Svetlana Boym Research Articles

Agha Shahid Ali and the Phenomenology of Postcolonial Nostalgia

Scholars have generally analyzed nostalgia in cognitive terms – the ideas of home it traffics in, the stories it tells itself about the world, the narratives its subjects imagine themselves acting in. Through readings of two poems by Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali, this essay argues against such cognitive focus, proposing instead an affect-minded account of nostalgia that draws on phenomenological research so far ignored in both literary and postcolonial scholarship. In particular, it argues the homes desired by nostalgia are inherently ambiguous and underdetermined. Realizing this forces us to abandon common typologies of nostalgia that rely on the assumption of a clear object of desire, such as Svetlana Boym’s influential distinction between “reflective” and “restorative” types. Instead, the essay argues we must attend to nostalgia as the affective negotiation of an interruption of the present by a sense of familiarity lost, familiarity moreover that one knows of (at that moment) only through a gestalt of a past era or season.

All the Exiles оf Irène Némirovsky

The success of the novel Suite francaise has again sparked interest for the opus of Irène Némirovsky, an author who wrote during the interwar period and produced around twenty novels and several collections of novellas. The life of Irène Némirovsky (Ирма Ирина Леонидовна Немировская, 1903-1942), a Russian Jew who lived as a stateless immigrant since the Russian Revolution until her tragic death in Auschwitz, has also attracted a lot of public interest. In this paper, our focus is first on the circumstances in which Nemirovska lived and wrote, as they had an essential impact on her fate and the themes that underlie much of her work. After that overview of the work of Irène Némirovsky, the analysis in this paper focuses on the novels in which the themes of exile, nostalgia and lack of belonging are evident, such as David Golder (David Golder, 1929), Snow in Autumn (Les Mouches d’automne, 1931), The Wine of Solitude (Le Vin de solitude, 1935) and The Dogs and the Wolves (Les Chiens et les Loups, 1940).The theoretical basis for our analysis is found in the study The Future of Nostalgia by Svetlana Boym. In this study, Boym distinguishes between the two main subtypes of nostalgia: restorative and reflective and she identifies their characteristics. The analysis of the main characters’ actions and feelings in the afore mentioned Nemirovska’s novels show that reflective nostalgia is predominant in them; the characters show contradictory tendencies: on the one hand to fit in and integrate into the society, while on the other they are dominated by anxiety, sorrow and feelings of displacement and lack of belonging.

Bandit: Here to Haunt You! On Why I Became an Émigré Theatre Maker

Summary The article employs concepts of time lag, inspired by Ernst Bloch, and ghost and haunting, borrowed from Jacques Derrida. It also draws on Svetlana Boym’s and Vilém Flusser’s vision of the émigré and on Dominick LaCapra’s and Slavoj Žižek’s interpretations of trauma. The analysis is also informed by Karen Jürs-Munby’s and Cathy Caruth’s views on trauma and its representation in theatre. This critical apparatus is put into motion in the particular context of BANDIT: a theatre project developed in the UK by two Romanian émigré theatre-makers. The main focus is on exposing links between the references to trauma contained in the theatre piece BANDIT and the makers’ self-imposed artistic exile in the UK. The article seeks to answer the following question: what has pushed us, the makers of BANDIT, to leave our native country and what is our (new) role (as artists) in the country of emigration? The discussion is carried out within the wider context of the vast waves of Romanian emigration to Western Europe (after the fall of the Iron Curtain). The article critiques the troublesome relation of the contemporary Romanian society to its Communist past and the apparent inability and/or unwillingness to deal with the repressed/traumatic memories of that past. Analysis of BANDIT as performance of lingering trauma also references the historical Percentages agreement between Stalin and Churchill—the informal agreement that established spheres of influence in Europe at the end of the Second World War. Identifying the Iron Curtain as the epicentre of traumatic memory for Eastern Europeans, the discussion about BANDIT also makes a reference to Communist crimes against political prisoners committed in Romanian prisons in 1951–1952, put in parallel with the toxic EU referendum campaign in the UK in 2016. Underpinned by Derrida’s thinking, the article explains how the Romanian émigré-artist (as a paragon of the Romanian / Eastern European émigré in general) has to fashion herself into a ghost that haunts the adoptive culture, using artistic exile as a platform for processing the traumatic memories of an unresolved past.

