Restorative Nostalgia Research Articles

Lyrics of longing: Exploring the role of music in the lived experience of homesickness among college students

The study investigates the multifaceted role of music during homesickness among first-year college students in India. As compared to other mental health outcomes, homesickness is a relatively understudied phenomenon, yet noteworthy due to its direct association with depression and anxiety. Although empirical evidence about music highlights its therapeutic potential for managing stress and anxiety, few studies have explored its role in connection with homesickness. The data for this study were collected through semi-structured interviews with 10 students about their perception of using music during homesickness. Through interpretative phenomenological analysis, the emerging themes pointed to a mixed influence, highlighting the bittersweet nature of music during homesickness. While music validates feelings and boosts confidence and motivation, it also triggers restorative nostalgia and serves as an escape from confronting homesickness. Moreover, native songs fostered an appreciation for one’s culture and helped students connect with their roots. The study contributes to understanding how music is a versatile tool for students dealing with homesickness, offering solace and potential challenges. It serves as a guide to future intervention studies that could explore music’s long-term influences. Recognising the diverse ways students perceive and respond to music provides valuable insights for developing tailored interventions and support systems.

Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: Nostalgia and mobility perceptions of informal dementia carers

Worldwide, there is an increased prevalence of dementia and consequently informal dementia carers. Given the everyday responsibilities of informal dementia caring, the mobility of the informal carer is inextricably connected to the mobility of the one they care for. The mobility changes associated with informal dementia caring may foster feelings of nostalgia for past mobility, which may play a role in perceptions of present mobility. Therefore, the aim of this article is to better understand how nostalgia shapes mobility perceptions of informal dementia carers. Using remote graphic elicitation and telephone interviews, this article offers three key findings. Firstly, both reflective and restorative nostalgia are felt by the participants concerning their perceived past mobility, with the type of relationship with the care recipient playing a role how their nostalgia is experienced. Secondly, carers reflected very positively on their past mobility compared to their present mobility, which they considered mundane and care-centric. Thirdly, participants felt uncertain about their future mobility due to their reflections on past mobility and the unpredictability of dementia and care. Thus, the underlying feelings and sensations associated with nostalgia are key to understanding how carers experience their everyday lives and how this contributes to their sense of wellbeing.

Yougonostalgie, yougosphère culturelle et mémoire de / pour l’avenir

By counterbalancing the instrumentalization of the ethno-nationalist restorative nostalgia – which was not only the affective and imaginary fuel of the mnemonic wars fought, starting from the 80s, on the territory of “the country that no longer exists”, but also that of both the subsequent tragedies and cultural-political polarizations –, Yugonostalgia emerged in the painful 90s as a privileged form of post-Yugoslav mnemonic imagination. Against the background of the persistent mnemonic conflicts within the region, the multidirectional/ agonistic Yugonostalgic memory appears nowadays as a catalyst of the emotional and ethical commitment with the recent past, particularly able to inspire “visions of a better future”. Keywords: Yugonostalgia, multidirectional/ agonistic memory, retrospective utopia, post-Yugoslav divided memories, retrotopia

Nostalgia in Life Writing: Tracing the Uses of Nostalgia in Select Holocaust Trauma Memoirs

The article seeks to develop a theoretical analysis and interpretation of the role of nostalgia in German Holocaust memoirs. The intervention of advertising by appropriating nostalgia into marketing has led to an effacement of ‘algia’ or the pain that nostalgia implicates. The modern perception of nostalgia as a positive emotion has affected the idea of yoking nostalgia to traumatic experiences. The current paper analyses whether nostalgia plays a conspicuous role in the trauma narratives of Holocaust survivors. The paper is divided into three sections: first, an overview of the term ‘nostalgia’ through the ages is attempted to comprehend the problem of attaching nostalgia to trauma narratives. Second, textual analysis of The Boy on the Wooden Box (2013) by Leon Leyson and I will Plant you a Lilac Tree (2005) by Laura Hillman is undertaken to establish the presence of nostalgia in the narratives. Third, the major uses of nostalgia in the select texts are condensed into five categories: nostalgia functions as a tool of Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), relieves survival anxiety, improves resolute decisions, aids in preserving nostalgic objects and operates as an intermediary between individual and collective memories in the primary texts. Svetlana Boym’s binary classification of nostalgia is applied to the texts to provide an insight into the nature of nostalgia invoked. The study concludes that restorative nostalgia disrupts progress but augments the nostalgic individual’s determination to survive and recreate the perfect past. Reflective nostalgia provides the awareness that the past is irrevocable, and that change is inevitable.

