Intimations of Nostalgia: Multidisciplinary Explorations of an Enduring Emotion 9781529214789

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INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA Multidisciplinary Explorations of an Enduring Emotion Edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by Bristol University Press University of Bristol 1-​9 Old Park Hill Bristol BS2 8BB UK t: +44 (0)117 954 5940 e: bup-​[email protected] Details of international sales and distribution partners are available at bristoluniversitypress.co.uk © Bristol University Press 2022 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1476-​5 hardcover ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1477-​2 ePub ISBN 978-​1-​5292-​1478-​9 ePdf The right of Michael Hviid Jacobsen to be identified as editor of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Bristol University Press. Every reasonable effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyrighted material. If, however, anyone knows of an oversight, please contact the publisher. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the editors and contributors and not of the University of Bristol or Bristol University Press. The University of Bristol and Bristol University Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Bristol University Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design: bluinc, Bristol Front cover image: Unsplash/​Ameen Fahmy Bristol University Press uses environmentally responsible print partners. Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books, Padstow

Contents Notes on Contributors Preface and Acknowledgements

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Introduction: The Many Different Faces of Nostalgia – Exploring a Multifaceted and Multidisciplinary Emotion Michael Hviid Jacobsen

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Philosophy and Nostalgia: ‘Rooting’ within the Nostalgic Condition Giulia Bovassi

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History and Nostalgia: Historicizing a Multifaceted Emotion Tobias Becker

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Political Theory and Nostalgia: The Power of the Past in the History of Political Thought Andrew R. Murphy

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Sociology and Nostalgia: Micro-​, Meso-​and Macro-​level Dimensions of an Ambiguous Emotion Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Janelle L. Wilson

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Psychology and Nostalgia: Towards a Functional Approach Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides

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Anthropology and Nostalgia: Between Hegemonic and Emancipatory Projections of the Past Michael Herzfeld

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Media Studies and Nostalgia: Media Philosophy and Nostalgizing in Times of Crisis Katharina Niemeyer

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Marketing and Nostalgia: Unpacking the Past and Future of Marketing and Consumer Research on Nostalgia Ela Veresiu, Thomas Derek Robinson and Ana Babić Rosario

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Literature and Nostalgia: Vestiges of Paradise Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg

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Architecture and Nostalgia: The End of History, the End of the Future and the Prospect of Nostalgia Fernando Quesada and Andrés Carretero

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Postscript: On Nostalgia of the Future and the Future of Nostalgia – Some Scattered Concluding Observations Michael Hviid Jacobsen

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Index

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Notes on Contributors Tobias Becker is Research Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany,

where he is working on a history of nostalgia since the 1960s. His research focuses on the cultural, social, urban and intellectual history of Western Europe since the 19th century, particularly the history of popular culture. Giulia Bovassi is Associate Researcher at UNESCO, Chair in Bioethics

and Human Rights and a PhD student in Bioethics at UPRA, Rome, Italy. Her research focuses on neurobioethics, bioesthetics, posthumanism, digital ethics, human rights, the role of technology, biopolitics and contemporary philosophy. Andrés Carretero is an architect, critic, teacher and independent editor

based in Madrid, Spain. His practice encompasses an expanded conception of architecture intersected by art, critical theory and the political. He is a co-​founder of the MONTAJE c​ ooperative of architectural production and co-​editor of Materiales concretos. Michael Herzfeld is Ernest E. Monrad Research Professor of the Social

Sciences in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, United States, and International Institute for Asian Studies Visiting Professor of Critical Heritage Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. His research, largely based on fieldwork in Greece, Italy and Thailand, addresses heritage politics, eviction and gentrification, bureaucracy, craft transmission and the theory and ethnography of knowledge production. Michael Hviid Jacobsen is Professor of Sociology at Aalborg University,

Denmark. His research focuses on emotions, death and dying, palliative care, crime, literary sociology, social theory, qualitative research methodology and utopia/​nostalgia.

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Andrew R. Murphy is Professor of Political Science at Virginia

Commonwealth University, United States. His research is concerned with the history and politics of liberty of conscience, religion and political theory and the role of religion in early modern political thought. Katharina Niemeyer is Professor of Media Theory at the Faculty of

Communication, University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada. Her research interests reach from media theory, media archaeology and media history to nostalgia, social memory and mediatization. Fernando Quesada is Associate Professor of Architecture at Universidad

de Alcalá, Spain. His work focuses on social theatricality, bodily space, the politics of urban form, architectural avant-​gardes and utopia. Thomas Derek Robinson is Lecturer of Marketing at City University

Business School, London, United Kingdom. His research focuses on consumer temporality in a number of contexts including mobility (tourism, commuting and migration), nostalgia, sleep, branding, technologies such as mobile phones and robotics, sustainability and climate change, food consumption and friendship. Ana Babić Rosario is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Daniels College

of Business, University of Denver, United States. Her research centres on technology-​enabled consumption and communication, such as electronic word of mouth and social media. She is also concerned with nostalgic consumer practices and the role of online social interaction in consumers’ lives –​especially in the context of health and wellness. Niklas Salmose is Associate Professor of Literatures in English, Linnaeus

University, Sweden. He is a member of Linnaeus University Centre of Intermedial and Multimodal Studies (IMS) and much recent research has focused on interdisciplinary topics fusing intermediality, ecocriticism and nostalgia. Eric Sandberg is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at

City University of Hong Kong, China, and Docent at the University of Oulu, Finland. His research deals with topics including the modern and contemporary novel, crime fiction, cultural prestige and adaptation. Constantine Sedikides is Professor of Social and Personality Psychology at

the University of Southampton, United Kingdom. His research focuses on self and identity, including self-​relevant emotions.

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Ela Veresiu is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Schulich School of

Business, York University, Canada. Her research focuses on understanding and promoting consumer diversity and market inclusion at the intersection of identity, technology, branding and institutions. Tim Wildschut is Professor of Social and Personality Psychology at

University of Southampton, United Kingdom. His research is focused on emotions, in particular on nostalgia. Janelle L. Wilson is Professor of   Sociology at the University of Minnesota

Duluth, United States, where she teaches courses primarily in social psychology and deviance. Her primary research interests include the sociology of everyday life, nostalgia and generational identity.

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Preface and Acknowledgements When I was a young boy –​at least as far as I am able to remember –​I never felt nostalgic, perhaps because there was really not yet much life to look back upon and remember oh so fondly. Now, as an increasingly middle-​aged man, nostalgia has crept its way into my life and has become a much more familiar feeling. I frequently find myself falling victim to nostalgia in the form of reminiscing, remembering and reimagining my own life and past. From my own personal experience, nostalgia can perhaps best be described as a sort of misty mood in which the present is shrouded in the foggy recollections of a long-​since forgotten past. I am not always sure if the past I remember was in fact the way it is now being remembered or if it has been filtered through the selective sieve of time and is thus a gestalt of how I would have liked the past (and particularly my own past) to have been back then. So, in this way, the present book is to some degree the outcome of my own increasing awareness of the important role nostalgia plays in my own life and in my own attempt to understand this strange feeling. Besides this personal testimony, nostalgia has also grown into quite a hot topic within many academic disciplines and research agendas. There has been a noticeable upsurge in publications devoted to the study of nostalgia, and in many ways we do now live in what Zygmunt Bauman has aptly called ‘an age of nostalgia’. My recently released edited volume titled Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present (published by Routledge in 2020) is but one example of a more general trend within the social sciences to take nostalgia seriously as a promising and potent research topic in its own right. Despite the quite extensive list of academic disciplines covered in the present volume, not all angles of nostalgia have been covered. A chapter on nostalgia and the arts unfortunately did not pan out as planned, which was also the case with a chapter on economics and nostalgia. However, these omissions notwithstanding, this new book provides a comprehensive overview of how nostalgia has been conceptualized, treated and discussed within a number of social science and humanities disciplines. This book would not have been possible were it not for the fruitful and constructive collaboration with a number of international colleagues from

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whom I have learned a lot about nostalgia throughout the past year’s writing, reading and production process. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the scholars involved in the book for their insightful contributions. Moreover, I want to extend my gratitude to Associate Commissioning Editor Shannon Kneis and Bristol University Press as well as Gail Welsh from Newgen Publishing for getting involved in this volume. I am hopeful that the book, not least with its novel perspectives and extensive references to existing literature, will provide its readers with a useful overview of different disciplinary approaches to nostalgia for relevant teaching as well as research purposes. Furthermore, I hope that the book may work as a catapult for further imaginative empirical and theoretical explorations of nostalgia in different social and cultural contexts. Michael Hviid Jacobsen Aalborg, Spring 2021

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Introduction: The Many Different Faces of Nostalgia – Exploring a Multifaceted and Multidisciplinary Emotion Michael Hviid Jacobsen

Introduction The past is not dead –​it is very much a living thing. We may try our best to kill off the past, deny its importance, remove it as far away from our recollections as possible or make it irrelevant to our present concerns, but it is still there, lurking beneath the surface of time and memory. Everything that once was does not disappear but has a spectral presence in the way we live now. Even though the past may be forgotten, and attempts to deny or eradicate the past from the present (individual and collective) are indeed manifold, it can never be unmade. Throughout history, humans have always attempted not only to anticipate and shape the future, but also to make sense of and relate to the/​their past. The past is often regarded as the already known territory, whereas the future is regarded as an alien and sometimes even scary terrain. Time, however, is a tricky thing. What we may think we already know well and have left behind us long ago sometimes returns to haunt and pester us –​even many years after its actual occurrence. At other times, the re-​acquaintance with or revisits to the past –​voluntary and involuntary –​are much more pleasurable and positive. It is part of our human-​being-​in-​the-​ world that we seek to create a sense of meaning, direction and purpose with the time that has passed –​the time of our own individual lives as well as of

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broader historical time. ‘Nostalgia’ is a name given to the way (or rather the ways, plural) we somehow seek to connect with the past. But why is the past so important to most of us –​as individuals, groups and societies? Why do we entertain memories, why do we reminiscence, why do we feel nostalgic? There may be many different answers to this question. Perhaps the most obvious answer is that nostalgia arises because we necessarily live our lives from what was once in the past into what is now the present and towards what at the moment constitutes the future –​and this future, near and distant, is to many unfathomable as well as uncertain. We know what has been, but we know not what will come. Life does not stand still –​it constantly moves in only one direction: forwards (towards the end). Since we for all practical intents and purposes cannot know the future (in German philosopher Ernst Bloch’s memorable words ‘the not-​yet’) –​and thus have no memory or recollection of it (although we may indeed long for the future) –​we normally turn our minds towards that which we already know and which has already been, namely the past. Reaching back to what was before, searching for the roots, remembering, recollecting, rummaging in the past or longing for what once was is perhaps one of the main trademarks of being human. Whether animals can in fact feel nostalgic is difficult to determine, but there is no question about the human ability to think about and long for what has been before. Often this type of thinking and feeling is regarded as standing in opposition to the optimism towards the future, to the determination to bring about change and with the never-​quenched dissatisfaction with the way things were or currently are. However, there has probably never lived a human soul who did not somehow think back to childhood, prehistoric times (whether real or imagined), or who did not entertain happy and fond memories about past experiences. In this way, nostalgia is an all too normal emotion. Nostalgia is all around us, sometimes visibly, other times invisibly. Nostalgia can pertain to individuals’ feelings (often described as ‘nostalgics’) or to communities and collectivities (for example, people living in an ‘age of nostalgia’). Total immunity to nostalgia is not a common condition. Most people feel nostalgic at certain points in their lives. It is indeed difficult to imagine someone being entirely unconnected to, unconcerned with or dissociated from his/​her past. No matter how we consider life, it is in linear fashion always lived forwards from past via present to future, from birth towards death, but –​as Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard once mused –​life is often understood backwards from the place we stand now as we consider and contemplate the trajectory leading from the present back to our past. In this way, the past is always with us –​the present is pregnant with the past, unable fully to cut the ties with what went before it. Most people are somehow rooted in their constantly evolving life trajectories made up

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of everything that has happened to them prior to this very moment in time. Even though some people purposively may seek to forget, deny or run away from their past, they will often find that the past somehow catches up with them –​for better or for worse. For some people, it is a painful experience to be reminded of their past (especially if the past was a container full of unpleasant things), whereas for others the past is a pool of fond recollections and cherished memories. Whereas the former may seek to bury the past once and for all, escaping the nasty phantoms of childhood or youth by looking ahead to brighter times, the latter rather insist on keeping the past alive in their lives, actively resuscitating and reviving the things that previously made sense and provided comfort and meaning. This is why nostalgia has been so aptly called a ‘sanctuary of meaning’ (Wilson 2005/​2014). Those who are deemed or designate themselves as ‘nostalgics’ are often those who revel in what once was, with the hope that this may be brought back to life again. It is important already, here in the beginning, to stress that ‘the past’ that nostalgics want to bring back to life is not necessarily the past as it once really was or really happened. Our memories of the past, our childhood recollections and cherished moments of youth, are often selective and distorted and gain their eerie and seductive glow from the time that has passed since then. This is why our nostalgia for the past is always something which requires that we consider what is really meant by ‘the past’ and the yearning for ‘the past’. This book is dedicated to the exploration of nostalgia and to the multiple ways in which different disciplines from within the social sciences and humanities have sought to conceptualize, understand, analyse and debate nostalgia as part of their overall research ambitions. In the remainder of this introductory chapter we will look at various aspects and dimensions of the phenomenon of nostalgia and discuss how we may understand it as an integral part of our lives and as an important sign of our times.

‘Nostophiles’ versus ‘nostophobics’ Obviously, not everybody is a ‘nostalgic’ –​and not everybody is it to the same extent. How many people are indeed nostalgics is difficult to determine with any kind of empirical certainty or statistical accuracy. Although scales and techniques have already been developed that propose to detect and determine someone’s nostalgia proneness, nostalgia is not an emotion that is easily measured or can meaningfully be divided into percentages or fractions. But clearly, in the population at large, there are nostalgics (or ‘nostophiles’) and there are anti-​nostalgics (or ‘nostophobics’). The former are those who somehow long for or remember the past (their own past or ‘the past’ more generally) ever so fondly as if in a kind of beautiful, blurry haze, who are more than willing to admit and embrace such feelings and who express a

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sense of loss about the past. The latter are those who normally regard the former as sentimentalists and who themselves hardly ever think fondly about the past or, at least, admit to doing so. They are suspicious about attempts to make the past ‘stick’ or serve as a guideline for present and future actions. Nostophilia and nostophobia, however, are not merely individual emotional states. They are also feelings that pertain to and influence larger groups of people. Feeling nostalgic or nostophilic for that matter is thus not only something that people do individually by remembering their own private or personal pasts, it is also a highly collective phenomenon at times gripping larger groups of people, even entire populations and nations that give in to nostalgic sentiments by longing for a return to a great historical period, celebrating past victories or honouring legends and long-​gone heroes of importance to their local/​national community (Davis 1979). As such a collective force, nostalgia has a transformative capacity to change societies and the life experiences contained within them. When collective nostalgia is set in motion, it is often based on a dissatisfaction with the way things are currently run and with a desire or demand to return to how life was lived before. Perhaps there is a particular potential for nostophobia –​the repugnance or dislike of the past –​in society at large when the past is regarded with either suspicion or contempt, and when everything that does not necessarily point forward or is not future oriented is labelled as ‘backward’ or ‘stagnant’. This often unfounded antipathy towards nostalgia and nostalgics is perhaps often not always explicated, but it is certainly there, as when people who are longing for yesterday, expressing social pessimism or voicing (legitimate/​ illegitimate) concerns about the present state of affairs are ridiculed and seen as ‘relics’ or, perhaps even worse, their sense of nostalgia is pooled together under the headings of ‘populists’ or ‘radical right-​wing’ supporters. There is social research showing that nostalgia seems particularly to thrive among some right-​wing sympathizers such as the so-​called ‘Brexiteers’, ‘Trumpeteers’ or ‘Tea Party’ supporters (see, for example, Kenny 2017; Steenvorden and Harteveld 2017), but this is hardly either the whole or the only story about nostalgia. Obviously, there may indeed be valid reasons for suggesting or suspecting a certain overrepresentation of so-​called ‘nostalgics’ in such right-​ wing milieus (they are ‘the usual suspects’); however, it is unevidenced to detect and delimit nostalgia only to one end of the political continuum as has been one of the habitual ‘sins’ of much contemporary social research. In this way, important nuances, fine-​grained differences and obvious similarities are lost in translation. In contemporary society, and perhaps particularly in contemporary politics, those who seem to want to keep a firm grip on tradition, to safeguard monuments, defend existing ways of life and praise the past are generally depicted as obstacles to progress and as reactionary,

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religious and conservative fanatics. They are the ‘locals’ (often referred to as ‘traditionalists’, ‘nationalists’ and ‘anti-​globalists’) in a world increasingly governed by the ‘globals’ and their cosmopolitan visions of dismantling borders, emancipation from tradition and opening the world up to everything new, different and at odds with the past. In such a world, nostalgics are often regarded as yesterday’s news –​someone unable to keep up with the speed of change. It seems, however, that within the last decade or so, this more locally/​nationally oriented group –​the ‘nostalgics’ or ‘nostophiles’, as it were –​who want to maintain national borders and preserve local/​national heritage/​identity –​have gained momentum, evident not least in a number of political campaigns around the world (often exemplified by the British Brexit movement, Donald Trump’s period of presidency and the Visegrad Group). Whether or not this has in fact much to do with nostalgia is a matter of some debate, but it certainly points out that there is a constant push and pull –​an ongoing battle inherent in world history –​between those who want change and those who resist it. It shows also how globalization is a game that has winners as well as losers (Bauman 1998). The winners are those who are set to gain –​power, mobility, freedom or wealth –​from globalization, whereas the losers are those who rather see globalization as a threat to their values, privileges and identities or who will gain absolutely nothing from opening up the world to change. Nostalgia is therefore an expected response to globalization and to the seemingly uneven and uncontrollable nature of world events, perhaps particularly to the increasingly globalized economic situation with recurring spells of crises (Oliete-​Aldea 2012). The pendulum thus swings from periods in collective history that are characterized by showdowns with ‘the past’ in the name of ‘the future’, to other periods more devoted to calling attention to how mores, traditions, practices or beliefs prevalent in earlier times may guide or inform contemporary ways of life or take us through a crisis situation. The proposed separation between ‘nostophiles’ and ‘nostophobics’ is obviously simplistic, unvarnished and in some cases maybe also unwarranted. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a person who is completely inoculated against or immune to nostalgia. Most people will, at certain points in their lives (perhaps especially when crisis, adversity, transition or death and grief strike), think fondly about life before things went wrong or something painful happened. The same, in fact, goes for many societies. It seems plausible to claim that individuals and societies alike are much more prone to widespread nostalgic sentiments whenever crisis, rupture or uncertainty set in. Undoubtedly, as indicated already, some people (and some societies) are more prone or perhaps even disposed to nostalgia than others, and whereas some people (and some societies) may feel nostalgic for shorter spells of time, for others it is seemingly more of a chronic condition. However, to try to define