Thomas Pynchon and Paul Thomas Anderson’sInherent Vice(s) and the Affective Politics of Nostalgia

AbstractThis essay examines Thomas Pynchon’s 2009 Inherent Vice and Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of the novel. These works are closely connected, and can be effectively viewed as two parts of a single transmedia text which includes a novel, a film, and two trailers. All of the constituent parts of this meta-Inherent Vice are informed by their engagement with nostalgia. Yet it is precisely here that the texts diverge from each other most markedly, activating different types of nostalgia for different purposes. While much contemporary scholarship relies on Svetlana Boym’s reflective/restorative binary to conceptualize the phenomenon of nostalgia, this reading argues that a public/personal divide offers another perhaps more appropriate lens to view the differences between the two versions of Inherent Vice. Pynchon’s novel emphasizes the political potential and social aspects of nostalgia, while Anderson’s film focuses on its personal, affective impact.

Hip Nostalgia

The opening episode of season two of the AMC series Preacher begins with a big reveal that sets in motion the season’s subsequent action: God has come to earth and gone missing. The protagonists—a preacher possessed by the powerful, but amoral offspring of the illicit coupling of an angel and a demon, his contract killer girlfriend, and an Irish vampire—track the almighty to a small town strip club in East Texas he has been rumored to frequent. God is not there, mayhem ensues, and in the club’s office the manager—before succumbing to a gunshot wound—tells the preacher, with a sigh, ‘God didn’t come for the girls, you idiot. He came…for the jazz.’ The show then cuts to the club’s performance space where a piano-less trio led by veteran New Orleans drummer Johnny Vidacovich offers a Coltrane-inflected, hard bop-style tune while pole dancers writhe at the edge of the screen. Jazz is here partly, it turns out, to give the showrunners an excuse to set the season in New Orleans, but it is also here for more than simple exigency. This article plumbs the place of jazz in three contemporary American television shows’ soundtracks: AMC’s Preacher, Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, and F/X’s Louie. Together they represent a distinct cultural phenomenon in a distinct historical moment: the embrace of jazz as a music signifying creativity and the new; hipness and the bohemian margins of polite society; and elite, left wing intellectualism in an America riven by hope, change, and retrenchment. It is perhaps no surprise that each of these shows has a similar soundtrack—not only inasmuch as each includes new jazz recordings, in fact, but also in the range of other music compiled for their scores. They share a format—the ambivalent ‘dramedy’—an auteurish quality, an embrace of indie film aesthetics on the small screen, and a target audience. God aside, each of these shows participates in a signifying chain that links jazz to other aspects of American entertainment that once thrived together in a kind of demimonde, and which have since largely become uncoupled from each other; a Cold War-era world of Playboy clubs and the Rat Pack.
 What, this article asks, might be at stake in reattaching jazz, stand up comedy, and strippers in these television shows? What does their target audience want from that set of associations? Answering those questions requires a close look not only at the narrative frames in which jazz is made to participate and the televisual techniques with which it is shown, but also at the particular sonic qualities that define jazz for these shows. Jazz is, of course, a famously varied genre label. Each of these shows features the same kind of jazz: an eclectic style based in Miles Davis’s approach to texture and form and in John Coltrane’s harmonic explorations as elaborated since the 1970s. Notably, in using this style of music they have found a jazz that is neither strongly associated with the middleclass Black project of the ‘neo-traditional’ resurgence of historical styles starting in the 1990s, nor associated with the Black radical project of hip hop and R&B-tinged Afrofuturist jazz growing in popularity at the time the shows were released. It is not so much that the vision of jazz these shows produce is white, as that it occludes its racial signifiers altogether. In the most critical assessment one might say that this is a (mostly) white, (mostly) male attempt to recapture a moment of white hipness: a chance to make Bohemian America great again. A more sympathetic interpretation may use Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia to argue that the desire is to recapture the possibility of a different future offered by a selective memory of the past. These shows all make gestures toward a more multicultural world, and a world impacted by feminist and queer movements. This article holds open the possibility that by longing for a moment when jazz was hip these shows may be articulating with an audience’s desire for a more critical, more aware, more just future.

