter’s invitation to contribute to the Danish newspaper Morgenbladet in 1880 (Strindberg, Strindberg’s Letters 75). The two writers had never met before, and the offer from Brandes followed close upon his reading of Strindberg’s breakthrough novel Röda rummet (1879; The Red Room), an inflammatory piece, which quickly made his name known in Sweden—or, as Brandes’s invitation indicates, throughout Scandinavia. But did this youthful declaration of revolutionary stance come true over a lifetime of work? Or, rather, how did the author’s voluminous contributions to literature and the arts contribute to further [End Page 235] questioning of the fundamentals of what “ligger i botten” (Strindberg, August Strindbergs brev 166) [“lies at the bottom” (77)], as he expressed in the letter? Is it possible, even desirable, to chart the ebb and flow of Strindberg’s radicalism throughout the immense body of texts he produced? And was this radicalism progressive or conservative in its direction? Forward-looking or reactionary in its outlook? Indeed, did the author’s work end up challenging customary definitions of the concepts so often used to historicize, canonize, and rationalize literary representation? Within the framework of their respective subjects, each author in this special issue on Strindberg and Radicalism—Strindberg and the Avant-Garde grapples with such questions. For the first time in the history of Strindberg studies, we are, through this volume, offering a comprehensive, varied, and innovative examination of them. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, something or someone “radical” is “characterized by independence of or departure from what is usual or traditional; progressive, unorthodox, or innovative in outlook, conception, design, etc.” Another meaning of the term, especially when speaking of change or action, is described as “going to the root or origin [the term comes from the Latin radix, i.e. root]; touching upon or affecting what is essential and fundamental; thorough, far-reaching.” Thus radicalism can be associated, often simultaneously, with the forward-looking, innovative stance of the avant-garde and with a revisionist reassessment of the past in defiance of the present. In his letter to Brandes, for example, we see Strindberg evoking Rousseau’s call for a return to nature, so that the present, “så förfärligt mycket regerade” (August Strindbergs brev 166) [“so dreadfully regulated” (77)], can be uprooted and given a fresh start, all in one gesture. Thus, radicalism is by no means a theoretically unequivocal concept; it wasn’t for Strindberg, either. The author’s response to Brandes, articulating his calling as the writer of Röda rummet, namely, to go back to the roots and “vända upp och ner på allt” [“(turn) everything upside down”] echoes the complexity of the term. As Alastair Bonnett argues in Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia, “the modern era is characterized by change and a far more intense and...