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a distinct ‘nostalgic personality type’ may be difficult, for the simple reason that nostalgia is sometimes an acute response to changes taking place outside of the person that, for shorter or longer periods of time, reverberates within the individual and then disappears again. Hence to be born with particular ‘nostalgic genes’ makes no sense –​at least the evidence for this is slim if not non-​existent. Nostalgia rather seems to thrive when people are confronted with hardships, trials or crises with which they try to cope and create meaning. This may be something happening only to the individual, but it may also be something that encompasses larger groups of people who are affected by social or environmental changes. For example, in what has recently been called ‘ecological grief ’ –​the sense of loss, longing and grief associated with the destruction of nature –​there is a clear element of individual as well as collective nostalgia involved: once our earth was greener and less affected by climate change and the relentless human exploitation of its limited resources than is now the case. Ecological grief –​or what has also been called ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht et al 2007), thus playing directly on the nostalgic undertone –​is thus an expression of the sadness and longing connected to a time before industrialization, deforestation, rising CO2 levels, global warming, polar ice melting and so on (which is, to the presently living, something whose origins, to some extent, extends back to well before our own lifetime). We are thus not nostalgic about something we necessarily remember ourselves, but about something that predated our own lifetime but of which we now experience the consequences. Nostalgia is thus a neighbouring emotion, as it were, to many other human emotions associated with a sense of loss: grief, melancholy, sadness, longing, sometimes even despair. As mentioned earlier, nostalgia is all around, and although some cultures and historical epochs are undoubtedly more nostalgic (or nostalgia prone) than others, nostalgic sentiments can be found almost universally. Even though there may be quite significant historical differences in what specific meanings people ascribe to the emotion of nostalgia, according to extensive survey material a common prototypical understanding of nostalgia can nevertheless be seen across widely different cultures (Hepper et al 2014). For example, many cultures and languages have a specific word to describe feelings of nostalgia. As American sociologist Arlie R. Hochschild recently noted in her study of feelings of mourning and anger among American right-​wing sympathizers: ‘Throughout time such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litos. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon’ (Hochschild 2016: 49–​50). Despite the lingual differences in specific connotations and meanings, nostalgia is a word that is widely used and an emotion that is widely shared

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across time and space. In his careful and elegant elaboration of the idea of nostalgia, Swiss literary critic Jean Starobinski once noted how all emotions acquire their meaning from being attached to a specific word: ‘Emotion is not a word, but it can only be spread abroad through words’ (Starobinski 1966: 81). From this it becomes obvious that the way we name an emotion, the way language is used to capture and compare an emotional state or experience, impacts on the way this emotion is being understood –​perhaps even the way this emotion is being felt and expressed. This goes for all emotions. Whenever we hear the word ‘anger’, we immediately think and visualize a certain emotional expression and mood. The same is the case with ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘disgust’, ‘fear’, ‘shame’ and so on –​whenever we hear the word, we almost intuitively know and recognize the feeling. The word ‘nostalgia’ also evokes certain images of and ideas about people: how they think, how they live, how they look, how they feel, how they vote, what they like, what they dislike, what they buy, what they eat, how they dress, what music they prefer and so on. However, it was also Starobinski’s point that the language we use about emotions is not universal or historyless: ‘Inevitably, we speak the language of our time’ (Starobinski 1966: 83), he stated, and we should therefore be careful not to attribute emotions or subjective experiences to people living in the past by relying on contemporary word usage and vice versa, just as we should beware not to uncritically transfer the meaning of an emotion from a Western context to the meaning of the emotion from an entirely different cultural background. This is perhaps particularly important when dealing with ‘nostalgia’, which is indeed a word for an emotion that has changed not only its meaning but also its reception quite substantially throughout time.

Nostalgia as pathology Like any other human emotion, nostalgia is always a child of its time –​it derives its meaning and gains its perspective and depth from the specific historical and cultural context in which it is experienced and expressed, but also from the historical backlist that has shaped and changed its trajectory. Nostalgia in some shape or form has probably always existed. Even though it is impossible to know exactly what people really felt during, for example, the Stone Age or Middle Ages, having only secondary data sources with a considerable uncertainty attached to them from which to make inferences, there is no reason to suspect that nostalgia was not somehow an emotional experience known also to prehistoric people. But, to be honest, we do not know for sure. The history of the specific concept of nostalgia, however, can be dated and detailed quite specifically. The first recorded scientific use of the term ‘nostalgia’ was by Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer, who in

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a somewhat obscure dissertation described nostalgia as an ailment or illness identified among Swiss mercenaries stationed away from home (Hofer 1688/​ 1934). As Hofer wrote, in his work nostalgia was used ‘to define the sad mood originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land’ (Hofer 1688/1​ 934: 381). The literal meaning of the term ‘nostalgia’ is a combination or contraction of the ancient Greek notions of nostos (home) –​owing its origin to the Homeric epic The Odyssey –​and algos (aching/​pain/​grief) and it can thus be seen as a description of the aching or longing for a return to a home that has been abandoned or left behind. In this way, the early usage of the notion of ‘nostalgia’ related specifically to spatiality, to mobility and to being away from one’s ‘home’. It is also indicative of the term that there are challenges and obstacles to being able to return home and that this is thus regarded as a great difficulty producing sentiments and feelings of loss, despair, regret and sadness. Even though nostalgia as a concept in the literature on the topic is thus often dated to the time of Hofer’s dissertation, to which we shall briefly return, it is probably safe to say that it is an emotion that is for all practical intents and purposes unrateable. It has probably been there all along. In all likelihood, people also felt nostalgic prior to Hofer’s naming of the emotion/​pathology of nostalgia. The fact that people long for or idealize the past is thus not something that was invented by Hofer, although he was the first specifically to name the term ‘nostalgia’ as a word composed to capture this emotional reaction. Hofer’s original text provides an interesting read but it will also strike most contemporary readers as the product of a specific time and mentality. Hofer’s dissertation is a medical treatise concerned with developing a vocabulary with which to diagnose, describe and treat a newly discovered suffering. This was a period prior to the time when other types of human feeling also began to be clinically observed, diagnosed and treated, such as melancholy and hysteria. As mentioned, the sadness associated with being away from one’s birthplace, land of origin or home (‘Fatherland’ as Hofer wrote) is of Homeric origin and has later been pursued by poets such as Virgil, Dante and Milton (Austin 2010). In Hofer’s work, the main concern was with understanding and dealing with this nostalgic disease and with providing care, relief and comfort for its unfortunate victims. Hofer located ‘nostalgia’ in the middle brain, and it manifested itself in the body and mind as ‘continued sadness, meditation only of the Fatherland, disturbed sleep either wakeful or continuous, decrease of strength, hunger, thirst, senses diminished, and cares or even palpitations of the heart’ (Hofer 1688/​1934: 386). Hofer’s text also outlined sensations that may trigger or provoke nostalgia (such as familiar sounds and smells from the homeland or being confronted with foreign food and the variety of the weather) and he proposed that rest, care and ‘appropriate remedies’ could be administered to ease symptoms or even

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cure the disease. Hofer was thus instrumental in providing a useful term to cover the emotional experience of longing for the home left behind (and, indirectly, something lost from one’s past, whether remembered or imagined), and, even though the science of nostalgia has progressed quite considerably since Hofer’s original writings, his terminology still attracts the attention of scholars, writers, poets, politicians and ordinary people who with the notion of ‘nostalgia’ seek to make sense and/​or use of this special feeling of longing. Since Hofer’s treatise, for quite some time nostalgia remained a concern primarily within the medical and later also the psychological/​psychiatric disciplines. By the middle of the 18th century, due to many scholars and physicians relying on and referring to the work of Hofer, nostalgia had become a well-​established and frequently mentioned phenomenon within medical and later also psychological discourse, focusing on the physical and psychological distress of homesickness among soldiers stationed far away from home (see, for example, Rosen 1975; Roth 1991), and the mentioning of nostalgia thus often featured as part of various phobias, neuroses or emotional disturbances. But the interest in nostalgia as a clinical diagnosis gradually waned and the entry disappeared from most medical and psychological encyclopaedias, which were instead equipped with the entries of ‘schizophrenia’, ‘depression’ and other personality disorders. However, even close to our own time –​throughout the period from the 1940s to the 1970s –​there was still a detectable interest within different parts of psychology and psychiatry in regarding nostalgia as a potentially pathological condition and the concept still appeared in various clinical contexts (see, for example, Freedman 1956; Kleiner 1977). In this kind of work, nostalgia was sometimes discussed as a substitute for mourning, as an attempted mastery of life through idealization and the displacement of a painful past, as evidence of resistance in psychoanalysis and as a counterphobic mechanism (Werman 1977: 338). Moreover, French psychoanalyst Dominique Geahchan specifically coupled nostalgia to a certain narcissistic personality type when stating: The nostalgic object thus represents a narcissistic structure of the personality. The nostalgic cannot relinquish his search for the lost object because that would represent giving up his own narcissistically invested, grandiose self-​image. It is now not simply the absent, repressed mother who is nostalgically longed for, but rather the mother as internalized into a personality structure. (Geahchan 1968, quoted in Boren 2013) Such conventional psychoanalytic descriptions of nostalgia (but also of many other psychopathologies) –​trying to relate the emotion to repressed childhood memories –​are no longer commonplace, although the interest within psychoanalysis and neuropsychiatry in nostalgia has far from

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disappeared (see, for example, Phillips 1985; Hirsch 1992). Instead, nostalgia has, as we shall see later, gradually and generally become normalized throughout the past few hundred years. This does not mean, however, that nostalgia is now being regarded necessarily as something positive or desirable. The aforementioned pathologizing tendency of the emotion of nostalgia has not entirely disappeared with the coming of the recent centuries, and nostalgia is still surrounded with an aura of the somewhat strange and world-​ weary. People who are nostalgics are peculiar, sentimental or unable to deal with the harsh realities of life –​and for whatever reason prefer to live in the shadows of the past. For example, it has been observed that ‘nostalgia is always suspect. To give ourselves up to longing for a different time or place, no matter how admirable its qualities, is always to run the risk of constricting our ability to act in the present’ (Atia and Davies 2010: 181). In this way, nostalgia is still somehow seen as an obstacle to development –​almost as a sort of apathy or paralysis –​or as a hindrance to action in the ‘real world’. Here already, however, some conceptual caution is required. It needs to be stressed that the often proposed link between nostalgia and sentimentalism is neither self-​evident nor clear cut. The matter is, in fact, rather complicated. True, the Wikipedia entry for ‘nostalgia’ directly defines it as ‘a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations’. However, it is not necessarily the case that nostalgia and sentimentalism/​sentimentality go hand in hand. It is indeed possible to be sentimental without being nostalgic, just as it is possible to be nostalgic without being sentimental –​but it is also possible to be both things at the very same time and for the same reasons. It does, therefore, seem as if these two experiences are often –​but not necessarily –​correlated or regarded as intimately connected. In everyday understanding and the vernacular there is thus still some suspicion surrounding the notion of nostalgia, still a remnant of its erstwhile association with disease or disorder, although nowadays nostalgia is perhaps more regarded as a personal oddity rather than as an individual pathology. As such an odd personality or character trait, nostalgia is often associated with a rather sentimental, backward-​looking, melancholic and romanticizing feeling towards the past. True, nostalgia can be all that. However, nostalgia can also serve as a trigger for personal development, provide feelings of happiness, as well as inspire meaningful action (see, for example, Sedikides and Wildschut 2018; Newman et al 2020). Even though nostalgia may at first sight seem as something almost familiar, self-​evident and self-​explanatory, it is in fact an emotion that contains many different dimensions, angles, processes and functions, which is also why the title of this Introduction refers to the ‘many different faces of nostalgia’. Despite some convergence on how to define and understand nostalgia, nostalgia is

10

Introduction

certainly not a static, shallow or one-​dimensional emotion, but something that means many different things to different people and which serves many different pivotal purposes and functions in their lives. It is therefore important to stress, as recent psychological research has done, the deep-​ seated complexity and multifaceted character of nostalgia –​its mixture of the bitter and the sweet, loss and happiness, memorization and memory-​ reconstruction and so on (see, for example, Hepper et al 2011; Batcho 2013). But, as with anything else about nostalgia, this is also a contested or contestable claim. Perhaps nostalgia, in the end, is but a prominent example of what Scottish philosopher Walter Bryce Gallie (1956) once termed an ‘essentially contested concept’ –​something that continues to cause disagreement and heated discussion –​not only because so many different meanings can be attached to it but also because it can be valued or devalued, elevated or degraded, worshipped or detested, depending on the reasons why, how, where, when and about whom the concept is being used (Batcho and Jacobsen 2021).

The ‘normalization’ of nostalgia As we saw earlier, nostalgia, as a scientific concept deriving its original meaning from ancient Greek poetry, was born as a disease but later matured into an emotion –​however, still with some semi-​pathology or semi-​strangeness attached to it. The early –​and to some extent long-​ lasting –​pathological connotations associated with nostalgia gradually began to disappear when it no longer featured in medical textbooks or was listed as a psychological disorder to be diagnosed and treated (see, for example, Illbruck 2012). In time, nostalgia grew into a descriptive and general notion for a longing for the past (perhaps more so than for a specific place as was Hofer’s view) without the references to disease and disorder that previously characterized it. Nostalgia is thus no longer –​among professionals or laypeople –​routinely associated with or surrounded by the aura of disease that originally gave birth to its name. Nostalgia is now mostly a notion that describes a normal and quite common emotional response to a sense of loss or a memory of a time past that seems to stick. Even though the notion of nostalgia may still have a certain derogatory or negative ring to it (being a ‘nostalgic’ is often a matter of some friendly ridicule), today most people would admit that they every now and then feel nostalgic. Even though nostalgia has thus slowly been depathologized, people who are accused of being nostalgic will often somehow have to defend themselves, as there is almost something inherently ridiculous or sad about longing for the past. ‘Come on, live in the present, not in the past!’, seems to be the almost overbearing advice given to those who dwell on memories

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or express a longing for something that once was: childhood, youth, a lost love relationship, better health, better looks and so on. They are seen as world-​weary, escapist, sentimentalist, melancholic and mournful daydreamers who basically need to realign with reality. Despite the gradual normalization of nostalgia throughout the past centuries, removing from it the previous pathological connotations and association with disease, nostalgia is in common discourse therefore still regarded mostly as a somewhat negative phenomenon often based on a caricature of what nostalgia actually is (see, for example, Schiermer and Carlsen 2017). Admitting that one is ‘feeling nostalgic’ or insisting that the ‘past was much better’ is regarded with ill-​ concealed contempt and as a sign that one is incapable of dealing with the present –​and nostalgia is seen as something that is thus closely associated with sentimentalism, pessimism, retreatism, backwardness and resistance to change. Moreover, nostalgia is frequently also associated with political conservatism, reactionary/​traditionalist attitudes or with a colonial or nationalist mentality –​ longing for the ‘Glory Days’ when the Empire, the Nation or the Fatherland ruled the world. True, within some of these orientations nostalgia thrives; however, to reduce nostalgia to any such political or ideological positions is to miss most of the point. Nostalgia cannot be owned by or reduced to political movements or ideological stances, just as compassion, anger, hatred, happiness or solidarity cannot be monopolized by any specific group or political faction in society. Nostalgia as an emotion is too ‘normal’, too widespread and too multifaceted to be appropriated by any special interests. Why has nostalgia been mostly regarded with such suspicion and negativity or sometimes merely a general neglect not only in everyday contexts but also within many social science and humanities disciplines for so long? Regarding the latter, the answer may be quite plain and obvious: many of the social science disciplines that took an interest in the study of nostalgia were themselves the offspring of the age of modernity –​sociology, anthropology, psychology and so on. They earned their scientific status and legitimacy –​ often after long and hard struggles –​from promises to enlighten the world by breaking away from the powers of the irrational, human oppression, backward living conditions and traditional ways of life. Nostalgia was in itself regarded as an anti-​modern sentiment –​a longing for that which modern society tried so hard to forget and eradicate: its own roots in superstition and religion, feudalism as well as the reliance on the past. Modernity sought to replace nostalgia with a future-​orientation, with ideas of growth and progress and a determination for change, but it often found itself inescapably interlocked with its own premodern past. Paradoxically, maybe the feeling of nostalgia was in fact spread and reinforced by the coming of modern society itself and its relentless uprooting, detraditionalizing and delocalizing agenda. However, this negativity surrounding nostalgia –​perhaps particularly

12

Introduction

prevalent within a discipline such as sociology –​is as unwarranted as it is unfruitful. Nostalgia, like any other human emotion, contains positive as well as negative potentials, depending on who feels it and how this feeling is being expressed and used. All emotions can be used for ulterior motives, causing individual and social harm, just as they can be mobilized for generating good and desired results. No emotion is in and by itself either good or bad (for example, love can be self-​destructive or excessive, while hatred under the right circumstances can be understandable and even called for), and therefore all emotions must be understood and interpreted in light of their specific conditions. The perceived goodness or badness of an emotion is thus always in the eye of the beholder or can be determined only by assessing it against some desired or undesired outcome. Nostalgia can thus do good or it can do bad, and it may, just like utopia, as Polish-​British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once suggested, ‘lead to a better life as much as [it] may mislead and turn away from what a better life would require to be done’ (Bauman and Tester 2001: 48–​50). Although nostalgia –​even as a generalized and normal emotion devoid of its previous pathological underpinnings –​may at first sight seem like a rather simple, uncomplicated, shallow and perhaps almost one-​dimensional emotional experience and expression, it is, in fact, a rather complex and multi-​layered emotion. On the one hand, nostalgia is a feel-​good feeling –​ when feeling nostalgic, one is warmed or energized by the recollection of something that was good, meaningful and fulfilling in one’s past. However, there is also another dimension to nostalgia than feeling good –​the pain and distress that is associated with realizing that it is indeed impossible to retrieve or revive that which is no more –​the past, one’s childhood or youth, the lost empire and so on. This is also why nostalgia is a so-​called ‘bittersweet emotion’ –​the sweetness is always coated with a bitter glace. The past is no longer here and one thus has to live with the sense of loss and deprivation that the past –​childhood, youth, prehistory and so on –​has been irretrievably lost. As mentioned, in modern society ‘nostalgia’ has often been associated with negative connotations –​designating someone struck with sentimentality and an unwillingness to accept changes and to embrace the new and emerging. As many recent psychological studies have shown, to be nostalgic, however, not only means that one lives in the past or desperately longs for it. It also means to have an active approach to the past: even though the past may, for all practical intents and purposes, be dead and gone, by fondly remembering, reminiscing, recollecting and resuscitating the past, one finds meaning and purpose in and for the present. Even though some people, as mentioned, are doubtlessly more nostalgia prone than others, and even though some perhaps even take nostalgia to extremes, nostalgia is probably a feeling most people are familiar with –​the entirely non-​nostalgic person is indeed a rare breed. For