On the Borders of Free Verse: Translating Varlam Shalamov’s Aesopian Texts

Abstract Designed to deceive some readers, such as the censor, while inviting others to read “between the lines,” Aesopian texts task their translator with added interpretive complexity. Does a given translation reflect both text and subtext, target audience and hurdle audience? Is the target audience of the translated text even mappable onto an original text’s schema of hurdle and target audiences? The writings of Varlam Shalamov further complicate the translation of Aesopian texts. Whereas Leona Toker and others identify Aesopian moments in Shalamov’s prose, Svetlana Boym argues that in his writings the deceptive device of mimicry resists totalitarianism precisely when it goes beyond any Aesopian or other useful purpose. Shalamov’s 1963 essay “The National Borders of Poetry and Free Verse” (“Natsial’nye granitsy poezii i svobodnyi stikh”) invites engagement as an exemplary Aesopian text—one whose “deceptive means,” however, call for a more capacious understanding of Aesopian language. Nineteenth-century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin first used the term “Aesopian” to indicate the “trembling” littérateur’s unique style of writing, whose “deceptive means” showed “a remarkable resourcefulness in their invention.” The Aesopian mimicry of Shalamov’s essay on free verse exceeds both predator’s and trembling prey’s powers of appreciation, calling for equally artful mimicry on the part of the translator.

Self-Imposed Exile, Marginality, and Homosexuality in the Novels of Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O., and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri

ABSTRACT A burgeoning canon of Maghrebian writers in self-imposed exiled in France has in the last decade begun to openly broach the subject of homosexuality in Arab-Muslim communities of the Maghreb. Novels of writers like Abdellah Taïa, Rachid O. and Eyet-Chékib Djaziri reflect a fascinating trans-Mediterranean construction of homosexual identity. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s critical work, particularly her observation that nostalgia “charts an affective geography of the native land that often mirrors the melancholic landscapes” of the exiled, this paper analyzes the construction of homosexuality against the notions of exile, nostalgia, and marginality. The novels of these Maghrebian writers highlight nostalgia as both cathartic and paralyzing for “gay” migrant protagonists who find themselves trapped in the subtle seam between a cherished Maghreb that is framed as homophobic in the sexual clash of civilizations and a more liberal yet inauspicious France. The nostalgic contemplation of the constitution of a homosexual subjectivity is read as a critical performance and mainstreaming of hitherto marginalized voices that now subvert and fight back against normalizing discourses of ethnicity, sexual and gender identity as well as nationality.

ResurReaction: Competing Visions of Turkey’s (proto) Ottoman Past in Magnificent Century and Resurrection Ertuğrul

The Turkish TV dramas Magnificent Century and Resurrection Ertuğrul share a number of traits: Both reprise the country’s Ottoman (or proto-Ottoman) past by focusing their story on a heroic figure; both raised the ire of critics for their lack of historicity; and both have been highly successful, ruling ratings on the same competitive Wednesday night prime time slot, with Resurrection coming in to take Century’s place after that show left the air. Despite these similarities, the projects represent quite different takes on the Ottoman past and the issue of history’s role in the Turkish present. While Century arguably partakes in what Svetlana Boym calls reflective nostalgia, Resurrection is a highly restorative project. In this article, I detail the differences between these projects and explain their success in light of the shifting political environment in Turkey. I begin with a characterization of Century and the ‘problem’ it posed for a conservative government that was deeply invested in an idealized Ottoman past. I next turn to Resurrection, which I see as a government reaction to Century, and explain that it succeeds where other imitators failed due to the careful choice of a hero with a relatively blank historical slate. Finally, I argue that Resurrection practices a different attitude toward history than does Century, heralding for a government that not only seeks to glorify and idolize the past, but also to claim ownership of it.

“The Past Is Never Dead. It’s Not Even Past”: The Ambivalent Call of Nostalgic Memory in Richard Ford’s Short Story “Calling” (A Multitude of Sins, 2001)

This article focuses on Richard Ford’s short story “Calling,” collected in the volume entitled A Multitude of Sins (2001). It consists of the detailed recalling by a first-person narrator, from the vantage point of adulthood, of a duck-hunting outing with his father at a moment of acute family crisis when he was still a teenager. This episode, redolent of America’s nostalgic motif of male bonding and father-son transmission in the midst of mythical American nature, is shown to have proved a pathetic failure at the time, and the story stages—to pick up Svetlana Boym’s famous distinction between two main types of nostalgia—the enlightening “reflective” effects of recalling this moment of “restorative” longing for the protagonist. However, the highly analytical narrator does not consciously dwell upon the peripheral yet disturbing presence of two grotesque characters that, I contend, are the locus of the implicit meaning of the text. Through precise textual reading and references to Southern Gothic, I indeed argue that the subtext of “Calling” invites the reader to journey back into a region’s (the South’s) troubled collective past and to question its own relation to nostalgia. “Calling” thus also stages the ambivalence of nostalgic longing on the collective plane as it shows willful nostalgic recollection wavering in the face of the return of the historical repressed, that of America’s ineffable original sin.