Geek nostalgia: The reflective and restorative defence of white male geek culture

During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, this article explores how and why geeks nostalgically long for a time when they were largely marginalized. We combine readings of Swedish online geek podcasts and YouTube channels with ethnographic visits to geek conferences and pop-cultural “geek fairs,” such as Comic Con and SciFiWorld. We argue that geek nostalgia represents a clinging on to a “constitutive wound,” allowing the geek figure to mobilize masculine victimhood in ways that simultaneously underpin geek privilege and allow the geek to continue operating as a white male gatekeeper of geek culture.

Finding the Lost Home: Restorative Nostalgia in the Characters of Game of Thrones

Finding the Lost Home: Restorative Nostalgia in the Characters of Game of Thrones

The Impact of Restorative Nostalgia and Transgenerational Memories on Identity Construction in Susan Abu Alhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

The Impact of Restorative Nostalgia and Transgenerational Memories on Identity Construction in Susan Abu Alhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

Mémoire, nostalgie et « la fin de l’utopie » à l’âge du « présentisme »

"Less than a decade after the proclamation of “the end of history”, the anxieties about “the end of utopia” are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both “the crisis of the future” and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order – occurred in the ‘70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain – which defines the “presentist regime of historicity”. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a “global epidemic of nostalgia”, including the commodified forms of “retromania”, that reveals the presentist “faces of utopianism”, from the non-instrumental “retrospective utopias” – as poles of “existential” types of reflective nostalgic practices – to the instrumental “retrotopias” based on the “restorative nostalgia”, which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the ‘80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the “age of extremes” and the apprehensions about “the future of nostalgia”, the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the ’70s and the ‘80s – which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis – to the post–Cold War contests around “the divised memories” of “Europe’s Europes”, coexisting with the clashes of contradictory “faces” of nostalgia and utopia. Keywords: presentism, multidirectional memory, nostalgia, retrospective utopia, retrotopia"

“Whence, Then, Is This Change of Sentiment?”: Homesteading and Restorative Nostalgia in The Woman of Colour

Following the lead of recent inquiries into The Woman of Colour (1808) as a sensibility narrative that fleshed out the unfinished project of abolitionism at around the time when the slave trade was being outlawed in England (1807), this study explores the intermingling between what Svetlana Boym has identified as two distinctly oriented strands of nostalgia, reflective v. restorative, that innervate the title character’s sensibility of (dis)enchantment with her homesteading voyage, as she is transported from her native island into another – partly ancestral yet also foreign and emetic – insular space, from which she eventually tries to expunge herself into a yet-to-be-undertaken voyage of return.

When Puppies start to hate: the revanchist nostalgia of the Hugo Awards’ PuppyGate controversy

ABSTRACT In 2015, two groups of right-wing authors and fans – the Sad and Rabid Puppies – flooded the Hugo Awards with literature they deemed “popular” and anti-“message fiction.” These reactionaries mobilized the affects of melancholy, anger, and hatred against the increasing diversification of speculative fiction. Through analyzing the affective economy of “PuppyGate,” this article demonstrates the key role of nostalgia in the affective economies of reactionary movements, paying particular attention to the tension between restorative nostalgia, with its aim to return to an imagined past, and revanchist nostalgia, which strives to destroy the present and punish those who made that destruction necessary.