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example, an expatriate I recently interviewed during an ethnographic study in Thailand told me: ‘When you ask me about nostalgia, I think everybody is nostalgic’ (quoted in Jacobsen 2020c). Whether this is in fact true or not –​ that everybody is nostalgic –​is difficult to determine beyond any reasonable doubt. However, the fact that nostalgia is a feeling recognizable and known to most people is perhaps easier to accept. For example, who has not felt nostalgic when fondly entertaining memories of childhood experiences, when listening to music from events that were of particular significance in one’s life, when recalling one’s first infatuation, one’s first car, seeing one’s progeny for the first time, or when thinking about those loved ones now dead and gone? True, nostalgia is as such difficult to see, but we somehow sense that it is there. Contrary to the emotional response of anger, which is a ‘you know it when you feel (or see) it’ kind of emotion (Schieman 2006: 494), nostalgia is not a so-​called ‘primary emotion’ that we can easily detect in the bodily appearance of people. There are no blushing, no clenched fists, no sweaty palms and no visible tears in nostalgia. Nostalgia is perhaps more of a ‘you recognize it when you feel it’ kind of emotion. Although most people are familiar with shorter or longer spells of nostalgic experience –​for example, when they see, smell, touch, hear or think about something from their past –​there is something intangible or fuzzy about nostalgia, making it difficult to pin down. Despite being mostly invisible, nostalgia nevertheless is and remains an integral part of our memories and recollections, and yet it cannot be reduced to simple memory or recollection. In nostalgia there is an unmistakable and deep-​seated sense of loss and longing that provides depth and direction to our nostalgic sentiments. As a ‘normal’ emotion rather than as a pathological affliction, the longing for and the memory of the past is always with us. However, nostalgia is never merely a plain and simple recollection or recording, but also a recounting and reconstruction of the past as we –​from where we now stand in life based on our accumulated knowledge, experience and expectation –​remember it. As Marcel Proust, himself a formidable nostalgic, famously insisted in The Search of Lost Time: ‘Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were’ (Proust 1913–​1927/​1992). A similar understanding was revealed by Julian Barnes in The Sense of an Ending: ‘What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed’ (Barnes 2011: 3). What is here captured so well by the words of fiction can also be expressed by the language of science, and American psychologist Krystine I. Batcho eloquently summarized the same insight by stating that ‘one can remember without being nostalgic, but one cannot be nostalgic without remembering’ (Batcho 2009: 269). Also, social gerontologist Jeanette Leardi has noted how ‘nostalgia is much more than mere reminiscing; it’s a feeling’ (Leardi 2013). There is thus no one-​to-​one relationship between

14

Introduction

memory/​reminiscence and nostalgia (just, as we saw earlier, as there is no necessary connection between sentimentalism and nostalgia), there is no automatic connection between the cognitive recording of what actually happened and the feelings attached to it, but without remembrance of some sort, nostalgia is indeed unimaginable. Nostalgia is thus about memory and remembrance, but it is always a memory and remembrance that is somehow shaped or even tainted by the filters of selective recollection (individual and collective), or at least a recollection that is mostly a mental distillation of that which is cherished, revered and valued. Based on these considerations, let it be emphasized already, from the outset of this book: nostalgia is not a simple, straightforward or one-​ dimensional human emotion. Its meaning is not fixed once and for all. It is not experienced in the same way by everybody. Its meaning does not stand still and is not uncontested. If this were the case, there would hardly be any need to devote an entire volume to the study of the many different forms and expressions of nostalgia within various scientific disciplines. Then we could sit back comfortably, relax our explorative endeavours and analytical skills or put them to proper use elsewhere, and rely simply on common-​sense meanings. However, nostalgia does not simply mean that people long for the past or that they are unable to cope with the problems of the present or other similar, frequently heard accusations against nostalgics. What people perceive as constituting ‘the past’ differs, how they relate to this ‘past’ is certainly not the same for everyone and why they do so is also something that cannot be deduced simply from common sense, taken-​for-​g ranted wisdom or what we think we know. There are many different dimensions of nostalgia, and many analytical distinctions and typologies have been proposed in order to account for nostalgia’s complexity (see, for example, Jacobsen 2020b). American sociologist Fred Davis (1979) provided a useful conceptual and analytical inventory of many different types of nostalgia such as ‘simple nostalgia’, ‘reflexive nostalgia’ and interpretive nostalgia’, just as he distinguished between ‘private nostalgia’ and ‘collective nostalgia’. Similarly, British sociologist Bryan S. Turner (1987) has proposed four different types of loss experience involved in nostalgia (for example, historical decline, loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty, loss of individual autonomy, and loss of spontaneity and authenticity). More recently, British researchers of media and communication, Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2006), for example detailed a number of different ‘modalities’ and manifestations of nostalgia, thus showing how nostalgia is not a straightforward or one-​ dimensional phenomenon. In fact, as they revealed, nostalgia is an emotion made up of multiple inherent contrarieties and contradictions such as the regressive and the progressive. Moreover, as we have already hinted at, nostalgia has both spatial and temporal dimensions and connotations (Wilson

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2015). In fact, as we saw earlier, nostalgia started out as a ‘spatial emotion’ referring in the writings of Homer and Hofer alike to the experience of Heimweh (homesickness), but later it turned into a ‘temporal emotion’ that is more past oriented than place bound. Furthermore, late Russian professor of comparative literature Svetlana Boym (2001) memorably distinguished between ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’, regarding the former as being concerned mostly with reviving the past whereas the latter is preoccupied with revisiting and thinking critically about the past in order for it to play a constructive role in the present. But nostalgia, in order to confuse matters even more, is not only about the past but also about present and future. For example, American cultural critic Fredric Jameson (1989) once seemingly paradoxically spoke of the ‘nostalgia for the present’, insisting that a certain timelessness had descended upon the postmodern world (especially evident in the commodification of culture and popular culture), thus making people nostalgic not about the past but about the present being emptied of ‘time’. Jameson thus distinguished between a ‘nostalgia mood’ (related to feelings or experiences of loss and longing) and a ‘nostalgia mode’ (related particularly to how understandings of nostalgia are being culturally produced in postmodern times marked by amnesia and a waning of history). Only rarely, nostalgia is directly future oriented, but, as we shall see in the Postscript to this volume, there are in fact scholars and writers who read a distinctive future orientation into nostalgia. Obviously, no matter how hard we try, we simply cannot remember the future (unless we believe in science-​fiction scenarios allowing people to travel back and forth in time), just as we cannot go back in time and relive our lives, but we can indeed think about and long for the past in order to plan and prepare for the future. Despite the ontological irreversibility of time, we may still thus contemplate and anticipate the future (Jankélévitch 1983). It is evident from the aforementioned that the notion of ‘nostalgia’ contains many different meanings, many different connotations and many different dimensions, depending on who uses the word and for what purpose. Like most other human emotions, nostalgia is an easy target for normative evaluation claiming either that it is a good or a bad feeling, that it is desirable or undesirable, benevolent or dangerous. In either case, we need to understand that nostalgia in and by itself is significantly influenced by the many social and cultural forces and processes that surround and shape the way we talk about, approach, feel, share and sanction nostalgia. Nostalgia ultimately gains much of its meaning –​for individuals as well as for larger groups of people –​not only from what is does to people from the ‘inside’, as it were, but perhaps even more so from the many intricate ways nostalgia as an emotion is made available to them from the ‘outside’. In this way, what has been termed ‘emotionology’ –​the study of ‘the attitudes or standards

16

Introduction

that a society, or a definable group within a society, maintains toward basic emotions and their appropriate expression’ (Stearns and Stearns 1985: 813) –​ is as important when trying to describe, understand and analyse nostalgia as it is with any other human emotion. This is exactly why the social sciences and humanities hold so much promise for studying and analysing nostalgia.

Living in ‘the age of nostalgia’ As we saw earlier, the notion of ‘nostalgia’ was originally conceived within a medical context when Johannes Hofer more than 300 years ago proposed the notion of ‘nostalgia’ to account for the homesickness suffered by Swiss mercenaries based far away from their homeland. Hofer –​and many of those who later followed in his footsteps –​regarded nostalgia as an individual pathology that often required medical intervention in order to be cured. As we have seen, this is, not the case today, when nostalgia is now mostly viewed as a widespread and normal emotional experience devoid of its previous association with medicine, psychology and pathology. Today, nostalgia is not only here to stay, it is a topic that, since the turn of the millennium, has witnessed a heretofore unheard of boom within many areas of social life. Back in the late 1970s, Fred Davis (1977) observed a ‘nostalgia wave’ in many different sectors of society. A quarter of a century later, Svetlana Boym (2001) noted that we were witnessing a ‘nostalgia epidemic’. It thus seems as if nostalgia never really disappears, at least not for long, but pops up every now and then, reminding us of the impact and importance of the past. The present –​perhaps nowadays in an previously unprecedented manner –​is haunted by the past, not only as an ontological premise, as suggested by the so-​called ‘hauntologists’, who argue that the present is always and unavoidably pregnant with that which precedes it, but also as an experiential dimension evident in the way people wilfully seek out the relics of the past (or specific and selective parts of it) in order to be able to endure the present. In many ways, nostalgia has turned out to be an important yet also rather controversial ‘master narrative’ in contemporary society, informing public, political and academic discourse alike (Becker 2018). This is evident within the worlds of politics, marketing, architecture, the arts, consumer goods, television and the media and in many other pockets of social life. Today, there are many different actors and agencies involved in rewriting, repackaging and selling the past as something beautiful, memorable and meaningful, sometimes even in the shape of ‘false history’ (Hatherley 2017). This revival of nostalgia has in recent years been fuelled by many developments of late-​modern social life. In a consumer society like ours, in which we are increasingly interpellated (by political and commercial interests) as consumers rather than as producers, and in which

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our identities are created around what we buy and how we look (Bauman 2007), consumption becomes an important generator for nostalgia. This has spawned nothing less than a retro wave within technology, leisure-​time activities, holiday and travel plans, housing arrangements, food and drinks as well as fashion and clothing, where, for example, ‘vintage fashion’ is regarded not only as a personal statement but also as a new search for aesthetic authenticity (for example, Veenstra and Kuipers 2013). Think, for example, about how football outfits from the 1970s and 1980s have now once again become popular even among younger generations, T-​shirts from long-​since dissolved rock bands from ‘the Golden Age of Rock’ are worn by old and young alike and holograms of deceased celebrities are being screened at rock concerts and pop shows in order to give it all a sense of history and patina. This tendency extends also to many other realms of consumption, with vinyl records, video tape recorders, old-​style telephones, classic black-​and-​white movies, a newly found interest in board games (a long-​forgotten pastime, in an age of computer gaming) and other practices signalling a demand or desire for getting re-​acquainted with the not-​so-​very-​distant past. Things are being brought down from the attic or up from the basement in order to be once again put to use. And where there is nostalgic consumption there is destined to be nostalgic marketing, nostalgic branding and nostalgic advertising thriving on our thirst for the old, familiar, calm and cosy in a world of rapid change and high-​speed life-​styles (just think of the recurrent ‘throwback’ phenomenon within marketing and sales). From within the realm of politics, nostalgia has been there all along, but it is now perhaps more visible and directly spoken than previously. For example, whereas former president of the United States Barack Obama made the motto ‘Yes We Can’ his call to action, thus insisting that we can change the present and future if enough determination and perseverance are put into it, his successor Donald Trump instead relied on the phrase ‘Make America Great Again’, playing specifically on the idea and impression that American society was no longer as great as it once used to be. Besides its revival within the world of politics, in recent years nostalgia has also become a very much media-​driven phenomenon that is evident in television advertising, game shows, re-​runs and re-​recordings of old films and series, and there are constant marathons of old-​time television productions and old cinema movies from the childhood and adolescent years of the currently living older generations (see, for example, Niemeyer 2014; Pallister 2019). All this adds up to suggesting that we now seemingly live in an ‘age of nostalgia’ or a ‘nostalgic age’. As late American historian David Lowenthal observed on the recent nostalgic wave in his 2015 revisit to the topic of nostalgia 30 years after the first publication of his 1985 magnum opus The Past is a Foreign Country:

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Introduction

Nostalgia is today’s favoured mode of looking back. It saturates the press, serves as advertising bait, merits sociological study, expresses modern malaise … Once the solace or menace of the few, nostalgia now attracts and afflicts all. Myriad ancestor-​hunters scour archives; millions throng to historic houses; antiques engross hoi polloi; every childhood past is souvenired. Reversing earlier ill-​repute, nostalgia is promoted as therapeutic, an aid to self esteem, a crutch for personal continuity, a defence against reminders of mortality … Restaurants lead the nostalgia boom … Nostalgia fuelled the nascent film industry and suffuses modern cinema … Present woes are drowned in Irish theme pubs … In sum, nostalgic remembrance is a burgeoning enterprise, and almost any era will do. (Lowenthal 2015: 31–​39) Nostalgia is all around, and Lowenthal is far from the only one acutely aware of the relatively new and seemingly widespread appeal of nostalgia in contemporary society, but whereas Lowenthal did not directly associate this development with the world of politics (but, rather, with a general globalization and commercialization tendency of nostalgia), others have been more keen to point specifically to the potential political driving forces behind and the ideological underpinnings of current claims to nostalgia. For example, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2017), in one of his last books before his death, we are, in his words, living in the ‘age of nostalgia’, and in his view this new nostalgic (or what he calls ‘retrotopian’) mood is particularly observable within the reactionary types of politics wanting to find solutions to present problems by returning to past practices or ideas. Although difficult to specifically date, this boom in retrotopia/​nostalgia –​ as has been observed by many other political commentators and cultural analysts –​apparently coincides with and is probably also a response to the appearance of many contemporary social problems on a global scale: mass migration and mass immigration, financial crisis, international terrorism, ecological challenges, welfare-​state crisis, existential uncertainty, political apathy and so on. Perhaps the recent rise of nostalgia can be seen as a response to these problems facing individuals, nations and the global community alike –​almost as a sort of globalized sadness. Perhaps the desire for a time when the world was seemingly less threatening, more transparent and less complex, when one could distinguish clearly between friends and enemies, and when it was, at least in principle, possible to confront, control and fix the problems, is exactly what fuels the widespread nostalgia drive we are witnessing in contemporary society. What is so characteristic of the present nostalgia epidemic or nostalgia wave is that, on the one hand, in many ways it is at odds with so many

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trends and tendencies otherwise prevalent at this moment in time (for example, a concern with the future of the planet, solving the climate crisis and a preoccupation with dealing with acute problems like the COVID-​19 situation by relying on new medicines and innovative technologies), but on the other hand it is also a reaction to the dissatisfaction and despair with the way our contemporary society and world order tackles its problems and crises. It has been suggested by many social theorists that our society currently finds itself in a state of crisis. As such, there is nothing new in this. There has been a consensus among many sociologists and social philosophers throughout the past centuries in suggesting that society finds itself in what seems to be a chronic state of crisis. After all, what use would there be for critical sociologists and critical philosophers if there was nothing to write or worry about? However, what is new, perhaps, is that a sense of doom has descended upon our contemporary social landscape, whether it is associated with climate changes, the COVID-​19 scare, international terrorism, financial crisis, immigration problems, political impotence, political radicalism, fake news and the like. Feelings of nostalgia seem increasingly to be mentioned and targeted as the individual as well as collective response to the towering challenges and problems confronted by contemporary society (see, for example, Koppetsch 2018). In this sense, nostalgia is regarded as a sort of safety raft for the hapless victims caught in the stormy weather and troubled waters of contemporary social change and turmoil. So, whereas nostalgia was originally conceived as an illness, it is itself now increasingly seen as a remedy for and bulwark against the social pathologies of our time and age. Obviously, besides its recent rise to prominence and attention, nostalgia has been there all along, it has never disappeared and it is not a new invention –​ but it does seem as if the emotion has gained momentum in the post-​ millennial decades, in society and academic circles alike. Notions like ‘the return of ’, ‘the revival of ’ or ‘the resurgence of ’ nostalgia have thus in the past decade reverberated throughout social and cultural life, bearing witness to the feeling that we seem to live in times characterized increasingly by a nostalgic mood. The contemporary ‘mood of the world’ (Bude 2018) is thus unmistakably nostalgic, just as we have earlier experienced moods –​ currents and condensations of collective emotional energies –​of depression, fear, anger, grief, love and so on spanning several years or even decades (‘The Great Depression’, ‘The Winter of Discontent’ or ‘The Summer of Love’). In this way, we often seem to carve out slices of and measure historical time by way of its prominent emotions. Nostalgia has not wiped out such other emotional moods, but it seems to feed on, respond to and exist alongside them. Despite common claims to the contrary, claims not least audible in our contemporary ‘now society’ (a society increasingly decoupled from past and

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Introduction

present), the past is not dead, it is a living part of the present in the memories, recollections and epiphanies that people entertain and actively seek out in order to connect with what has gone before. Obviously, not everybody –​as we saw earlier –​is equally concerned with the past or their own past. There are people and groups of people for whom only the present or the future counts –​or at least, this is what they want to flaunt through their words and actions. However, no one can escape the tentacles of time, no one is ever entirely freed from the shackles of the past, no one can totally avoid contact with or connection to that which went before. We always live in the shadow of the past, but the questions only remain how we live in it and how we relate to it. Here the notion of ‘nostalgia’ can provide us –​as ordinary people but also as practising social scientists –​with useful pointers to how people try to make sense of the past in the present. German sociologist Norbert Elias (1987) once wisely warned against what he called ‘sociologists’ retreat to the present’, whereby he meant that sociologists should always keep a keen eye on the importance of historical time and historical context instead of providing only historyless snapshots and analyses of what currently takes place. The present state of affairs is always the outcome of extended and complex historical processes leading from the past to the present –​in the lives of individuals as well as in the lives of societies and cultures. Instead of shying away from nostalgia or being afraid to admit to it, social scientists should be nostalgic not in the simple sense of the term (insisting that the past was so much better than the present) but, rather, in the sense that Fred Davis (1979) once called ‘interpreted nostalgia’, whereby he meant that we should always critically scrutinize the roots and question the expressions of nostalgia in order to find out what it means, why, how, when and to whom. In this way, we would be recognizing and admitting nostalgia its rightful place as a topic of social research. The recent rise of nostalgia is, as mentioned, not only related to the fact that nostalgic sentiments and longings increasingly seem to influence culture, everyday life, politics, the media, popular culture and our consumption patterns, but also that nostalgia has gradually acquired a foothold within many different areas of research, perhaps particularly within the social sciences and humanities. Nostalgia is thus a new hot topic within social science and humanities research. For example, I recently edited a volume titled Nostalgia Now (Jacobsen 2020a), which provides insights into many different theoretical and empirical dimensions of nostalgia as an individual and collective emotion. Working on this volume made me aware that the interest in nostalgia thrives in many corners of the academic world and that nostalgia for many scholars and researchers increasingly constitutes a useful lens for understanding how contemporary society and contemporary life are in different ways trying to reconnect with the past. Moreover, a simple search

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for the notion of ‘nostalgia’ in Google’s Ngram viewer reveals that the use of the word ‘nostalgia’ in book titles –​including academic books –​throughout the 20th century (and particularly throughout the past 50 years) has risen exponentially. Furthermore, looking at the catalogues from major academic publishing houses as well as searches of journal articles, it is obvious that nostalgia has increasingly attracted the attention of scholars and researchers from various disciplines now seeing a potential for doing interesting studies and analyses of a topic that for a long period of time was almost routinely neglected. The recent rise of the topic of nostalgia within different science disciplines and fields of research in itself shows how this emotion is and continues –​perhaps even more now than ever before –​to constitute an important part of our human way-​of-​being-​in-​the-​world.