White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature by Tim Engles

Reviewed by: White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature by Tim Engles Josef Benson Tim Engles. White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature. Palgrave, 2018. v + 243 pp. One endearing choice that Tim Engles makes in White Male Nostalgia in Contemporary North American Literature is to include himself among the white men who wittingly or unwittingly experience an emotional sense of mythical American nostalgia in response to the seemingly waning status of the white American male within American sociopolitical power structures. In Engles’s case, this takes the form of a vacation he and his father recently took to Alaska where the two men enjoyed the “unspoiled ‘wilderness’” (vi) with little thought to an indigenous past plundered by white interests. This admission bolsters Engles’s credibility as a critic and as a human being. Another choice Engles makes early on establishes the high stakes of the book and historically contextualizes his discussion within the current era of American history, which requires an all-hands-on-deck approach to repudiating the white supremacist ideologies bubbling to the surface of American life since the election of President Donald Trump. Engles notes, “When a candidate who had been caught bragging about sexually assaulting women ran during the 2016 presidential election with the full-throated support of the Ku Klux Klan, all while repeatedly promising to ‘Make America Great Again,’ he both embodied and deployed a form of nostalgia that was particularly appealing to white men” (1). Engles identifies the slogan “MAGA” as a powerful form of nostalgia that simultaneously galvanizes feelings of powerlessness among a large portion of American white men and legitimizes the idea that America can once again return to a time and place where white men reigned supreme. Engles employs Svetlana Boym’s phrase “restorative nostalgia” (8), a “desire . . . or aching . . . to return to a previous time and place . . . and thus to an idealized set of conditions, ultimately as a way of securing dominance in the present.” Hidden in plain sight within the connotation of the word “nostalgia” is the idea that white men have been unfairly dethroned from their powerful perch and that this, more than anything, has contributed to the problems in the US. The idea of restorative nostalgia links Engles’s literary analyses together and offers a discussion of the various ways protagonists in their respective novels pine for an era long passed when white men enjoyed unencumbered power. Engles establishes a crucial idea in the beginning of the book: “Ordinary white men often cast themselves melodramatically . . . as struggling protagonists of their own lives, unjustly besieged by the status-threatening demands of women and ethnoracial minorities” (7). [End Page 720] Two particularly salient forms of restorative nostalgia that Engles identifies in these works are moral and spatial. First, he employs Richard Wright’s novel Savage Holiday as a vehicle that highlights the hypocrisy inherent in the historical harnessing of whiteness as a moral impetus for exploitation and imperialism. Namely, Engles notes, “The moral conundrum that Wright locates at the heart of white masculinity is the donning of a mask of morality while knowing at some level of a collective immorality” (71). Implicit in the idea that the past represents a simpler and better time is an assumption of white men’s moral superiority, which is often couched in references to the founding fathers. Engles identifies this fraudulent and hypocritical idea as problematic from the beginning, noting, “Slavery, and the profits it provided, violated white male American ethical convictions of overriding compassion and a sense of justice for other human beings” (77). The enslavement of Africans, as well as the extermination of Native Americans, grossly undermines any claims to moral superiority that white men may feel when considering the legacy of the United States and its development into a world power. White Europeans have never been morally justified in their efforts to settle North America. To illustrate spatial restorative nostalgia, Engles uses the character of Jack in Carol Shield’s novel Happenstance. Engles highlights the penchant of American white men to encroach physically, emotionally, or intellectually on virtually any space available to human beings, past or present, with total impunity, as though space does not become...