Subverting the Restorative Nostalgia of Black Metal: Reading Swiss Band Zeal & Ardor Through an Afropessimistic Lens

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the ways in which Swiss experimental metal band Zeal & Ardor imagine an allohistory, according to which slaves in the American South embraced Satanism to resist white supremacism. Firstly, Svetlana Boym’s reflections on nostalgia are used to argue that Zeal & Ardor reject the restorative nostalgia that infuses black metal, instead generating an off-modern anti-linear temporality permeated with the trauma of slavery. Secondly, Frank Wilderson’s Afropessimism is employed to emphasize the homelessness that characterizes the band’s oeuvre. Thirdly, it is claimed that this off-modern turn distinguishes Zeal & Ardor from the futurism of transcendental black metal.

Passés troublés, rétro-utopies et mobilisations guerrières en Europe contemporaine

"After the horrific experiences of ex-Yugoslavia, the tragedy of Ukraine reveals the terrible consequences of the memory conflicts radicalization. Anticipated by a constant mnemonic war led by the Russia particularly against its Eastern neighbors, it proves “what happens when memory wars turn into real wars”. Since the end of Cold War, in the context of the re-nationalization of ideologies, the remythologization of national histories, and the reshaping of memory politics, the European memory games, as part of the struggle for recognition, have often became memory wars. This article provides some relevant insights about the political instrumentation of the “restorative nostalgia”/“retrotopia” in the (post-)Cold War illiberal memory games/wars, against the background of the growing crises connected to the rise of neo-nationalism. Keywords: memory wars, memory games, (re)mythologization of history, restorative nostalgia, populist neo-nationalism."

The New Far Right, Subcultural Theory, and the Sociology of Emotions

This article argues that a theoretical synthesis between subcultural theory and the sociology of emotions can provide a way to grasp the esthetic and emotional appeal of the new far right. This is illustrated through a multimodal analysis of fashwave music. We find that the central emotion conveyed by the music is a variation of restorative nostalgia accompanied by a sense of loss and anger. The analysis demonstrates the potential of the theoretical perspective and contributes empirically to studies of the new far-right movement.

«Чемпион мира» и «Одиннадцать молчаливых мужчин»: нормативный порядок современного российского кинематографа и ностальгия по советским спортивным победам

The article focuses on the feature films "The World Champion" and "Eleven Silent Men" released by the domestic cinema in the winter of 2021/2022, which relate to the genre of historical films about a specific event. In the absence of a universal theory and methods of analyzing historical cinema, an attempt is being made to consider films based on the assumption that they broadcast the mythologeme "USSR – The West". The current political situation is taken into account, characterized by the interest of the Russian state in the production of historical and patriotic motion pictures popular with the viewer, as well as the acute phase of confrontation between the Russian Federation and Western countries. The essence of historical films claiming to be connected with the modern context and going beyond the usual perception in the conditions of digital media communication is also taken into account. Using the example of the development of the "USSR – The West" mythologeme in feature films, the evolution of the "Us – Them" myth is shown and the approval of such a normative order in which Soviet sports victories acquire an epic scale and legendary dimension, and the actions of Soviet citizens are predictable, inscribed in the logic of rational, correct behavior. The actions of representatives of the Western world are associated with ambiguous, often caricatured images referring to heterogeneous socio-cultural phenomena. It is noted that an important factor in the success of films is what generation the audience belongs to, what forms of nostalgia they experience: this is both a restorative nostalgia, which allows us to recall the grandiose sports victories that the entire Soviet people were involved in, and a reflective nostalgia that focuses on details and contexts. After watching movies, the viewer begins to live as if in two realities. In one – cinematographic – the victories of Soviet athletes and almost fair play; in the other – objective – violations of international law and campaigns to discredit Russian athletes as heirs of Soviet winning traditions.

“Golden hour”: Nostalgia and the demise of the Muslim urban space in Twilight in Delhi and Sunlight on a Broken Column

ABSTRACT This article explores how changing cityscapes of (post)colonial urban transition contribute to the creation of nostalgic longing in Twilight in Delhi and Sunlight on a Broken Column. Drawing from recent scholarship, it focuses on the memorialization of space and compares the ways in which narrative memory frames the perception of urbanization in both texts. Further, this study also examines the cultural location of this nostalgia and articulates the categorization of a specific Muslim nostalgia, which comes from the recognition of the anticipated political and social exclusion of the community in contemporary India. The article analyses the impact of the transformation of the city with colonization and decolonization on Muslims, as narrated in both texts. Borrowing from Svetlana Boym’s twin concepts of reflective and restorative nostalgia as analytical frameworks, a close reading reveals significantly contrasting literary perspectives when it comes to narrating the flux between modernity and tradition within the Indo Muslim imagination.