About this book So far, this introductory chapter has described some analytical dimensions, delineated some historical details and provided some personal and professional interpretations of nostalgia that are, however, neither representative of the breadth or depth of existing research on the matter nor by any means uncontested. This volume is devoted to showing how nostalgia has been conceived within a variety of scientific disciplines and how it continues to inspire scholars working within different branches of research. The chapters in the volume cover a broad range of disciplines from within the social sciences, the humanities and the arts. Each chapter outlines, exemplifies and discusses the way nostalgia has been approached, presented and analysed within a specific disciplinary context and how nostalgia as a topic of research has evolved over time. The chapters included thus provide evidence for the fact that nostalgia has gradually –​after many years of absence –​gradually developed into quite a hot and thriving topic in parts of the contemporary research landscape. However, nostalgia is not only part of a generalized disciplinary interest; also in more specialized sub-​branches of research such as tourism studies, heritage studies, media studies, urban studies, memory studies, consumer studies, childhood studies and popular culture studies the emotion of nostalgia seems to be a particularly useful and fruitful theme for shedding light on and understanding some recent changes in society and culture. Like the study of any other human emotion, the study of nostalgia cannot be allowed to be monopolized by any single scientific discipline or any unitary perspective. In order to capture its diversified and multifaceted nature, nostalgia should be researched ‘in the round’, as it were, drawing on insights from various different disciplinary, theoretical and methodological perspectives. For example, psychology is particularly useful for understanding

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the individual-​psychological as well as social-​psychological functions of nostalgia; sociology for shedding light on the presence and importance of nostalgia at the micro, meso and macro levels of society; anthropology for showing the cultural and cross-​cultural differences and similarities in nostalgic expressions; history for documenting epochal changes in the way nostalgia is perceived; architecture for capturing the concrete and symbolic expression of nostalgia in artefacts and urban planning; and so on. Other disciplines may provide insights into other aspects of nostalgia. There are by now so many classic and recent, recognized and unrecognized, works on nostalgia –​some are very detailed and specific, others are more comprehensive –​that show its bountiful analytical possibilities and its continued appeal to academics writing within widely different and related disciplines (see, for example, Howland 1962; Fischer 1980; Shaw and Chase 1989; Golam 1995; Lowenthal 1996; Austin 2007; Trilling 2009; Howard 2012; Angé and Berliner 2014; Cassin 2016; Dodman 2018; Groebner 2018; Maertz 2019; Sayers 2020). Because nostalgia means so many different things to different people at different times, we need to be careful not to limit our scope or confine our curiosity. This book is deliberately seeking to open up nostalgia to inquisitiveness and interpretation. Within many scientific disciplines, nostalgia has often been a neglected or forgotten feeling, emotion or sentiment (without wanting here to engage in the intricate differences between ‘feelings’, ‘emotions’ and ‘sentiments’). For example, within my own discipline of sociology, and even within the sub-​discipline of ‘the sociology of emotions’, the topic of nostalgia is often –​ even in classic and more recent textbooks, introductions or encyclopaedias –​ conspicuous primarily by its absence, lacking a separate entry or even a mention (see, for example, Franks and McCarthy 1989; Kemper 1990; Cuthbertson-​Johnson et al 1994; Lewis and Haviland-​Jones 2000; Stets and Turner 2007, 2015). This is quite surprising, but it nevertheless testifies to the fact that even among many scholars working within the fields of ‘emotion research’ or ‘emotion theory’, nostalgia is –​first and foremost –​often not really regarded as an emotion. Nostalgia, it seems, is not taken seriously as ‘an emotion’ alongside so many other emotions studied, for example, love, trust, shame, anger, guilt and so on. There are, however, exceptions that show that nostalgia is in fact a phenomenon that should be included under the heading of ‘human emotions’ (see, for example, Smith 2015). This general neglect of nostalgia as an emotion is surprising, but it also makes it opportune and worthwhile to study it by asking such quite elementary and explorative questions as: When are people feeling nostalgic? Why? How do they experience nostalgia? Who are the ‘nostalgics’ (or the ‘nostophiles’), and who are the ‘nostophobics’? What are the consequences of nostalgia –​ on the individual and social level? How is nostalgia perceived, received and

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sanctioned within a social and cultural context? Many more questions could be added. Admittedly, there is by now a substantial portion of research on nostalgia, but much of it is of a quite recent date and some of it opens up new pathways for investigation. Fortunately, there are still so many important and relevant questions to ask –​questions still searching for answers –​and the chapters in this volume will try to suggest answers to some of them as well as to so many others. In this way, this book is a treasure trove for anyone wanting to get acquainted with nostalgia. This book introduces the topic of nostalgia from a number of different academic disciplines such as philosophy, political theory, history, sociology, anthropology and psychology. The book aspires to provide readers with an introduction to the way a number of important disciplines from within social science and the humanities have conceptualized, studied and commented on nostalgia. The overall purpose of the volume is to show how nostalgia has been a latent presence within many disciplines for a long time, but also how it has increasingly turned into a topic deserving of attention within various academic disciplines and research contexts. The book is tightly organized around a disciplinary focus, with each chapter devoted to the treatment of nostalgia within a specific discipline (for example, sociology, anthropology, media studies, consumer and marketing studies and so on). However, since the book covers a broad range of neighbouring disciplines, the volume is also multidisciplinary as it paints a diversified and broad-​spectrum picture of how the topic of nostalgia across different disciplines has developed by way of ‘interdisciplinary contamination’ and debates between different disciplines. The book is intended as an introduction to nostalgia as such a diversified and multifaceted phenomenon that can be captured, studied and analysed from a number of different academic vantage points. In this way, the book can be used as a resource for anyone interested in understanding nostalgia as a topic that concerns scholars and researchers working within their disciplinary, theoretical, methodological and normative backgrounds, and as a testimony to the continued relevance and vitality of nostalgia in contemporary academia. Staring out with the so-​called ‘mother of all science’, the discipline of philosophy, in Chapter 1 by Giulia Bovassi we are taken back to the ancestors of modern thinking in ancient philosophy. The author shows how both nostalgia and philosophy respond to the human need for meaning, and in the chapter this need is traced through discussions of themes such as time, memory and identity from classical Greek philosophy to contemporary postmodern philosophical thought. Chapter 2 is written by Tobias Becker and is devoted to outlining how and why historical science as compared to other disciplines has been reluctant to engage more fully with nostalgia. The author shows how a more elaborate historical understanding of nostalgia

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could draw on a number of relevant approaches such as conceptual history, memory studies, the history of temporality and the history of emotions. In Chapter 3, Andrew R. Murphy introduces to the topic of nostalgia within the field of political science. He shows how the theme and political practice of nostalgia can be traced from the writings of ancient Greek philosophers through the work of Niccolò Machiavelli and Edmund Burke to contemporary Christian right-​wing politics in the United States. The book’s Chapter 4 by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Janelle L. Wilson explores sociology’s contribution to understanding and analysing nostalgia on the micro, meso and macro levels. Admitting that sociology’s interest in taking nostalgia seriously has been somewhat belated and reluctant, the authors nevertheless show how nostalgia can in fact serve as an important prism for understanding a wide range of sociological issues. In Chapter 5 by Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides, we turn to the discipline of psychology and its particular ‘take’ on nostalgia. Based on a compact review of early psychological studies of nostalgia, the authors propose a new regulatory or functional approach to nostalgia and provide suggestions for future directions for psychological research into nostalgia. Chapter 6 is authored by Michael Herzfeld, who takes us on a tour of anthropology’s multiple engagements with nostalgia. He shows how the anthropological interest in nostalgia encapsulates numerous interpretations, of which some appear in unexpected contexts. He critically discusses how the discipline analyses nostalgia as well as how the discipline –​in the shape of so-​called ‘salvage anthropology’ –​has sometimes itself engaged in an exoticizing nostalgia. In Chapter 7, Katharina Niemeyer shows how nostalgia is increasingly a mediated and mediatized phenomenon in contemporary culture. She explores the intrinsic relationship between media, technology and nostalgia from a media-​philosophical standpoint by discussing the current theoretical and empirical scholarly work in the field. Nostalgia, however, is not only increasingly a mediated emotion but also a marketed emotion. In Chapter 8, Ela Veresiu, Thomas Derek Robinson and Ana Babić Rosario provide an overview of how marketing and consumer research can shed light on the role and function of nostalgia in times of consumerism. The authors outline the importance of individual nostalgia among consumers, then move on to producers’ application of nostalgia in advertising and branding strategies as well as to illustrate the role of collective nostalgia in broader consumer culture. Nostalgia is not only part of the universe of science or research but also an integral aspect of artistic and literary expression. Chapter 9 by Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg invites us into the wonderful world of literature by examining the close relationship between nostalgia and literature, surveying the history of literature through a selection of its most prominent engagements with nostalgia, and then delineating the mechanics of a nostalgic

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literary aesthetics. In Chapter 10, Fernando Quesada and Andrés Carretero –​ in a roundabout way –​introduce the topic and practice of nostalgia from the field of architecture. The chapter proposes a narration of this phenomenon in reverse manner, from today to yesterday, to conclude with a proposal for the practice of ‘memory without nostalgia’. In this story, the authors give preponderance to three very specific historical moments of epistemological rupture as key points in the problematic relationship between architecture and nostalgia: the present historicist postmodernism, 19th-​century eclecticism and the Renaissance. The book is concluded with a Postscript in which some of the recurrent and transversing themes from the Introduction and the chapters are revisited, discussed and put into perspective. Moreover, the Postscript also engages with the notion of ‘the nostalgia of the future’ and discusses the possible future of nostalgia. It is the hope and aspiration for this book to show the multidisciplinary and multifaceted nature of nostalgia and to point to possible pathways for further exploration of nostalgia as an emotion of importance for understanding human life and society. Nostalgia is and remains an important emotion to study for all social science and humanities disciplines, not least because it provides us with an understanding –​particularly important in a ‘now society’ like ours in which everything associated with the past is regarded as outdated and irrelevant –​of how the present is always connected in the hearts and minds of people to that which went before it. The book’s chapters will thus show some of the many different ways in which people find meaning (and perhaps even hope) –​individually and collectively –​in a longing for the past, and they thus pay homage to the important existentialist insight of American philosopher and theologian Ralph Harper, who once stated that ‘through nostalgia we know not only what we hold most dear, but the quality of experiencing that we deny ourselves habitually’ (Harper 1966: 26–​27). To neglect nostalgia is to fail to recognize that the search for meaning (and hope) is often rooted in what has already been experienced, felt and lived. References Albrecht, Glenn et al (2007) ‘Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change’. Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (1): 95–​98. Angé, Olivia and David Berliner (2014) ‘Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia –​Anthropology as Nostalgia’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp 1–​16. Atia, Nadia and Jeremy Davies (2010) ‘Editorial: Nostalgia and the Shapes of History’. Memory Studies, 3 (3): 181–​186. Austin, Linda M. (2007) Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–​1 917. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Austin, Norman (2010) ‘Homeric Nostalgia’. The Yale Review, 98 (2): 37–​64.

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Barnes, Julian (2011) The Sense of an Ending. London: Jonathan Cape. Batcho, Krystine I. (2009) ‘Nostalgia and the Emotional Tone and Content of Song Lyrics’. American Journal of Psychology, 120: 361–​381. Batcho, Krystine I. (2013) ‘Nostalgia: The Bittersweet History of a Psychological Concept’. History of Psychology, 16 (3): 165–​176. Batcho, Krystine I. and Michael Hviid Jacobsen (2021) ‘Nostalgia –​An Essentially Contested Emotion’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Emotions in Culture and Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Bauman, Zygmunt (1998) Globalization –​ The Human Consequences. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2007) Consuming Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt (2017) Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bauman, Zygmunt and Keith Tester (2001) Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Becker, Tobias (2018) ‘The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique’. History and Theory, 57 (2): 234–​250. Boren, Zachary (2013) ‘The Nature of Nostalgia’. Contemporary Psychotherapy, 5 (1). Available online at: www.contemporarypsychotherapy.org/​volume-​ 5-​no-​1-​spring-​2013/​the-​nature-​of-​nostalgia/​. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Bude, Heinz (2018) The Mood of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Davis, Fred (1977) ‘Nostalgia, Identity and the Current Nostalgia Wave’. Journal of Popular Culture, 11 (2): 414–​424. Davis, Fred (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press. Cassin, Barbara (2016) Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? New York: Fordham University Press Cuthbertson-​Johnson, Beverley, David D. Franks and Michael Dornan (eds) (1994) The Sociology of Emotions: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland Publishing Inc. Dodman, Thomas (2018) What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Elias, Norbert (1987) ‘The Retreat of Sociologists into the Present’. Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (2/​3): 223–​247. Fischer, Volker (1980) Nostalgie: Geschichte und Kultur als Trödelmarkt. Lucerne: C.J. Bucher. Franks, David D. and E. Doyle McCarthy (eds) (1989) The Sociology of Emotions: Original Essays and Research Papers. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press Inc. Freedman, Abraham (1956) ‘The Feeling of Nostalgia and Its Relationship to Phobia’. Bulletin of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, 6: 84–​92. Gallie, Walter Bryce (1956) ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56: 167–​198.

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Geahchan, Dominique (1968) ‘Deuil et Nostalgic’. Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse, 32: 39–​65. Golam, Romy (1995) Modernity and Nostalgia –​Art and Politics in France Between the Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press. Groebner, Valentin (2018) Retroland: Geschichtstourismus und die Sehnsucht nach dem Authentischen. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag. Harper, Ralph (1966) Nostalgia: An Existential Exploration of Longing and Fulfillment in the Modern Age. Cleveland, OH: The Press of Western Reserve University. Hatherley, Owen (2017) The Ministry of Nostalgia. London: Verso. Hepper, Erica G., Timothy D. Ritchie, Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut (2011) ‘Odyssey’s End: Lay Conceptions of Nostalgia Reflect Its Original Homeric Meaning’. Emotion, 12 (1): 102–​119. Hepper, Erica G. et al (2014) ‘Pancultural Nostalgia: Prototypical Conceptions Across Cultures’. Emotion, 14: 733–​747. Hirsch, Alan R. (1992) ‘Nostalgia: A Neuropsychiatric Understanding’. Advances in Consumer Research, 19: 390–​395. Hochschild, Arlie R. (2016) Strangers in Their Own Land –​Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press. Hofer, Johannes (1688/​1934) ‘Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688’. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2: 376–​391. Howard, Scott Alexander (2012) ‘Nostalgia’. Analysis, 72 (4): 641–​650. Howland, Elihu S. (1962) ‘Nostalgia’. Journal of Existential Psychiatry, 3 (10): 197–​204. Illbruck, Helmut (2012) Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease. Boston: Northwestern University Press. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (ed) (2020a) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. New York: Routledge. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2020b) ‘Introduction: In Times of Nostalgia –​The Brave New World of a Grand Old Emotion’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 1–​28. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2020c) ‘Living in Nostalgia –​Exploring Expatriate Experiences of Everyday Nostalgia in Pattaya’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 201–​225. Jameson, Fredric (1989) ‘Nostalgia for the Present’. South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (2): 517–​537. Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1983) L’irréversible et la nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion. Kemper, Theodore D. (ed) (1990) Research Agendas in the Sociology of Emotions. New York: State University of New York Press.