Ostalgia in Czech Films about Normalisation Created Post-1989

This piece will introduce Czech ostalgic films set in the normalisation period (1969–1989) and will interpret the basic divide between nostalgic representation of the period and the openly anti-communist stances of the films’ creators. The methodological frame of this research comes from Robert Rosenstone’s approach of representation of history in film. To interpret ostalgia in Czech film, I use ideas from Daphne Berdhal and Svetlana Boym. I described the nostalgic elements and their functions in the structure of the films, taking into account their story, characters, settings, film style, narration, genre, and audience response (identification, causality of emotional experience). Czech ostalgic films about the normalisation period are interpretively ambivalent. The interpretational tension appears out of a fundamental divide between a clear refusal of communism and an idyllic view of the socialist past. They cannot be simply classified into restorative or reflective nostalgia. The younger generation of spectators perceives ostalgic films in the mode of reflective nostalgia; on the other hand, the older generation perceive the films in terms of restorative nostalgia. A different way of perceiving ostalgia reveals a misunderstanding between generations of the current Czech society. Due to singular anti-communist viewpoints and emphasised liberal values, the films cannot be interpreted in a desire for an idealised home in a communist past, but as a desire for a present home and its security, which cannot be clearly conceptualised. The concept of reflective nostalgia can be linked with the theory of Berdhal. The films cannot be perceived as a desire for an idealised home in a communist past due to specific anti-communist viewpoints and highlighted liberal values, but as a need for a home and security that cannot be directly conceptualised. This appearance of reflective nostalgia can be connected with the theory stated by Berdhal.

Childhood’s End (or, We Have Never Been Modern, Except in Minecraft)

This article considers Minecraft, one of the most widely played and popular video games of all time, with over 100 million copies sold. Minecraft is an open-ended strategy game about material logistics, governance, and world building. It is also about a nostalgic modernity that players desire and produce but that is everywhere complicated by the very conditions of its production. Drawing on the work of Bernhard Siegert, Svetlana Boym, Raymond Williams, James C. Scott, and Chandra Mukerji, we consider the block-, grid-, and code-level cultural techniques associated with playing the game as allegories for our increasingly complex relationship to digital culture. Minecraft is not the apotheosis of cultural domination by code as much as it is a playable parable about its complications.

There’s No Nostalgia Like Hollywood Nostalgia

This essay argues that the complexities of the nostalgic impulse in Hollywood cinema are inadequately described by Svetlana Boym’s particular description of Hollywood as “both induc[ing] nostalgia and offer[ing] a tranquilizer” and her highly influential general distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Instead, it contends that Hollywood departs in important ways from the models of both the restorative nostalgia established by the heritage cinema and Great Britain and the reflective nostalgia commonly found in American literature. Using a wide range of examples from American cinema, American literature, and American culture, it considers the reasons why nostalgia occupies a different place and seeks different kinds of expressions in American culture than it does in other national cultures, examines the leading Hollywood genres in which restorative nostalgia appears and the distinctive ways those genres inflect it, and concludes by urging a closer analysis of the more complex, multi-laminated nostalgia Hollywood films offer as an alternative to Boym’s highly influential categorical dichotomy.

Being Special: Nostalgia through Special Rates Areas and Community Improvement Districts in Cape Town Suburbs

This paper explores how memories and nostalgia inform the rationale of implementing Community Improvement Districts (CIDs) or Special Rates Areas (SRAs) as a means of crime prevention and urban maintenance in two formerly ‘whites-only’ Cape Town suburbs; Rondebosch and Mowbray. Through an exploration of the remembering, the maintenance and the resuscitation of an idealized past in a suburb that remains predominantly white after years of racial and economic exclusion, this paper interrogates the role of long-term resident nostalgia in post-apartheid South Africa in maintaining spatial apartheid. Using Svetlana Boym’s (2001) framework of nostalgia, particularly ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia,’ to interpret the memories of residents interviewed, this paper argues that it is nostalgia for an idealized past and a remembered specialness that sustains mentalities that give rise to spatially exclusive SRAs and CIDs. In this paper, public and social media discourse analysis and resident interviews allow us to understand residents’ memories and discussions around crime and urban degeneration and homelessness in Rondebosch. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to questions about spatial exclusivity in residential spaces in the post-apartheid era, particularly in a city that retains the legacy of spatial apartheid.