일리야 카바코프 창작에 반영된 소비에트 아이러니와 노스탤지어 서사 충동

‘Nostalgia’ is a major theme that runs through the works of Ilya Kabakov (И. Кабаков), a Russian painter who represents Moscow Conceptualism. In this paper, based on Svetlana Boim"s definition of the word "nostalgia", we would like to analyze how two layers of nostalgia are realized in Kabakov"s creations. The layer of "restorative nostalgia" in Kabakov"s creations is developed with the reproduction of the "disappeared Soviet" space in the back of history. ‘Reflective nostalgia’ is reproduced based on Kabakov’s personal memory, which exists separately from the grand ideological narrative that occupied Soviet space and time. Furthermore, these two layers of nostalgia do not exist singly, but often appear in the form of a coexistence of a gigantic narrative formed in a isolated special space-time called "Soviet" and a micro-narrative embedded in the cracks. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus on the aspect of coexistence: the coexistence of "restorative nostalgia" and "reflective nostalgia" in’ Kabakov"s creations, and furthermore, the nostalgia of public objects composed of grand narratives and the nostalgia dependent on private memory made up of micro narratives. Kabakov often creates a configuration in which two forms of nostalgia coexist in his work. In addition, he projects his extremely private memories of a special form of nostalgia, namely, work schedules, toilets, and public houses, which are hard to see as objects of nostalgia, suggesting the double implications of Soviet space and time. Furthermore, in Kabakov"s creations, the nostalgic narrative impulse is not limited to simply the memories surrounding an individual. This reveals the "aesthetic nostalgia" for his artistic predecessors such as Malevich and Leonardo da Vinci, and expands to overcoming the masters of art. The summoning of a master of art by aesthetic nostalgia echoes the theme of "little man", one of the essential subjects in Russian literature. Moreover, it leads to declaring that Kabakov"s creation has entered the post-Sots era beyond conceptualism and Sots-Art. Based on the above, in this paper, various layers of nostalgia embodied in Ilya Kabakov"s creation, that is, "restorative nostalgia" as an official representation of Soviet space and time, and "reflective nostalgia" as a hidden private memory of the space, and furthermore, the aspect of the manifestation of "aesthetic nostalgia" as awedness and overcoming of masters of art and their works will be analyzed. Through this, we would like to explain the form and implications of Soviet space-time reproduced through a nostalgic narrative in Kabakov"s creations, and furthermore, the method of recalling and overcoming the avant-garde and socialist realism as a part of aesthetic nostalgia.

Beyond “Making Poland Great Again.” Nostalgia in Polish Populist and Non‐populist Discourses1

Nostalgia can be triggered not only by personal recollections but also by exposure to narratives or images evoking desirable pasts, more or less fictional, and inducing feelings of longing for them. We analyze the institutional and semiotic machinery involved in the cultural construction of nostalgia in Poland and its role in generating sentiments that predispose people to support populist—particularly right‐wing populist—ideology. While various political options use semiotic vehicles of nostalgia designed to engender nostalgic sentiments, we argue that there are systematic differences of content and form between politically useful invocations of nostalgia, related to the ideology of their proponents. We further posit that right‐wing populist nostalgia invokes not only national greatness but also national innocence. We also identify specific features of such nostalgic discourses. The empirical material for our four cases ranges from textual and film narratives, through images and performances, to large‐scale exhibitions and museal projects. To analyze their content and determine the form of politicization we build upon the conceptual apparatus developed by Svetlana Boym (reflective versus restorative nostalgia), Jan Assmann (communicative versus cultural memory), and Northrop Frye (low mimetic versus high mimetic narrative forms). The analysis relies on Geertzian “thick description” and the extended case study method.