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Kenny, Michael (2017) ‘Back to the Populist Future? Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse’. Journal of Political Ideologies, 22: 256–​273. Kleiner, Jack (1977) ‘On Nostalgia’, in Charles W. Socarides (ed) The World of Emotions: Clinical Studies of Affects and Their Expression. New York, NY: International University Press, pp 471–​498. Koppetsch, Cornelia (2018) ‘Soziologiekolumne: Eine Welle der Nostalgie: Die akademische Mittelschicht und die illiberale Gesellschaft’. Merkur, 23 August, pp 51–​58. Leardi, Jeanette (2013) ‘The Incredible Powers of Nostalgia’. HuffPost Life, October 5. Available online at: www.huffpost.com/​entry/​benefits-​of-​ nostalgia_​n_​4031759. Lewis, Michael and Jeannette M. Haviland-​Jones (eds) (2000) Handbook of Emotions (2nd edn). London: The Guilford Press. Lowenthal, David (1996) Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press. Lowenthal, David (2015) The Past is a Foreign Country –​ Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maertz, Gregory (2019) Nostalgia for the Future: Modernism and Heterogeneity in the Visual Arts of Nazi Germany. Stuttgart: ibidem-​Verlag. Newman, David B. et al (2020) ‘Nostalgia and Well-​Being in Daily Life: An Ecological Validity Perspective’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118 (2): 325–​347. Niemeyer, Katharina (ed) (2014) Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. London: Routledge. Oliete-​Aldea, Elena (2012) ‘Fear and Nostalgia in Times of Crisis: The Paradoxes of Globalization in Oliver Stone’s Money Never Sleeps (2010)’. Culture Unbound, 4: 347–​366. Pallister, Kathryn (ed) (2019) Netflix Nostalgia: Streaming the Past on Demand. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Phillips, James (1985) ‘Distance, Absence and Nostalgia’, in Don Ihde and Hugh J. Silverman (ed) Descriptions. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp 64–​75. Pickering, Michael and Emily Keightley (2006) ‘The Modalities of Nostalgia’. Current Sociology, 54 (6): 919–​941. Proust, Marcel (1913–​ 1 927/​ 1 992) In Search of Lost Time (7 vols). New York: Modern Library. Rosen, George (1975) ‘Nostalgia: A “Forgotten” Psychological Disorder’. Psychological Medicine, 5: 340–​354. Roth, Michael S. (1991) ‘Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-​Century France’. History and Memory, 3 (1): 5–​29.

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Sayers, Nicola (2020) The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Routledge. Schieman, Scott (2006) ‘Anger’, in Jan E. Stets and Jonathan H. Turner (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. New York: Springer, pp 493–​515. Schiermer, Bjørn and Hjalmar Bang Carlsen (2017) ‘Nostalgia, Irony and Collectivity in Late-​Modern Culture: The Ritual Watching of The Disney Christmas Show in Scandinavia’. Acta Sociologica, 60 (2): 158–​175. Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut (2018) ‘Finding Meaning in Nostalgia’. Review of General Psychology, 22: 48–​61. Shaw, Christopher and Malcolm Chase (1989) ‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia’, in Christopher Shaw and Malcolm Chase (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. New York: Manchester University Press, pp 1–​17. Smith, Tiffany W. (2015) The Book of Human Emotions. London: Profile Books. Starobinski, Jean (1966) ‘The Idea of Nostalgia’. Diogenes, 14 (54): 81–​103. Stearns, Peter N. and Carol Z. Stearns (1985) ‘Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards’. American Historical Review, 90 (4): 813–​836. Steenvorden, Eefje and Eelco Harteveld (2017) ‘The Appeal of Nostalgia: The Influence of Societal Pessimism on Support for Populist Radical Right Parties’. West European Politics, 41 (1): 28–​52. Stets, Jan E. and Jonathan H. Turner (eds) (2007) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions. New York: Springer. Stets, Jan E. and Jonathan H. Turner (eds) (2015) Handbook of the Sociology of Emotions, Volume II. New York: Springer. Trilling, Renée R. (2009) The Aesthetics of Nostalgia: Historical Representation in Old English Verse. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Turner, Bryan S. (1987) ‘A Note on Nostalgia’. Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (1): 147–​156. Veenstra, Aleit and Giselinde Kuipers (2013) ‘It Is Not Old-​Fashioned, It Is Vintage: Vintage Fashion and the Complexities of 21st Century Consumption Practices’. Sociology Compass, 7 (5): 355–​365. Werman, David S. (1977) ‘Normal and Pathological Nostalgia’. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 25 (2): 387–​398. Wilson, Janelle L. (2005/​2 014) Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Publishing. Wilson, Janelle L. (2015) ‘Here and Now, There and Then: Nostalgia as a Time and Space Phenomenon’. Symbolic Interaction, 38 (4): 378–​492.

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1

Philosophy and Nostalgia: ‘Rooting’ within the Nostalgic Condition Giulia Bovassi

Introduction This chapter, without claiming to be exhaustive, aims to deepen the investigation around the theme of nostalgia from a purely philosophical point of view. The purpose is not to examine ‘philosophers’ or ‘philosophical theories on nostalgia’ –​as they are difficult to identify –​but, rather, to locate nostalgia within the philosophical heritage, trying to make famous thinkers of the classical tradition interact with other, more contemporary ones. By adopting this approach, it is possible to verify how the object of analysis (nostalgia) can, in some respects, be considered a supra-​historical constant: despite the ambiguity that characterizes it, the theme of nostalgia, in fact, emerges with a certain clarity and redundancy in close correlation with philosophical investigations related to the processes of memory (mnestic functions) and to researches on the knowability (or definition) of time in three dimensions (past, present, future). Through this examination, attention is drawn to two other types of interaction between nostalgia and philosophical knowledge, which link to those mentioned earlier: one concerns the relationship between the nostalgic condition and knowledge (of ourselves and of reality), where a reading of nostalgia as an instrument of knowledge is proposed; the other makes some reflections, starting from the question of how nostalgia can determine the construction of personal identity. In the first section, ‘Nostalgia as maieutics’, the nostalgic condition investigates philosophical exercise, making specific reference to the Socratic

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metaphor. Socrates compared the philosophical exercise (in particular, the one carried out in a dialogical form) to the maieutic art, the art of the midwife/​ obstetrician, asserting that the effort to be made by every human being in the philosophical search for truth should be solicited to the point of making the interlocutor ‘give birth’ to the expected truth. A similar procedure occurs for any object of knowledge investigated, even the human being in all his complexity. For this reason, the labour of knowing, together with the effort that it implies, responds to the Socratic call to ‘take care of yourself ’ (epimèleia heautou). The latter, from late antiquity to the contemporary age, has been accepted as an appeal to make the philosophical exercise a cure for the soul and a behavioural doctrine with social, moral and political implications, even if it later lost the spiritual charge that was strongly present in the classical era. Nostalgia –​being a rich mixture of contradictions and ambiguities in close correlation with temporality, memory, knowledge and identity –​reveals itself to the philosophical discipline as a tool to reach the truth. A ‘purified’ or, we might say, ‘crisp’ (‘disclosed’, to use a philosophical synonym) truth. The human being, in fact, while living the nostalgic condition, and thanks to the conflicting experience (pòlemos, a term used to describe the intellectual effort in the philosophical exercise) that it produces (or, rather, the backward path, between memories, emotions, history, still projected in the present and future), makes new knowledge emerge. The ‘return effect of truth’ (to use an expression of Michel Foucault’s) just mentioned, capable of uniting nostalgia and philosophy, will be explored here by referring in the first instance to the Platonic allegory of the cave and St Augustine’s well-​known reflection on time , and in a second case to the reflections of Edmund Husserl and, in particular, of Martin Heidegger around the concepts of ‘temporalization’ and ‘Dasein’ (being-​there/​existence), in which the phenomena of experience of the oblivion, of remembering and of recalling, assume an important position to identify the object of nostalgia. These last considerations lead to the second section, ‘Temporality and identity within philosophical thought about nostalgia’. The aim of this section is to further investigate the value of philosophical contributions regarding the concepts of time and identity in relation to the nostalgic condition. It brings into dialogue numerous authors who, although not having given special consideration to nostalgia, provide valuable tools for reflecting on the theme in question. We will come to the conclusion that the manifestation to memory of the object proper to the nostalgic condition –​and the inevitable transition from the present to the past –​brings a sort of ‘nostalgia for the future’, that is, a human need to return ‘home’, to the ‘womb’. As we will see, this can include within itself the danger of a deformation of the object of which we are nostalgic, but it is equally evident that the ‘healing’ effect of the nostalgic condition can occur at the moment in which the knowledge

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it produces becomes the cause of a change rich in value for the human being and his existence. In this sense, the two notions of ‘uprooting’ and ‘rooting’ present in Simone Weil’s thought are well suited: the first indicates a state of ‘alienation’, namely the absolute extraneousness of the subject to himself and to what he does; while the second indicates the need not to get involved in a situation of rootlessness (nowadays often defined as the state of liquid or nomadic identity in which human beings find themselves). Two other voices will enrich these very current passages of philosophical thought on nostalgia: Hannah Arendt –​through a concept similar to those mentioned by Weil, the concept of ‘estrangement’; and the philosopher Byung-​Chul Han, whose thought closely touches the absence of roots as a distinctive feature of today’s society, as he considers it a consequence of multiple causes, not least the fragmentation of time, namely the separation between time and signification. This triggers the dispersion of the human being, which is at the centre of Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the effects of a compromised identity. The liquid paradigm occupies the final section, ‘The nostalgic condition within the post-​modern liquid paradigm’, where, among thinkers such as Günther Anders and Gilles Lipovetsky, nostalgia develops in correlation to the nomadic presupposition of the postmodern subject, who tends to deprive himself of those intellectual tools which are useful to place himself as an author aware of his own lived time. This is analysed simultaneously with the metaphysical and anthropological deconstruction typical of secularization, considering this aspect an integral part of the short-​circuit produced by the conflict between the need for continuity (‘rooting’) and the new man, defined by Anders as ‘without World’ and by Lipovetsky as the subject of an ‘accelerated obsolescence’. The premise of the present chapter is based on two observations: first, that nostalgia constitutes a territory in many respects unexplored with systematicity by the philosophical heritage; and second, that nostalgic specificity has much to offer both to philosophical method and to the content of philosophical thought. Thus, ultimately, not only does the philosophical approach offer a unique contribution to the topic of nostalgia with respect to the type of discipline, but nostalgia itself, explored with the tools of philosophy, offers a new way of understanding philosophy itself and the philosophical comprehension of the one/​those capable of experiencing the nostalgic condition.

Nostalgia as maieutics Maieutics is the art of the midwife, the woman who helps and accompanies women in labour. This comparison of midwifery with philosophy stems from a fundamental Socratic lesson about education in the philosophical

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exercise: in fact, it must be based on attitudes of gradual accompaniment and stimulation, rather than trying to fill others’ minds with knowledge given for granted. The one who leads to philosophical practice has instead the responsibility –​responding well to the metaphor of the midwife –​to encourage a ‘visceral’ effort from the individual, in order to reach the knowledge of truth, first of all by himself and, second, acknowledging that truth is something already present within his soul. The effort imposed by maieutics, applied to philosophical praxis, is that of unearthing the forms of knowledge already possessed by the individual in order to bring them to memory; a process that Plato called ‘reminiscence theory of knowledge’, precisely the process that makes the content of memory sharp, alive and ready to be explored again by the intellectual faculties. To adhere to this effort accomplished by thought means to access a different way of living the experience of our own present. In particular, since thought is always a thought of a human being who thinks, philosophical practice can turn out to be only an attitude, an existential condition that inevitably passes through the crisis, a time of strong transitory destabilization during which he feels called to confirm past certainties, evolve them or abandon them. This expedient of reason, on the inner and outer realities of the human being, becomes an object of judgement, order and discernment in order to distinguish what is weak (opinion) and what is strong (truth). The actions of ‘thinking’ and ‘remembering’ ascribe the historical–​biographical legacy of the human consortium and of each of its members, a legacy in which they express their identity, their language and their relationship with the other. In some ways, this awareness responds to the provocative Greek appeal of epimèleia heautou (‘to take care of yourself ’), as expressed in the Socratic exhortation of gnōthi seauton (‘to know yourself ’) (see Foucault 2011: 5) later taken up within Foucauldian thought. In the allegory of the cave, as described in the Platonic dialogue Republic (Plato 1967: 339–​342), human beings, prisoners of a fictitious present inhabited in conditions of precarious freedom, serve as a metaphor for the expedient of truth on time, considering that what they live until the moment immediately preceding the expedient is the mimesis of an inaccessible knowledge, because inaccessible are the tools –​whose property they ignore –​useful to access the first of all questions: quid est veritas (‘what is truth’)? They share a state of imprisonment, chained as they are, neck and limbs, at the bottom of the cave, without being able to know anything else beyond the shadows cast by other individuals, outside, on a long wall built in front of their eyes. Through the allegory, Plato discusses what would happen if only one of the chained men managed to undo the chains that prevent him from knowing or discovering that what he was convinced he had already learned

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was, in reality, only a fiction, and also wondering how gradually the eyes of those who have spent an entire existence in the dark will now adapt to the light of reality. The latter, the object of experience, is at the disposal of the one (the human being) who can know its sense and meaning (from the empirical to the metaphysical one); it lets itself be known by an act of will of the subject. In order for this to happen, it is obligatory that he, the individual, first makes the effort to escape from his own condition (to get out of himself). As in a circular motion, after the exit from himself, the individual returns to himself or acquires a new autonomy of thought that makes him a different citizen of the past, present and future. This mechanism is well identified with the phenomenon called ‘disclosure’, which synthesizes the possibility for the main agent (the thinking individual) of the philosophical exercise to see with the eyes of reason what was previously hidden, inaccessible or deceptive. Emanuele Severino, in the text Essenza del nichilismo (The Essence of Nihilism) (Severino 1982: 145–​153) –​ in which he argues the incidence of nihilism (a philosophical model that absolutizes nothingness, the lack of every root and identity) in the structure of the contemporary West –​distinguishes between the ‘Path of Day’ and the ‘Path of Night’. The paths indicate two clear and definitive antagonisms (Severino opposes the idea that there may be an ambiguity in this distinction), being and nothingness. Now, this very explanatory image used by Severino helps us to grasp an important aspect: what changes is the expression of reality (being) in the pluralism of its forms, not its truth (substance), which instead remains, regardless of the contingent change. In fact, Severino maintains that ‘a “truth” that does not know how to hold still is not a truth. ‘Philosophy’, he continues, ‘is the place, the guardian of truth’ (Severino 1982: 41). This happens only if that ‘original disclosure’ (Severino 1982: 41) which is the exit from the cave and the fidelity to the immutable truth of the objects of knowledge takes place. If it is compared to the nostalgic condition, the juncture between the two paths is an instrument of discernment capable of helping man not to implode the present in a melancholy or, on the contrary, in a deconstructive utopia. The provocation dictated by nostalgia is exactly that of not confusing what happens in historical time with immutable truth (natural origin, roots, identity and so on). Whenever history has seen a break in continuity between past, present and future, it has been at the same time (or in retrospect) as an event so extreme as to prevent members of the human family from recognizing themselves in a common origin that allows us to talk about community. As Severino affirms: The forgetfulness of the truth of being, in which the West got lost, does not mean then that the appearance, in which Western man consists, has emptied itself of its eternal spectacle. And primitive man,

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who still remains on this side of the juncture, from which the paths of Day and Night depart, is not an appearance that has not yet opened on this eternal spectacle. Man has since the dawn of time and forever in front of himself the truth of being, timeless. In this sense ... man is the eternal appearance of the truth of being. Time and history are within this appearance and constitute the process of revelation of the whole. (Severino 1982: 153) The liberating ‘accident’, the same one that breaks the chains between the subject and the wall of the cave, will never be totally alien to the memory of a past that, although harmful and privative, led the subject to understand how the meaning of freedom is associated with knowledge. Through the past, in the ‘Path of Night’, he can metabolize the light of reality. Such is philosophy and, above all, the philosophical exercise stimulated by the nostalgic condition. Martin Heidegger, talking about philosophy as ‘a question in which our destiny is at stake’ (Heidegger 1981: 19), gives it a privileged and decisive role for the destiny of humanity, allowing to emphasize again how, by its very nature, the type of effort imposed by thought determines the sense of belonging to a community, regardless of the conditioning produced by historical time. We could say that it is the conservation of that peculiar feature which transforms a mass into a lasting community. Simone Weil in La prima radice (The Need for Roots) explains it very well by clarifying to what extent collective identity has the power to escape oblivion or overcoming. She writes: The degree of respect due to human communities is very high; and for various reasons. First of all, each of them is unique and cannot be replaced if it is destroyed ... The nourishment that a community provides to the soul of its members has no equivalent throughout the universe. Then, with its duration, the community already penetrates into the future. It contains nourishment not only for the souls of the living, but also for those unborn beings who will come into the world in the centuries to come. And finally, by its very duration, the community has its roots in the past ... It is the only thing on earth that has a direct link with the eternal destiny of man; it is the splendor of those who have been able to become aware of that destiny, passed down from generation to generation. (Weil 2017: 14–​15) Thus emerges the reason why the philosophical exercise is not a simplistic practice but an activity innate to the subject, that consequently globally invests his existence. The insoluble fight between oppositions and

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contradictions appropriates the philosophical practice of a statute in motion, which contains in itself the organogenesis of change. The thinking subject is aware of the need for balance and definition, so he is an integral part of a pact of co-​responsibility between human being, Self and nomination of reality, where the latter implies that duel (pòlemos) (Curi 2000) between being part of logòs (reason) and owning it, as stasis and flow. Both quietism and dynamism are moments of philosophical thought that it would be wrong to reduce into antagonistic polarizations. Therefore, it can be deduced that any discourse on critical thinking is a discourse on the human which inhabits a multidimensional identity ananke (necessity) of the Self-​intrapersonal, in spatial and temporal continuity. Nostalgia, despite being an ‘open’ concept, free from ultimate categorizations precisely because of the ‘glue’ role it seems to perform, understood as a condition of cohesion between lack, return and overcoming, finds within the philosophical gym the same –​we could say –​cathartic purpose (of purification). This approach marks the passage from Johannes Hofer’s pathological and emotional vision (‘homesickness’) of nostalgia to an evolution towards gnoseology, where nostalgia rarely appears explicitly and directly as an object of analysis, rather, ‘emerging’ among the questions about temporality, historicity, identity, memory and intellectual mechanism. The nostalgic and philosophical conditions communicate with one another as forms of transition placed in a sort of participatory memory of the cognitive process that sediments bringing-​to-​m emory (the already-​mentioned reminiscence theory of knowledge) what is no longer (exhumation), making the object reappear in the present. This happens because the act of understanding moves through representations linked to the memory to which the knowledge arrives, which must be bound to the individual effort of the subject who desires (and decides) to reconcile with the time lived wondering about it. Michel Foucault identified the same conjunction between philosophy, memory and identity by stating that ‘the definitive fulfillment, the moment of the transfiguration of the subject, [is] made possible by the “return effect” of truth that he experiences on himself, and that passes through and transfigures his being’ (Foucault 2011: 21). This is the transition from inside to outside the cave, and it is also the transition of the individual as the one who ‘undergoes’ history to the one who ‘inhabits’ history. The nostalgic phenomenon, rather than simply quantifying a multiplicity of knowledge, drags a person’s past and, like a ‘sieve’ (Traversa 2016: 55), leads to the immutable roots, since it ‘imprints on the movement of those who shake it the task of letting pass through, “below”, and at the same time blocking, “above”. What is let through and what is blocked, before the action of the sieve was or seemed one’ (Traversa