Productive uses of nostalgia in contemporary Slovak fiction: Veronika Šikulová’s and Maroš Krajňak’s experiments with generational memory

ABSTRACTThis essay examines fictional uses of generational memory and life writing in Veronika Šikulová’s Miesta v sieti (Dwellings in the web) and Maroš Krajňak’s Carpathia and argues that the representations of the past in these contemporary Slovak novels provide alternatives to pernicious nationalist forms of nostalgia that have been of particular concern in the country in recent years, especially in the aftermath of the 2016 election, in which the neo-Nazi People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS) won 8% of the vote and seats in the Slovak Parliament. The essay examines representations of time and pastoral borderland spaces in each novel, arguing that the writers’ treatment of nostalgia challenges existing theories of the phenomenon as a form of maladaptation. The novels ultimately suggest a productive compromise between restorative and reflective forms of nostalgia, which is a central distinction in Svetlana Boym’s influential theory of post-socialist nostalgia. The novels’ ultimate achievement is that they avoid the extremes of sentimentality and irony in their treatment of the past and suggest visions of collective identity that provide a counterpoint to nationalist idealizations of the past.

Faces of nostalgia. Restorative and reflective nostalgia in the fine arts

In the present article I use the terminology introduced by Svetlana Boym of restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia regarding works of contemporary fine art.
 Restorative nostalgia implies an effort to revive the past – but without acknowledging that the desired and idealized past never existed, therefore it cannot be restored, either. I illustrate the application of this concept through the “new-academic” direction in today’s contemporary Hungarian fine arts. The reflective nostalgia is aware of the idealizing momentum of the desired past, it reflects critically upon its own desires, and it highlights possibilities in the past regarding the present – often playfully or with irony. I illustrate the latter through the works of the Chinese Ai Wei Wei and the Romanian Mircea Cantor. I argue that reflective nostalgia is not a fruitless burial into the past, but a resource for processing the passing of time in a creative manner.

Exploring Thirdspace in Nada Awar Jarrar's Unsafe Haven

Exploring Thirdspace in Nada Awar Jarrar's Unsafe Haven Luma Balaa (bio) Nada Awar Jarrar is a Lebanese Australian author. She writes in English, and her work belongs to the Anglo-Lebanese exile literature. When she was a child, she had to leave Lebanon because of the civil war (1975–90). She lived in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States before settling in Lebanon in 1995. In 2006, the thirty-three-day war with Israel broke out, and she fled to the mountains of Lebanon. She wrote Unsafe Haven in 2016 while residing in Beirut at the time of the Syrian war. Nearly all the novel's characters are displaced by wars in their homelands, and through their stories, Jarrar explores the different effects of displacement. Her protagonist describes how the whole Middle East region has been in turmoil, and people "find themselves disconnected and dependent on whatever and whomever provides reprieve from this state of drifting" (80). Displaced during the civil war, she flees to Cyprus for part of her life. This novel tells the story of Hannah, a journalist, who refuses to leave Lebanon despite the instability in the region. She is married to Peter, an American doctor who is without a work permit in Lebanon since, by law, a wife cannot give her nationality to her husband. Instead, he toils at a low-level administrative position (Jarrar 25). Only his love for his wife keeps him there. Their friend Maysoun is an Iraqi social worker who helps refugees. Maysoun forces her mother, Nazha, to live with her for a while in Beirut, but her mother eventually decides to go back home. Anas, an artist, came to Lebanon on business and resides in Syria with his wife and two children. When the war breaks out, Anas's wife takes the children and flees to Germany. He later tries to catch up with her but dies on his way to Damascus. Fatima, a Syrian refugee, has two children, one of whom is illegitimate. She eventually reunites with her family in Turkey. Jarrar portrays ambivalence in various ways throughout the novel. Lebanon becomes a city of contradictions, a space journeying in between the imagined home-land and factual homeland, both unsafe and at the same time a haven, a refuge to hide in. The theme of ambivalence is a "common feature of many migrants and migrant cultures" that can be projected toward the past and the present or even the future, "as to whether things were better 'then' or 'now'" (White 3). Edward Soja's [End Page 30] concepts of "Thirdspace" and Homi Bhabha's "in-between space" are occupied by many of the characters, who are mainly immigrants and refugees. Diaspora theorists such as Benedict Anderson, Svetlana Boym, and Leo Spitzer allow one to study other related themes that might trigger this feeling of ambivalence, such as home-land, war, displacement, nostalgia, trauma, personal memory, collective memory, nationalism, and humanitarianism. The Ambivalence of Nostalgia Nostalgia and nostalgic memory can have both negative and positive impacts. It can make people feel depressed because they cannot go back to the past and visit their lost homeland, or it can have positive effects because it gives them hope to rebuild the lost homeland. So on the one hand, Jarrar is pessimistic and questions the viability of her nation. On the other hand, she has hope and is inspired through her nostalgic memory to go beyond the negativity of the civil war and attempt to reconstruct Lebanon and make people reconnect with their sense of belonging and their common national values and beliefs. Jarrar seems to suffer from nostalgia and homesickness, which is "the desire to return to one's native land" (Spitzer 375). Even though she has physically returned home, she is still nostalgic for the old Lebanon before the civil war. She longs for the lost homeland, for "a 'world of yesterday' from whose ideals and values one had become distanced and detached" (Spitzer 376). Raymond Williams sees nostalgia as an "opiate with dysfunctional consequences, enticing people to take refuge in an idealized past while avoiding a critical examination and engagement with their present" (20...