One village, many nostalgias: The entanglements of embodied scopic regimes in the landscape production of Chinese nostalgia tourism

This article uses investigations into two villages to scrutinise the politics of space and visuality in the top-down development of nostalgia tourism across the Chinese countryside engineered by the government since 2014. It goes beyond the debate between the representational and non-representational approaches in tourist landscape studies and proposes the concept of ‘embodied scopic regimes’ as a more nuanced framework of analysis. It is argued that the landscape production in the current development of nostalgia tourism in China is featured by the coexistence and entanglement of three different embodied scopic regimes: ‘stop/gaze regime’, ‘flâneur/glance regime’ and ‘choraster/spectacle regime’. Each regime produces a unique fashion of visual pleasure and distinct mode of physical movements, manifested and afforded by different sets of cultural technologies. The operation of these multiple regimes also diversifies the meanings of nostalgia that these tourist sites claim to represent, which allows the overlapping between ‘reflective nostalgia’ and ‘restorative nostalgia’ in the same space. Based on this unique case, the article engages with the ‘landscape debate’ in critical tourist studies and extends the common ground between the two seemingly oppositional approaches.

Între nostalgia restauratoare şi muzeul fantomelor utopiei. Practici nostalgice în spaţiul cultural (post)sovietic

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly during the hard transition of the 90s, the highly polarized Russian society revealed two main forms of remembering and coping with recent past. This past was either idealized as a time of imperial glory, national pride, and relative welfare, even if it also included periods of anomie (the late Stalin era) or stagnation (the Brejnev era), either treated as a period of significant traumas that necessitated persistent recognition and working through. As for the official memory regimes, if the first post-Soviet decade was dominated by the totalitarian anticommunist (and antinostalgic) paradigm, the 2000s brought a radical turn, with the rise of victimhood nationalism and “redemptive” authoritarianism of the Putin era. The new mnemonic regime is shaped by an official, “patriotic” restorative nostalgia that is also placed in the centre of the presidential cultural programe designed to legitimize the authoritarian system and to support the restoration of a great, mythical Russia. Against this background, new forms of counter-memory and counter-nostalgia began to manifest within both the social and cultural field. One of the most remarkable exemples is offered within the “new realities” created by the young photographer Danila Tkachenko, who’s compositions marked by a “second-hand nostalgia” challenge both the Soviet utopia and its official nostalgic-populist recostructions. By means of a special nostalgic technique based on reframing the remnants and the “trukhliashechkas” of the Soviet past – (re)interpreted as the symbols of “the perfect technocratic future that never came” –, the young artist also deconstruct the imagined “sovietness” embedded in the cultural-political products shaped by the statist patriotic nostalgia. His representations of the post-Soviet landscape are those of “a ghost of utopia”, a land of ruins, of abandoned cities, of ecological disasters, and of millions unburied deads of the GULAG.

Multifaced Hungarian Kin-State Activism in Szeklerland: Rebuilding the Last ‘Nation' Through Restorative Nostalgia and Lieux de Mémoire

This article explores the cultural dynamics of Fidesz's kin-state policies achieved in Romania between 2015 and 2020, particularly in the enclave of Szeklerland. In recent years, Fidesz's external policies constructed a transborder “synthetic home” connected to Hungary by memory spaces. Consequently, this study investigates how the ethnocultural reproduction and redefinition of the Hungarian heritage in Romania has evolved under these influences. To understand Fidesz's ethnic parallelism, this article studies Fidesz's overseas financial assistance for Hungarian cultural heritage and the actions of long-distance Hungarian nationalists from Romania. By analysing the lieux de mémoire from Szeklerland and the activities of political agents, this paper reveals how public spaces are nationalised under a Hungarian identity. This paper also shows that the dialectic of lieux, in the case of minorities separated from their homeland, features both a restorative process and commemorative rhetoric of a positive past. Finally, this paper reveals that lieux de mémoire are instrumental when synthetically reconstructing the lost home through religious and nationalist revivals.