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2016: 55). The instrument of the sieve proposed by the philosopher Guido Traversa is necessary to outline the cathartic work of discernment which we said to be an inalienable part of the cognitive process, which preserves in itself the purpose of dealing with the labour (maieutic art) it generates. The uniqueness of the binomial nostalgia-​philosophy is identified in how they both constitute the reaction to a need, a lack of meaning –​a scarcity deeply associated with the crisis that affects the ability of self-​understanding, often due to the obstinacy of thinking ourselves indifferent to the past. The indifference or trivialization of thought blocks at first the possibility to judge, then distinguish or ‘sift’ between past and future errors of the human mind. It is here that the shadow zone, in which humanity becomes capable of denying itself without fearing any memory, is determined. The circular motion, the return, finds a consideration in Le Confessioni (The Confessions) of St Augustine, in which knowledge is extracted from the memory which becomes guardian, occupying the place first devolved to nothingness (the ‘not actual’) (Severino 1982: 152). Inside the basin of knowledge, as St Augustine explains, what is preserved by memory –​which, in the philosophical investigation of reality, is revealed, namely called to be –​sediments. He does not fail to point out the effort (maieutic art) to which the subject is obliged when constructing his own thought, which is never foreign to the knowledge learned some time ago. For this reason, St Augustine describes the cognitive mechanism as a process of ‘extraction’ of the knowledge contained in the mind (see Saint Augustine 2005: 225–​227). Talking about the ‘act of thinking’, St Augustine defines a place of thought (mind) and, at the same time, a movement of thought (disclosure) which are in relation to time through the person, the one who accepts the need for the signification of time. The same concept of ‘temporalization’ in Martin Heidegger demonstrates the correlation between the nostalgic phenomenon and access to knowledge that he interposes in the investigation of the ‘historicity of being-​there’, where there is an attempt to ‘show that this entity is not “temporal” because it “is in history”, but vice versa it exists and can exist historically, just because it is temporal at the bottom of its being’ (Heidegger 2011: 528). A reading that goes beyond the phenomenological vision of time, memory, representation and perception of Edmund Husserl, focused at first on the externalization of the binomial knowledge-​time, while later on the consciousness of temporality. The latter has to directly do with the identity of time and past, which raise the nostalgic question through ‘retention’ (a primordial form of bringing to mind from the past) and ‘protention’ (a primordial form of access to the future). As if at conjunction, Henri Bergson formulates a sort of temporalization of the inhabited place or localization of time, arguing that ‘our past is ... what no longer acts, but could act, what

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will act by inserting itself in a present sensation from which it will draw vitality’ (Bergson 1983: 223), then consolidated in the notions of ‘continuity’ and ‘permanence’ (duration). Therefore, it oversteps measurement of time, which places an aseptic relationality and proposes, instead, the conscience through which the forms of memory –​in which the net stratification of time, which has become more malleable and fluid, is dispersed –​are taken. Heidegger, then, in part by approaching and in part by detaching himself from Husserl, radicalizes the historical event, a vehicle through which the individual ‘actively’ experiences the present (‘being-​in-​the-​world’) (Heidegger 2011: 491) from which understanding is defined. Understanding, for Heidegger, is a phenomenon that is expressed in the present as a ‘Seindes-​ been-​presenting’ (Heidegger 2011: 491). Through this, he indicates how thought contains within itself the three temporal dimensions, without ever being able to be alienated from each of them. Heidegger concludes Essere e Tempo (Being and Time) by arguing that ‘the existential-​ontological constitution of the totality of being is founded in temporality’ (Heidegger 2011: 611); this is a prelude to the closing question where he asks if time could ‘become manifest as the horizon of being’ (Heidegger 2011: 611). Sealing his work with such an open conclusion, he takes a step forward in the concept of ‘temporalization’, which is ‘returned’ to the temporal dimension of the present as a favourite place in which to keep constant philosophical research. At least, Heidegger proposes a vision of time that is very different from a pure succession of events, much more similar to the concurrence of past, present and future in a fictitious distance from the community, from existence and identity, that is hardly separable from what they are. St Augustine takes up this vivid nostalgic presentiality –​ we could improperly define it as ‘extratemporal’ –​by analysing the link between time, knowledge and memory. As he explains, the present is an exclusive time: it differs from past and future, but it is the only one able to enclose them, because both of them ‘wherever they are and however they are, they only exist as present’ (Saint Augustine 2005: 277). Memory exists in this awareness: what emerges from knowledge is the result of the processing mediated by senses and intellect in the act of thinking, which cannot but be in the present. He, therefore, writes: What is now evident and clear is that neither future things nor past things exist. Just as it is improper to speak of three times: past, present and future. Perhaps it would be more correct to speak of three times: the present of the past, the present of the present, and the present of the future. There are actually within the soul these three forms of time, which I do not see elsewhere: the present of past is memory; the

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present of present is immediate perception; the present of future is expectation. (Saint Augustine 2005: 279) The peculiarity of the union of philosophy and nostalgia is the break: the second bursts into the exercise of thought, forcing it to an oblative trauma punctuated by the choice to exit from itself and to re-​enter, after having been participatory in the upheaval of lived time. The cathartic principle is exactly a time of sharing in the scenario that reality puts in front of the subject, in such a pervasive way as to provoke in him the ‘exit from the cave’. Probably what specifically characterizes the philosophical contribution to the theme is the transformative genesis transmitted to nostalgia as a human condition, giving it the power to become a catalyst of knowledge, passing compulsorily through the crisis of the finite, empirical and tangible experience of existence in order to proceed to signification. And it is here that, where tradition, philosophy and nostalgia communicate, the nostalgic human experience in the three microsystems of the macrosystem of ‘time’ merges with maieutic method: a solicitation –​as well as task of the midwife –​to the continuous (re)birth of knowledge and the torment felt by the one who tries to belong to that knowledge.

Temporality and identity within philosophical thought on nostalgia Dealing with nostalgia from the point of view of the discipline of philosophy requires that the object in question, nostalgia, is placed on a ‘time-​of-​the-​ subject’ scale, which is metaphysical and goes beyond empirical measurement. On the other hand, biographical experience, together with chronological experience, is already learned first of all as time lived by a subject of that precise present. Emmanuel Levinás speaks of it in terms of ‘dialectics’, namely the dynamic movement that goes back up the currents of knowledge, making its way between the eternal and the moment, in which the human being is rehabilitated to define himself in a space occupied by time, the only one able to guarantee him an escape from non-​places. What Levinás sees in the ‘event’ –​namely that ‘the commitment to being starting from the present, which tears and knots the weave of the infinite, involves ... a tension and a contraction’ (Levinás 1986: 90–​91) –​has the value of a man who gives meaning to the present. A contemplative and transformative meaning. The human being, according to nostalgia as maieutics (or pòlemos), becomes an integral part of a wider concept of the term interpreted as an ontological (inherent to being, to substance) and existential condition, thus digressing within all the limbs that compose the individual (rooting) and the relational (the Heideggerian notion of ‘being-​in-​the-​world’) human identity. A society

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seeks the past and the future not only as an anguished dissatisfaction for the present or as an accelerated desire for novelty but, rather, as sources of origin and memory: oblivion, the result of the latent indifferentist charisma, is an attribute of the choice made in favour of uprooting (nomadism), as residual moment of the contraction between inner and outer dimensions. Novalis argued that the exquisitely philosophical soul resides in nostalgia as an ‘exploration of the exclusions and white spots on the map of the past’ which ‘takes on the flavor of a research strongly oriented towards future’ (Liakos 2010: 70). What Novalis argues is undeniable, if the application of critical thinking is understood as a condition proper to human existence which, in turn, occurs and materializes in the temporal macrosystem, namely the inevitable and irreversible historical-​chronological time. As a macrosystem, time contains within itself continuous subdivisions into three dimensions, but, unlike past and future, the present infiltrates transversally, creating conflictual hotbeds, suitable for the interference of thought in the lived time, together with its most intimate determinations. In the present there is the moment, the instant, which has a ‘grip’ on time capable of making past and future converge in it, although they are less palpable than lived time. This temporal mixture stimulates thought, the awareness of the present, which originates from a fortification of memory, since remembrance is a tool useful to avoid indifference towards contemporary issues and facts. Going through this perspective, memory departs even more drastically from the bidirectional evocative regret (retrotopia –​utopia), giving the circuit of remembrance the original sense of belonging, which is the place of contemplation: the only space of conjunction between past, present and future able to confirm humanity, that inimitable system of consciousness of continuity collected in genealogy. Nostalgia is the guarantor of signification, aware that enracinement –​that is, ‘rooting’ –​‘is perhaps the most important and most unrecognized need of the human soul. It is among the most difficult to define. Through his real, active and natural participation in the existence of a community that keeps alive certain treasures of the past and certain presentiments of the future, the human being has a root’ (Weil 2017: 50). ‘Rooting’ and ‘uprooting’ (Weil 2017) respectively indicate the visceral need of the individual to name him/​herself and denominate reality, namely to ‘be’ in the univocal identity determined by multiple processes of recognition with the Other; vice versa, uprooting indicates the exhausted, the one who finds himself deprived of any identity by living in abstraction. Uprooting uses the despotic force of alienation from the origin, which is time and place. If we exclude rooting, in the long term we provoke the insomnia of the empathic dilemma where intersubjectivity is a priori undermined by the denial of identity poured over historical experience. The vital ‘need for

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truth of a people’ (Weil 2017: 49) is part of the ‘natural’ rooting theorized by Weil (2017: 50) if –​as she affirms –​there are less men capable of adhering to the deconstructive and constructive dialectic, a must in the exploratory labour of truth and recognition. This positioning is the presence of the incarnation of identity in time that has been lost due to the burnout, the ‘accelerated obsolescence’ (Lipovetsky 2016: 118). ‘Human misery would be intolerable if it were not diluted in time’ (Weil 1985: 28), because ‘time is an image of eternity; but it is also an Ersatz [surrogate] of eternity’ (Weil 1985: 32). Weil warned of the danger for the human being and human preservation of a fracture between identity-​memory-​survival, accentuating the prevarication of uprooting where man [sic], forgetting his own misery, abdicates universal relationality, among peoples, based on the common natural origin, opening to the indifferentism of the non-​place, of non-​ being, of flowing without roots: ‘Being uprooted means not having a place recognized and guaranteed by others; being superfluous means not belonging to the world. Uprooting can be the preliminary condition of superfluity, as isolation can be of estrangement’ (Arendt 2004: 651). How can there be, then, temporalization, if the one who holds the power to doubt and exercise thought chooses to become the owner of a thought uprooted from memory and identity? In the end, it is precisely this impasse that torments Friedrich Nietzsche, as in La gaia scienza (The Gay Science) he announces the death of God, and provocatively raises the question: ‘Where do we move? Away from all the suns? Is it not ours, an eternal downfall? And backwards, sideways, forwards, on all sides? Is there still a high and a low? Are we not wandering as if through an infinite nothingness? (Nietzsche 2011: 163). He is led to idealize negatively any retrospective junction as a sort of betrayal of progress, aimed at the redeeming identity of the Übermensch (Beyond-​Man), who is nothing other than the utopia of a posthuman born from nothingness and residing in nothingness. ‘The Eternal Return as experience, as thought of thoughts, constitutes the event that abolishes history’ (Klossowski quoted in Giacomelli 2012: 170); that multiple in itself factuality with ‘a nihilistic side and a redemptive side, which respectively postulate: “everything is equal” –​“every moment is occasion”, “everything is indifferent” –​“nothing is indifferent”, “everything is to be denied” –​“everything is to be affirmed” ’ (Giacomelli 2012: 171). In Nietzsche’s work, time and identity animate the entire struggle of humanity, manifested in each individual because it is the history of humanity as a whole, as a community: it is asked to live individually what it lives collectively. Conversely, he theorizes the legitimacy of the idea of the present expressed in the redemption from the responsibility of knowledge on temporalization (lived present) and the natural struggle that runs through it. Nietzsche’s philosophy exalts the projection towards the not-​yet, upsetting the understanding of the transient nature of the human

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being by driving him into the zone of hegemony of tiredness; this is what Gilles Deleuze defines as ‘exhaustion’, namely a ‘creative process, tending towards nothingness, silence, the end ... it is a matter of exhausting the possibility itself (“we were tired of something, we are exhausted of nothing”)’ (Deleuze 2015: 9). Experiencing the most extreme tiredness, the one without perspective and hope, is one of the after-​effects of an age without memory, but obsessively competing with future. The complementarity between past and future, condensed in the nostalgic condition, becomes specular to that one between alienation (uprooting) and preservation (rooting-​identity/​memory). This is the glue, the nourishment that gives nostalgia an even cathartic function, because it is able to deny the postmodern liquid condition. The dialectic nostalgia adheres to that warning prematurely left us by Weil, for whom ‘he who is uprooted, uproots. He who is rooted, does not uproot’ (Weil 2017: 55). As Nietzsche noted: Look at this carriageable door! Dwarf! I continued: it has two faces. Two paths agree here: no one has ever walked them to the end. This long way to the door and back: it lasts an eternity. And that long way out of the door and forward –​it’s another eternity. They contradict each other, these paths; they bang their heads against each other: and here, at this carriageable door, they gather. At the top is written the name of the door: ‘moment’. (Nietzsche 1976: 183–​184) Nietzsche seals the form of the moment (belonging to the present), following the same reasoning conducted earlier, where the intrinsic ambivalence of temporalization was affirmed: it fills the gap between past and future through the present, which moves incessantly between one and the other, thanks to thought. The nostalgic paradigm is this sort of break between the two Nietzschean ‘paths’, capable of balancing the conflictuality typical of being-​ in-​the-​world, experienced by the individual. In fact, ‘without man there would be no struggle: perhaps without him the forces of past and future would have long since neutralized or destroyed each other’ (Arendt 1991: 33). Byung-​Chul Han, a contemporary philosopher, starts from the observation that today’s meaning of time is linked to its ‘dispersion’ (Han 2017: 7), which the author defines as a symptom among multiple symptoms of ‘dyschrony’. Han explains that ‘dyschrony’ is not the result of forced acceleration. Responsible for dyschrony is first of all the atomization of time. This also gives the impression that time is moving much faster than before. Due to time dispersion, any experience of duration is no longer possible. Nothing contains time. Life is no longer placed in those structures of order or coordinates

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that form a duration. Even things it identifies with are fleeting and ephemeral. In this way, we ourselves become radically transient. (Han 2017: 7) Through the definition of ‘dyschrony’, Han links in a cause–​effect correlation two central factors of the present reasoning: the erosive ruination of temporality (which Han calls ‘atomization of time’) and the ‘liquid anthropology’ (Bovassi 2017) (where the absence of roots, the nomadic identity, the effects of secularization and the increase of nihilistic meanings of the person become evident). Both aspects encourage the individual to distance himself from continuous ties with the past and, therefore, with the future. The ‘accelerated obsolescence’ (Lipovetsky 2016: 118) traceable within uprooting, commodifying the person’s need for meaning and being, takes ‘time’ to continuously ‘collapse, or rather it presses on, in order to balance its essential lack of being, but it fails, since acceleration alone does not generate any fixed point. Rather, it makes the current lack of being appear even more pervasive’ (Han 2017: 28). The penury of objectives is an integral part of liquid anthropology (Bovassi 2017), widespread to Zygmunt Bauman’s expression, in which Han lucidly grasps the redundant flattening that follows such that ‘boredom can be basically traced back to emptiness of time. Time does not fill any temporal gravitation’ (Han 2017: 92), the limbs of time vitalize and persist within vita activa (Arendt 2001), which is not doing, but acting; the craftsman with the power to remember and forget, albeit for a purpose transcendent to contingency, where –​in fact –​ authenticity claims that unique value of experience that the artefact is denied by nature. In the guise of the nomad, of the wayfarer, the subject does not have the architrave of a managerial planning ability (telos) useful to safeguard his dignity from being reduced to a by-​product of the consumerist social system in which ‘human capital’ is already a commodity, ending up victim of an agitating paralysis (Bovassi 2017: 56). Starting from such impoverishment, the perspective view (utopia –​retrotopia) crystallizes its own lost sedentariness, hindering both the possibility of a ‘home’ (in terms of belonging-​to-​a) and of recognizing it: does this ‘identity disorder’ favor or inhibit the anamnesis? Does it sharpen the desire for memory or make the genealogical ghost despair? Does it suppress, remove or release? Without doubt all at once, and this would be another version, the other side of the contradiction that has set us in motion. And that makes us run breathlessly, or even lose our heads. (Derrida 2004: 23)

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The nostalgic condition within the postmodern liquid paradigm Originally, those who felt nostalgic about themselves fell into the clinical categorization of ‘nostalgia’, which could be called a form of naturalization (or biologization) of nostalgia. Johannes Hofer himself, confronting it in its origins, intersects clinical, philosophical and psychological explanations: ‘nostalgia’ is a ‘symptom of a disturbed imagination, produced by the vital spirits that in their motion follow a single path along the white conduits of the striated bodies of the brain and the small channels of the oval centre, and thus arouse within the soul the exclusive and persistent idea of the return to homeland’ (Hofer quoted in Priest 1992: 47). Subsequently, there was the transition from symptomatology to a more inclusive vision of the existential aspect in which the human being finds himself. Svetlana Boym (2001: xiii–​xiv) overcomes the mechanistic interpretations of the binomial nostalgia-​pathology, stating that nostalgia must be understood as ‘a feeling of loss and bewilderment ... an irremediable condition. The twentieth century, which began with a futuristic utopia, ended with nostalgia’. Boym wears nostalgia of meaning, or at least of the attempt represented by nostalgia to be a doorway towards the search of meaning, but she realizes that for the man of the postmodern era it runs the danger of becoming a pathological disease again. In part, this derives from the absolute uprooting, where the subject becomes the creator and victim of his own alienation from any relationship and from any identity linked with past and with progress. The uprooted society does not know where and how to find the cognitive, religious, cultural tools and values in order to elaborate a historical-​temporal representation, which would not be limited to the numerical succession of facts and randomness. Vladimir Jankélévitch offers a perspective which is extremely coherent with the philosophical grip on the nostalgic condition and on the individual who experiences nostalgia, defining the latter as a human melancholy made possible by consciousness, which is consciousness of something else, consciousness of an elsewhere, consciousness of a contrast between past and present, between present and future. This scrupulous consciousness is the restlessness of the nostalgic. It is at the same time here and there, neither here nor there ... multipresent or nowhere. (Jankélévitch, quoted in Prete 1992: 126) If the ‘conscience’ factor surrenders to the restlessness and ambivalence described also by Jankélévitch, there would be not the nostalgic man, but