Reconciliation through Estrangement

AbstractWhile it is often assumed that reconciliation culminates in the comprehensive resolution of conflict between deeply alienated parties, the article argues that reconciliation can only be achieved through complex mechanisms of estrangement that reveal alternative vistas or collective renewal. Art performs an important role in this process. The article theorizes estrangement as both an artistic and a political technique that can have world-disclosing, rather than alienating, effects on its audience: what Svetlana Boym calls estrangement for, rather than from, the world. I tease out the implications of this insight by examining the South African theater pieceUbu and the Truth Commission, which employs a number of estrangements devices in order to problematize the ambiguities and uncertainties of the post-Apartheid transition period. By subverting audience identification, yet triggering emotional contagion, the play imaginatively opens up the possibility of a common world in which agonistic relations are productively negotiated, rather than fully suppressed.

Vaporwave, or music optimised for abandoned malls

AbstractIn this article I focus on the genre of ‘vaporwave’, using the artist 18 Carat Affair as a case study, to explore the way the genre works as a project that produces, and takes pleasure in, a kind of ‘memory play’. As a genre, vaporwave is a style of music collaged together from a wide variety of largely background musics such as muzak®, 1980s elevator music and new age ambience. Vaporwave's ‘memory play’ is a project that takes remembering as its audio-visual aesthetic. The pleasure of vaporwave is therefore understood as a pleasure of remembering for the sake of the act of remembering itself. To explore this theme, I examine vaporwave's memory play using the terms of Chris Healy's ‘compensatory nostalgia’, as well as the idea of ‘ersatz nostalgia’ as discussed by Arjun Appadurai and Svetlana Boym.

“Dig, What Makes Your Mouth So Big?”: Off-Modern Nostalgia, Symbolic Cannibalism, and Crossing the Border of the Universal Language in Clarence Major’s “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage”

Abstract African American literature on the Middle Passage has always challenged white supremacy’s language with its power to define and control. This article demonstrates how the border of such a “Universal Language” is challenged and trespassed in Clarence Major’s ekphrastic poem “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage” in order to communicate – through the implementation of the voice of a disembodied water spirit Mfu – the black perspective on understanding the slave trade and effectively resist the symbolic cannibalism of Western Culture. The trope of antropophagy often appears in Middle Passage poems in the context of (mis)communication (which results in the production of controlling, racist images of blacks) and stands as a sign of Euro-American power to create the historical, hierarchical, racial reality of the Atlantic slave trade in its economic and symbolic dimensions. The strategy implemented by Major in his poetic confrontation with representation of historical slave trade in European and American Fine arts may be classified as “off-modern” (to use Svetlana Boym’s (2001) nomenclature), which immediately places his poem in a “tradition of critical reflection on the modern condition that incorporates nostalgia” as a means of a critical analysis of the heritage and limitations of a given culture. My claim is that the poem’s “off-modern nostalgia” perspective is a version of textualist strategy which Henry Louis Gates (1988) identifies as Signifyin(g). Major/Mfu successfully perforates and destabilizes the assumed objectivity and neutrality of the images of blacks and blackness created and circulated within the realm of the visual arts of the dominant Western Culture. In “The Slave Trade: View from the Middle Passage” Signifyin(g) takes the form of what could be called an ekphrastic (re)interpretation of actual works of art and joins in the critique of essentialist views often associated with understanding of meaning.