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the alienated, nomadic individual to whom corresponds the stereotype of the secularized individual structured in the anthropological liquid dispersion, which prevents him from taking responsibility for the affinity between himself-​with-​himself and himself with history. For what concerns the human being, it participates in the ‘analytic of finitude’ (Cesaroni 2010: 88), proposing an alternative other than the chronic and pervasive nihilism of the postmodern era, in which individuals try to find their way through the bottlenecks of a ‘cognitive labor of the real ... sequential process of dark times and free times, where free means conscious of light and nostalgic for it because of their humanity’ (Bovassi 2017: 17). It is misleading and counterproductive to reduce the inclination towards a nostalgic look at the past or future as something inevitably stagnant, disconnected from the present, since it risks to ignore the central role occupied by the ‘scrupulous conscience’ of the nostalgic condition –​as explained by Jankélévitch –​which makes the latter that ambiguous but transformative passage of a thought that thinks memory. Günther Anders, while focusing on the question of technique, foresees the risk for the anti-​anthropocentric age –​the age that laid down both the centralized allocation of the person and his ontological value –​to design that humanity ‘without World’ (Anders 2000: 11; see also Anders 2007) of which he speaks, due to the lack of contiguity with the human burden of finitude, of fallibility. Discontinuity, estrangement and a sense of inadequacy lay in favour of individuals without nostalgic conscience; those men he describes as millions of passive Eichmann-​men ... the repetition of the monstrous is not only possible, but it is probable ... since the probability of winning the fight against repetition is less than the probability of losing it. But our defeat will be truly final only when we have failed in the search for the assumptions of what has already happened once, that is, when we have discovered what we really have to fight. (Anders 2018: 25) ‘Defining, redefining the Self, is not a novelty, much less an obstacle: the hurdle is to confuse this assemblage with a radical dismantling’ (Bovassi 2017: 24) typical of the narcissistic and nomadic profile where we glimpse the new posthuman in which the ‘law of discrepancy’ presides (Bovassi 2017: 39); the fecundity of the present moment in the suspended time inserted between the educational value of memory and the creative value of possible future. Of this consists the nostalgic ambivalence, which is properly the Aufheben (overcoming) of the attraction to return (melancholy) without denying it, or an event of the phenomenon of parrhesia (disclosure) that translates the tension fed by the longing to reason, because it preserves in itself the roots of the substantial truth already possessed. It is a movement

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that belongs to the human being as a subject endowed with freedom and, for this reason, posing itself as a peculiar necessity of what Foucault called ‘the art of living (teknē tou biou)’ (Foucault 2011: 181). Here, again, the theme of the return appears. Paul Ricoeur and Gabriel Marcel talk about it in terms of ‘conversion of thought’; in their opinion, it opens up to an ‘elevation’ which ‘takes the various names of a return: first of a “situation that nourishes”, then of “incarnation as mystery”, and finally of the passage “from objectivity to existence” ’ (Ricoeur and Marcel 1998: 102). Does the liquid figure (Bauman 2011) of the ‘dynamic numbed’ (Bovassi 2017: 140) allow the courage required by parrhesia? Bauman, defining ‘uncertainty’ as the ‘combined result of the feeling of ignorance (the impossibility to know what will happen) and helplessness (the impossibility to prevent it from happening) and of an elusive and widespread fear, vaguely defined and difficult to locate: a fear that fluctuates in the desperate search for a fixed point’ (Bauman 2011: xiii), aligns himself with the friction between the desire to belong to the world and the dispersion of the contemporary individual, who hastens to take leave of temporality. In these conditions the effort to put order, to possess a thought about reality, is denied. Philosophy takes over by helping to understand the practical sense of nostalgia as a thought that decodes actuality without exhausting it in experience. It is perhaps one of the most fruitful forms of ‘being-​there’. On the contrary, the nomadic condition of the subject produces insignificance and sterilizes the nostalgia by jeopardizing the possibility for the person to be a witness to a universal biographical heritage. Jacques Derrida brings the nostalgic as the one who is able to pause without grief in the waste of the ‘return to himself ’ (Bauman 2020: 117) symbolized by the gremium, the womb, since it feels a healing necessity to return to it in order to bear present. It is very different from regret, as well as melancholic malaise: it is learning from a loss without absolute; a reversible loss. Just as the intrauterine habitat hosts, prepares and co-​determines the unborn child that awaits birth both in autonomy and in the maternal–​foetal relationship, so the human being himself evolves the constitutive dimension of dependence by continuing to orient it elsewhere. Returning to ‘home’ (womb) recalls the dependence on the origins, on the filial identity that is the factor of uniqueness able to prove the true equality between all communities and all peoples. If the nostalgic attraction were to disappear, the community would suffer what Anders called the ‘malaise of uniqueness’ (Anders 2007: 55), that negative nostalgia (resignation) –​placed in the limbo between past and future –​of not being a product, but of having a nature-​ data, a dependence, from which it is impossible to escape in order to comply with the Promethean ideal (Übermensch). For the Promethean ideal, in fact, the notion of ‘overcoming’ is the property of every self-​evolutionary thrust.

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The ambition inherent in this ideal is to reach a level of symbiosis with the individual so dense that it becomes the embodiment of the structural scepticism rooted around the possibility of saying something in a final way about being ‘someone’ instead of ‘something’. Among the basic provocations of the postmodern era, there is the detachment from the category and the denomination in favour of a banal ‘nothingness’ that also intervenes on the thought, feeding what we could define as ‘the banal thought’, that of the post-​truth, in many ways similar to the phenomenon of uprooting. Contrary to what Heidegger (2009) affirms in Identità e Differenza (Identity and Difference), namely that ‘only when, thinking, we turn to the already thought we are employed for what is still to be thought’ (Heidegger 2009: 51), the nihilism of our contemporary age embraces the tendency to initiate thought by keeping it suspended in nothingness. A nothingness not to be confused with the absence of intellectual inheritance but, rather, a nothingness permeated by the basic idea that the only valid construction is that of a dispersive ontology, metaphysics of nothingness. Above these bases rises the dilemma of relational recklessness as a principle of philosophizing (‘the world as experience belongs to the fundamental word I-​It. The fundamental word I-​You founds the world of relationship’) (Buber 2011: 61) and all the problematicity of an individual-​artefact subordinated to de-​ subjective devices with novel modes of power, yet potentially harmful to the principle of intersubjectivity, essential within social fabric. A new man is born, the ‘man without World’ (Anders 1991), ready to make his rational nature collapse into emptiness. Lipovetsky, analysing the modern and postmodern age in his text L’era del vuoto (The Era of Emptiness), defines the expression ‘accelerated obsolescence’ as ‘the definitive realization of the individual’, which ‘coincides with desubstantialization, with the appearance of floating atoms emptied by the circulation of models and therefore permanently recyclable’ (Lipovetsky 2016: 118). In other words, Lipovetsky notes how the consumerist paradigm has come down to the human essence, to human transience, which fulfils the unprecedented experience of being ‘consciousness without world’. This is the drama experienced by banal thought: being without world, it is also without time, without memory. Anders makes this paradox the core of his investigation, demonstrating the link between structured thought in the past (reminiscence) and future (planning/​teleology) with the inability of the subject to think the truth, the identity. He says, in fact, that even to us, nowadays men, we who are still alive in the world that still exists, what has been, and that is only ‘been’, seems dead. But even this death would be dragged into ruin and die of a second death, so that what has been would not even be any more –​for how could one

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distinguish what has been from what has never been, if there is no one who remembers what has been? And it would not even spare the future, as it would die even before the day of its life. (Anders 2007: 230) Anders lays bare the objective fact that the continuity between ‘what has been’, ‘what is’, ‘what will be’ soaks not in abstract thought, but in the one who can be aware of it, confirming what has been said so far about the philosophical value of the nostalgic condition. It can legitimately be deduced that ‘nostalgia’, the object of dribbling between utopia, dystopia and ‘retrotopia’ (Bauman 2020), agitates the hope of moving backwards, of coming back, and harasses the restlessness dictated by the existential biodegradability progressively consumed by the individual and the masses, root of the inadequacy that he perceives. The problem is that the individual in a condition of liquidity does not know who or what to cross (oblivion), therefore he faces a collection of vacuities difficult to digest and, at the same time, hostile to hope (nihilism), as a fertile borderline threshold (maieutics) between nostalgia and utopia. Such ‘cordial disarmament of the Self ’ (Han 2012:10) is perhaps the deepest degree of the ‘lack-​of-​being’ (Mattucci and Luciani 2018: 74).

Conclusion This chapter has aimed to develop the ways in which the theme of nostalgia affects philosophy and what meaning the ‘nostalgic condition’ takes on in the exercise of philosophical thought. In order to try to identify the main issues, the entire argument has focused on certain terms, those that most appear among the authors considered and, in general, in philosophical literature. In the first section, we intended to lay down the main theoretical assumptions, then deepened these in the following sections. Therefore, it was necessary first of all to clarify what is the peculiarity of the philosophical exercise in relation to the thinking subject, which is why the similarities between philosophizing and the maieutic art, between philosophizing and the duel necessary to reach the truth of things –​that recalls the Platonic allegory of the cave –​have been proposed. One of the first questions posed is the correlation of thought with memory and of the latter with knowledge. From here emerges the inevitable centrality of rethinking time in the function of the ambivalent nostalgic condition, which holds both an attraction towards the past and a desire for escape, projected into the future. The first conclusion is that the philosophical exercise belongs to the very nature of the individual, to his existential condition, to his history and, last but not least, to the lived present, which in the nostalgic feeling is affirming its role of cohesion in the dimensions of temporality (the so-​called ‘temporalization’).

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In particular, this last consideration leads to the second section where, dealing specifically with time and identity, it is shown that being-​in-​the-​ world belongs totally to the philosophical duel, because it acts by putting thought into crisis. It is also shown that nostalgia, in this, becomes a fertile opportunity to investigate the human and collective need for rooting. Nihilist persuasion, together with the dual phenomenon of ‘rooting’/​‘uprooting’, calls into question the fluid condition investigated later. It can be deduced that nostalgia, on a par with philosophy, vitalizes and is vital, escapes past or future stagnation, showing a condition that yearns for comfort, preserved in identity and time, privileged places of meaning. Finally, in the chapter’s third section nostalgia carries the weight of the postmodern liquid condition, which greatly complicates the ability of men to identify in nostalgia the opportunity to get out of the sense of inadequacy that pervades the ‘man without World’. The latter, having absolutized his state of uprooted and alienated individual, can hardly make the ‘liquid’ option coexist with his role of world consciousness, which necessarily passes through thought and roots. The most eloquent conclusion on the correlation between philosophy and nostalgia is that the latter is none other than a ‘sanctuary of meaning’ (Wilson 2014), where the totality of the human being is built into ‘what has been’ in the past as an essential part of ‘what is’ in the present and participation in ‘what will be’ in the future. References Anders, Günther (1991) Uomo senza mondo: Scritti sull’arte e sulla letteratura. Ferrara: Spazio Libri. Anders, Günther (2000) Eccesso di mondo. Processi di globalizzazione e crisi del sociale. Milan: Mimesis. Anders, Günther (2007) L’uomo è antiquato (vol I). Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Anders, Günther (2018) Noi figli di Eichmann (3rd edn). Florence: Giuntina. Arendt, Hannah (1991) Tra passato e futuro. Milan: Garzanti. Arendt, Hannah (2001) Vita activa: La condizione umana. Milan: Bompiani. Arendt, Hannah (2004) Le origini del totalitarismo. Turin: Giulio Einaudi. Bauman, Zygmunt (2011) Modernità liquida. Bari: Laterza. Bauman, Zygmunt (2020) Retrotopia. Bari: Laterza. Bergson, Henri (1983) Materia e memoria. Reggio Emilia: Città armoniosa. Bovassi, Giulia (2017) L’eco della solidità: La nostalgia del richiamo tra antropologia liquida e postumanesimo. Rome: IF Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Buber, Martin (2011) Il principio dialogico e altri saggi (3rd edn). Milan: San Paolo. Cesaroni, Pierpaolo (2010) La distanza da sé: Politica e filosofia in Michel Foucault. Padua: Cleup.

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Curi, Umberto (2000) Pòlemos: Filosofia come guerra. Turin: Bollati Boringhieri. Deleuze, Gilles (2015) L’esausto. Milan: nottetempo. Derrida, Jacques (2004) Il monolinguismo dell’altro. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Foucault, Michel (2011) L’ermeneutica del soggetto: Corso al Collège de France (1981–​1982). Milan: Feltrinelli. Giacomelli, Alberto (2012) Simbolica per tutti e per nessuno: Stile e figurazione nello Zarathustra di Nietzsche. Milan: Mimesis. Han, Byung-​Chul (2012) La società della stanchezza. Milan: nottetempo. Han, Byung-​Chul (2017) Il profumo del tempo: L’arte di indugiare sulle cose. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Heidegger, Martin (1981) Che cos’è la filosofia?. Genova: Il melangolo. Heidegger, Martin (2009) Identità e differenza (3rd edn). Milan: Adelphi. Heidegger, Martin (2011) Essere e tempo. Milan: Mondadori. Levinás, Emmanuel (1986) Dall’esistenza all’esistente. Turin: Marietti. Liakos, Antonis (2010) ‘Il passato come utopia e il desiderio di storia’, in Rolf Petri (ed) Nostalgia: Memorie e passaggi tra le sponde dell’Adriatico. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, pp 63–​74. Lipovetsky, Gilles (2016) L’era del vuoto: Saggi sull’individualismo contemporaneo. Milan: Luni. Mattucci, Natascia and Francesca R. Recchia Luciani (2018) Obsolescenza dell’umano: Günther Anders e il contemporaneo. Genova: Il melangolo. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1976) Così parlò Zarathustra. Milan: Adelphi. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2011) La gaia scienza e Idilli di Messina (18th edn). Milan: Adelphi. Plato (1967) Opere (vol II). Bari: Laterza. Prete, Antonio (ed) (1992) Nostalgia: Storia di un sentimento. Milan: Raffaello Cortina. Ricoeur, Paul and Gabriel Marcel (1998) Per un’etica dell’alterità: Sei colloqui. Rome: Edizioni Lavoro. Saint Agustine (2005) Le Confessioni. Milan: San Paolo. Severino, Emanuele (1982) Essenza del nichilismo. Milan: Adeplhi. Traversa, Guido (2016) Dall’identità individuale all’identità della Storia: L’Antropologia teleologica in Kant. Rome: IF Press. Weil, Simone (1985) L’ombra e la grazia. Milan: Rusconi. Weil, Simone (2017) La prima radice. Rome: Edizioni di Comunità. Wilson, Janelle L. (2014) Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Libraries.

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2

History and Nostalgia: Historicizing a Multifaceted Emotion Tobias Becker

Introduction Historians’ relationship with nostalgia is somewhat paradoxical. Given that nostalgia is one of the most prominent ‘historical emotions’ –​perhaps the most prominent –​and despite the memory boom since the 1980s, and the more recent interest in the history of emotions, historians have paid little attention to it, compared with researchers in other disciplines (Boym 2001: xvi). Richard Sennett remarked in 1977 that a ‘history of nostalgia has yet to be written’, and this is still by and large the case today (Sennett 1977: 168). At the same time, historians frequently use the term nostalgia, though mostly in a negative, pejorative sense, thereby contributing to how nostalgia is viewed within their own discipline, in other disciplines and by the wider public. This makes the lack of historical research even more acute. Only when we know what we mean by the term ‘nostalgia’, how its meanings have changed and developed over time and what connotations and subtexts the term carries can we hope to employ it in an analytical and meaningful way. This chapter starts off by examining historians’ reservations around nostalgia, which are likely to be at least partly responsible for their reluctance to research it. The second part looks at how nostalgia has been theorized and historicized; and the final part discusses possible avenues and approaches for future research.

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Why do historians reject nostalgia? Nostalgia clearly does not have a good reputation among historians. ‘The problem with nostalgia’, John Tosh writes in a textbook for students, ‘is that it is a very lopsided view of history. If the past is redesigned as a comfortable refuge, all its negative features must be removed. The past becomes better and simpler than the present’ (Tosh 2015: 16). This is the most basic and common critique of nostalgia, and it can be summarized, as the title of an essay by David Lowenthal (1989) declares, thus: ‘Nostalgia tells it like it wasn’t’. In the eyes of such critics, nostalgia is more than a harmless ‘sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past’, as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it (Oxford English Dictionary Online). Rather, through the act of rendering the past an object of sentimental recall, nostalgia romanticizes and thereby distorts it. This makes it the very opposite of history. While history explores the past to better understand it –​and, through it, the present –​nostalgia falsifies it to feel better in the present; and, to that end, forgets, disregards or ignores the horrors of the past. It offers, in the words of Michael Kammen, ‘history without guilt’ (Kammen 1991: 688). This makes nostalgia, at best, ‘dangerous’ –​if not, as Dipesh Chakrabarty and Tony Judt have it, a ‘sin’ (Chase and Shaw 1989: 1; Chakrabarty 1992: 1; Judt 2007: 10). How can anyone yearn for a past characterized by wars and conflicts, colonialism and genocide? Yet nostalgia’s propensity to distort does not by itself explain historians’ strong reaction to it –​the past is misrepresented in many ways, and historians, too, necessarily simplify it, as no one can ever do justice to it in its entirety. To better understand their reservations, it is helpful to take a cue from the postmodernist historian Frank Ankersmit, for whom nostalgia ‘questions historist and positivist assumptions’ (Ankersmit 1994: 206). But which assumptions, and how? The first assumption nostalgia questions is the modern understanding of time as dynamic, linear, continuous and open, visualized by an arrow pointing to the future and embodied in the concepts of historicity and progress. These concepts were increasingly challenged in the second half of the 20th century. Simultaneously, historians like Reinhart Koselleck, demonstrating that the perception and experience of time is itself anything but timeless, argued that the modern understanding of time had evolved since the 18th century (Koselleck 2004; see also Assmann 2013; Landwehr 2014; Hartog 2015). Although this research has continued to grow since the 1970s, most historians still tend to take its understanding of time –​on which, after all, modern historiography is based –​as a given, thereby further essentializing it. For a worldview based on progress, nostalgia obviously poses a headache, especially when it is understood not merely as a sentimental yearning for

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the past but as elevating the past to the level of a golden age never to return. For the literary critic Svetlana Boym, progress and nostalgia are therefore ‘like Jekyll and Hyde’: nostalgia is a ‘rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress’, and, thus, against history itself (Boym 2001: xvi, xv). Nostalgia also runs contrary to the idea of historical continuity. While some, most notably the sociologist Fred Davis, have argued that nostalgia helps people to cope with rapid social and cultural change by invoking if not a sense of continuity then at least the appearance of it, most historians agree that it has the opposite effect (Davis 1979: 104). As Christopher Lasch argues, ‘a sense of continuity is exactly what nostalgia discourages’ (Lasch 1984: 69). Lasch distinguishes sharply between memory, which draws hope from the past, and nostalgia, for which the past is ‘irretrievably lost and for that reason timeless and unchanging’ (Lasch 1991: 83). Similarly, Charles S. Maier differentiates between a productive, future-​oriented longing and a nostalgia ‘that can never be assuaged because it accepts that the past is irrevocably lost’ (Maier 1999: 273). For both, nostalgia, more than simply distorting the past, undermines the sense of historical continuity that makes history relevant. Up to this point Ankersmit agrees with them. What we experience in nostalgia, he argues, is not a ‘reliving of the past’ but ‘the difference or the distance between the present and the past’ (Ankersmit 1994: 201). However, it is exactly for this effect that Ankersmit welcomes nostalgia, because for him, as a postmodernist historian, it is possible neither to relive nor to ever fully reconstruct the past. Irretrievably lost as an ontological reality –​or, in short, dead –​the past can only ever exist in a present that engages with it. In short, Ankersmit celebrates nostalgia for the same qualities for which traditional and historicist historians criticize it, and in doing so brings their implicit reservations vis-​à-​vis nostalgia out into the open. A third position towards nostalgia can be found in Pierre Nora’s Les Lieux de Mémoire, his seven-​volume project to recapture the lost memories of the French nation. Not discussing nostalgia overtly, Nora uses the term only once in his programmatic introduction, when he notes how traditional institutions of memory, such as museums, archives and cemeteries, have become ‘relics’ or ‘exercises in nostalgia’ (Nora 1996: 6–​7). Nostalgia, then, is hardly a positive term for Nora, and yet he himself has been repeatedly accused of it –​along with his Lieux de Mémoire –​not least for a fixation with the nation-​state and the countryside (Englund 1992; Legg 2005; Rothberg 2010). For Nora, the ‘acceleration of history’ has turned the past into ‘a world from which we are fundamentally cut off’, instilling in us a ‘sense of discontinuity’ (Nora 1996: 1, 12). Among the wreckage is memory itself, understood as an authentic, visceral connection with the past. ‘Memory is constantly on our lips because it no longer exists’, Nora (1996: 12) laments. ‘Never’,

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he continues, ‘have we longed more for the feel of mud on our boots, for the terror that the devil inspired in the year 1000, or for the stench of an eighteenth-​century city’ –​in short, for the past as a lived, tangible reality (Nora 1996: 12). Constant, accelerated change in modernity has disrupted historical continuity, rendering it an object of longing. Neither opposing nostalgia, like Lasch and Maier, nor utilizing it for theoretical reflection, like Ankersmit, Nora can be said to give himself over to it. Here, nostalgia becomes a motivation for historical investigation. Driven by a feeling of loss –​and the wish, if not to regain the past, then at least to document its loss –​it becomes clear why the Lieux de Mémoire have been understood as an exercise in nostalgia. As this example shows, historians are hardly immune to nostalgia, especially as Nora is not the only historian suspected of it (Ankersmit names some other ­examples –​for instance, Jules Michelet; see Ankersmit 1994: 204, 212). This raises the question of the role that nostalgia, along with emotions more generally, plays in their work (see, for instance, Robinson 2010). Aside from the concept of time, nostalgia also violates another historist assumption, which is that history should be written, as the Roman historian Tacitus famously demanded, sine ira et studio –​that is, without anger or passion; or, in other words, without emotion. Its emotional quality is another reason why historians view nostalgia with suspicion. Indeed, they often use the term in a wider sense to describe –​or rather to criticize –​sensual, performative and emotional representations of the past, such as novels, films, exhibitions, historical re-​enactments –​in short, the whole landscape of public and popular history (Frevert and Schmidt 2011; Rymsza-​Pawlowska 2017). As many of these examples are commercial in nature, nostalgia is also applied to the commodification of the past, as in the British ‘heritage debate’ of the 1980s, in which Robert Hewison held the longing for a more glorious and self-​confident national past responsible for what he termed the ‘heritage industry’ (Hewison 1987). ‘Nostalgia’, Maier writes, ‘is to longing as kitsch is to art’, thus declaring nostalgia both aesthetically inferior and commercial: whereas art is unattainable to most, kitsch, smacking of flea markets and junk shops, is a commodity; and so, by inference, is nostalgia (Maier 1999: 273). However, this does not explain why, in a world where almost everything is commodified, the past should be exempt from market forces. What is more, nostalgia alone hardly accounts for the commodification and popularization of history. Rather, historians use the term strategically to disavow and discredit engagements with the past that differ from their own and that they view as a challenge to their interpretative authority over the past they thereby seek to reassert. There is, finally, also a subconscious and subliminal political bias against nostalgia. It is certainly no coincidence that the term ‘politics of nostalgia’,

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which is often applied to Brexit, Trump and other right-​wing politicians and political projects, was coined by a liberal historian. Arthur Schlesinger Jr first used this expression to criticize the New Conservatism of the mid-​ 1950s (Schlesinger 1955). To many –​historians and otherwise –​nostalgia is suspicious, not least because, while sharing its orientation towards the past, they see it as inherently conservative; and it is hardly surprising, therefore, that its most ardent critics are often progressives. That does not mean, however, that conservatives view it more positively. It would, for instance, be hard to find someone more critical of nostalgia than Lasch, a historian and outspoken conservative, who deplored the ‘prevalent confusion of nostalgia with conservatism’ (Lasch 1991: 117). Yet historians espousing a progressive outlook may feel doubly compelled to reject nostalgia. Taken together, these aspects –​particularly the ways in which nostalgia questions history’s underlying assumptions –​explain why most historians have been rather ill-​disposed towards it and why they have been so reluctant to study it, as compared to their colleagues in other disciplines. At the same time, this reluctance has not prevented them from commenting on nostalgia or from using the term, and thereby contributing to how it is understood more generally. This makes historical investigations into nostalgia all the more called for. Yet historians would also need to scrutinize and historicize existing historical interpretations, including their ideological basis and blind spots, so as not to merely repeat and perpetuate them unchecked.

When was nostalgia? One question every history of nostalgia, like every other history, has to confront is the question of chronology: when was nostalgia? Is it a universal and timeless anthropological phenomenon or is it characteristic for a certain period or periods? Unlike many other concepts, we know exactly when the word nostalgia was coined –​in 1688 by the physician Johannes Hofer, as a medical term for homesickness –​and it is here, consequently, that most studies on nostalgia begin. Indeed, nostalgia’s career as a medical concept is the one aspect of its history that can be said to be very well researched (Starobinski 1966; Brunnert 1984; Roth 1989; Roth 1991, Roth 1992; O’Sullivan 2006; Bunke 2009; Brauer 2014; Dodman 2018; Landwehr 2018). Although, then, it is hardly possible not to begin with Hofer, beginning with him may well be a false start, as neither his dissertation nor the considerable medical literature expanding on it over the following 200 years –​interesting though it is as a history of homesickness –​helps us much to understand how nostalgia came to mean what it means today. The question is when nostalgia ceased to denote homesickness –​the longing for a place –​and when it took on a temporal meaning, as a longing for a moment or a period in the past.

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Different answers are on offer. Achim Landwehr argues that the later meaning of nostalgia was already contained in Hofer’s original treatise. He also quotes Immanuel Kant, who, in the late 18th century, observed that people suffering from nostalgia yearned not so much for a place as for the time of their childhood (Landwehr 2018). Focusing on France, Thomas Dodman observes that nostalgia, in the sense of homesickness, gradually vanished from the medical discourse between the first quarter and the end of the 19th century, taking on a wider, more metaphorical meaning in the process, without really becoming more widespread until the interwar period (Dodman 2018: 126, 185). This was the period during which the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs published Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, one chapter of which was devoted to ‘nostalgie du passé’, a title implying that ‘nostalgie’ alone signified mere yearning and required the addition of ‘du passé’ to be specific (Halbwachs 1925). Even today, French dictionaries distinguish between nostalgia as homesickness and as signifying a yearning in a wider sense, not necessarily aimed at the past. Clearly, nostalgia can mean different things at different times as well as in different languages –​something to keep in mind when applying the English term to other cultural contexts. However, what Halbwachs was concerned with –​and what he defined as a ‘retrospective mirage by which a great number of us persuade ourselves that the world of today has less color and is less interesting than it was in the past, in particular regarding our childhood and youth’ –​is more or less identical to how nostalgia is usually defined today (Halbwachs 1992: 48). For Halbwachs, as for many later sociologists and psychologists, such ‘retrospective mirages’ were not necessarily a bad thing. Rather, by offering escape from a present experienced as deficient, they could even have a liberating effect (Vromen 1986). Peter Fritzsche, one of the few historians to historicize nostalgia, locates its birth at the transition from the 18th to the 19th century, building on Reinhart Koselleck’s work on time. Fundamentally disrupting the sense of historical continuity, the French Revolution altered how people perceived time and history. The Romantics, critical of the new world it had created, began to turn backwards, idealizing the time before the rupture, particularly the Middle Ages. It was at this time, also, Fritzsche claims, that nostalgia ‘found a secure place in household vocabularies’ (Fritzsche 2002: 62). If, however, the German word Nostalgie was used at all during this period, then it was merely as a medical term for homesickness. It was not until the 1970s that it took on its current meaning, following the example of its English counterpart, and became more widely used (Becker 2018). In respect of American usage, Susan J. Matt has noted how homesickness and nostalgia increasingly drifted apart from one another at the beginning of the 20th century (Matt 2011: 102–​103, 174). The Oxford English

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Dictionary, too, locates the first examples of nostalgia in the sense of a sentimental yearning for the past in the 1900s, although it took until the 1960s for the new definition to appear in British and American dictionaries, suggesting a prolonged and gradual process (Becker 2018). According to Michael Dwyer it was not even ‘until the end of the mid-​to late 20th century that nostalgia became fully associated with the temporal dimension, and removed from the sense of spatial dislocation’ (Dwyer 2015: 9). So, while nostalgia potentially had a temporal component from the time of Hofer, this potential did not fully realize itself before the second half of the 20th century. It was certainly not until the 1960s that the term nostalgia became common currency, as is evident from dictionaries of the time, from Google Ngram and from the number of intellectuals who now began to comment on it. Among them were also two historians. Contradicting claims that nostalgia was a new phenomenon, and that American culture was dominated by a belief in progress, the historian Arthur P. Dudden identified a long tradition of nostalgic longings (Dudden 1961). Jean Starobinski, who, as a historian of both medicine and ideas, was ideally suited to the task, tracked down nostalgia’s changing meanings. By then, the term had become ‘so familiar to us that we conceive of its recent and very scholarly origin only with great difficulty’, he noted (Starobinski 1966: 85). Starobinski did just that, commenting also on its ‘pejorative connotation’ as a ‘useless yearning for a world or for a way of life from which one has been irrevocably severed’ (Starobinski 1966: 103). Neither contribution, however, led to a more sustained historical interest in nostalgia. The discussion of nostalgia at this time was dominated by other disciplines, and specifically by the idea that it was of comparatively recent vintage, having emerged as a reaction to sustained and increasing social and cultural change since industrialization. Although he did not come up with this interpretation, no one did more to promote it than the futurologist Alvin Toffler. In his 1970 bestseller Future Shock, Toffler described a ‘wave of nostalgia’ in contemporary society as people –​younger people especially –​attempted to escape from the stressful present into an allegedly slower past (Toffler 1970: 407). His diagnosis was quickly taken up and further popularized by the mass media as well as by other intellectuals. For the political scientist Ronald Inglehart, the ‘recent wave of nostalgia’ signified a ‘retreat into the past for the population at large’; for the sociologist Fred Davis, the ‘nostalgia wave of the seventies’ was a reaction to the ‘massive identity locations of the sixties’; and for the West German philosopher Hermann Lübbe, nostalgia, similarly, was both a reaction to, and offered compensation for, the loss of orientation in a rapidly changing world (Inglehart 1977: 371; Lübbe 1977: 305–​306, 316, 318, 1981: 10–​12; Davis 1979: 105).

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Although not uncritical about nostalgia, social scientists overall tended to view it more positively than historians, who more or less kept out of the debate until the 1980s. Then, trying to account for what they perceived as a sudden and surprising popular interest in the past –​borne out by its presence in the mass media and popular culture, period films and dramas, and the success of the conservation movement or, in short, ‘heritage’ –​British historians in particular homed in on nostalgia as an explanation. In The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal saw nostalgia as the ‘universal catchword for looking back’, made pervasive by the ‘great changes of the times’ (Lowenthal 1985: 4, 8). Robert Hewison called it ‘a sickness that has reached fever point’ (Hewison 1987: 10). On the opposite side of what retrospectively came to be called the ‘heritage debate’ stood the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel, in whose eyes this critique treated nostalgia like the ‘contemporary equivalent of what Marxists used to call “false consciousness” ’ (Samuel 1994: 17). His objection was not that there was no nostalgia, or that nostalgia was better than its reputation. He believed that by focusing so much on nostalgia, critics missed out on other, more important and more positive factors. What they derided as ‘heritage’ bespoke, for Samuel, a more democratic engagement with the past. Inspired by this debate, historians began to take an interest in nostalgia more generally, which also led to more neutral and balanced assessments (see, for instance, Chase and Shaw 1989). Lowenthal, for instance, now accused critics of having ‘misconceive[d]‌nostalgia and exaggerate[d] its evils’, and even considered it a ‘good antidote’ against those trying to use the past for their own ends (Lowenthal 1989: 27, 30). In general, however, historians continued to polemicize about nostalgia rather than historicize it. In a way, they even did the opposite, insofar as, influenced by the social sciences, they tended to understand nostalgia as a reaction to rapid change and increased stress, and to project this explanation back onto the past. For this reason, many texts from this period shed more light on contemporary debates and sensibilities. Although these constitute important sources for the purpose of historicizing how nostalgia was understood and discussed at the time, they are less helpful in historicizing it directly and, as such, need to be viewed in their historical context –​all the more so as they are sometimes taken as evidence of a heightened nostalgia since the 1970s. In Age of Fracture, for instance, Daniel T. Rodgers, quoting Toffler’s and Lowenthal’s diagnoses from the time, adopts their interpretation (see Rodgers 2012: 221). Others update explanations from the era and apply them to our own time, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa does in Social Acceleration (Rosa 2013). As already noted, most historians commenting on nostalgia –​ like most theorists of nostalgia –​are inclined to view it as a phenomenon of

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Western modernity, regardless of whether they locate its beginnings in the Renaissance, the 16th century, the 1800s, the romantic era, the 1900s, or the post-​war period. They commonly regard it as a product of modernity that is conceivable only under the modern understanding of time; and that, geared towards the past, it is opposed to progress and modernity, and ‘stalks modernity as an unwelcome double’, as Peter Fritzsche pointedly writes (Fritzsche 2002: 62). The perceived connection between nostalgia and modernity is further substantiated by the fact that research on nostalgia largely concentrates on the modern period, with a particular emphasis on the 20th century. I want to contest this view. Studies focusing on earlier periods would not find it difficult to uncover evidence of nostalgia –​either in the sense of a personal longing for the past or as its collective adoration –​before the onset of modernity. Whenever it began –​in ancient Greece, ancient Rome or the Middle Ages –​nostalgia was the default mode in which pre-​modern cultures made sense of time and history. Almost universally, they held the past to be superior to the present; a golden age to which they longed to return. Lacking a concept of progress, they were sceptical, if not outright hostile, to change; and in the few instances they openly sought it, they tended to frame it as the return to an earlier, superior state, as terms like re-​formation, re-​naissance and re-​volution imply (Wendorff 1980; Whitrow 1988; Borst 1993). What modernity produced, I want to argue, was not nostalgia but the critique of nostalgia. As progress came to rule, nostalgia was dethroned. Yet, from the 1960s onwards, when progress itself came to be seen from an increasingly critical perspective against the background of the threats of nuclear and environmental annihilation, the nostalgia critique arose often as a veiled defence of a now embattled belief in progress. Studying this critique, therefore, reveals a lot about how the second half of the 20th century made sense not only of the past but also of the present and the future –​in short, of itself in relation to time and history. Despite claims about nostalgia’s origin in Western modernity, it has also been found in non-​Western cultures. Much like his Greek contemporaries, the ancient Chinese thinker and reformer Confucius did not see himself as an innovator, but looked for lessons in a past he perceived as an unsurpassed golden age (Scott 2016). Similarly, scholars working on non-​Western cultures use the term nostalgia without perceiving this as imposing a Western concept on places and times where it does not belong. This approach is validated by psychological research, according to which nostalgia is a ‘pancultural emotion’ (Hepper et al 2014). While this may very well be the case, it is still important to differentiate. Nostalgia is such a vague concept that it is tempting to apply it indiscriminately.

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However, that would only result in making it vaguer still. The feeling described by this concept may be universal; it is nevertheless important to take into account that it has a history, and that it has been understood and perceived differently over time, particularly in Western modernity. For instance, the Japanese concept of natsukashi, though sometimes claimed to be untranslatable, is usually translated as nostalgia, as it signifies an emotionally tinged recollection of the past triggered by a taste or smell, an object or an image. However, unlike nostalgia, natsukashi carries primarily positive connotations: it is sweet, not bittersweet as nostalgia –​a word which, after all, contains the Greek word for pain (algos). There is, likewise, no critique of natsukashi comparable to the critique of nostalgia in the West. In addition to natsukashi, the Japanese language knows the English word ‘nostalgia’, as well as one adopted from it: the loanword nostarujii, included in such compounds as nostarujii bumu (nostalgia boom) and nosutarujii shohin (nostalgia products), both of which began to be discussed in Japan in the 1980s –​that is, only a decade or two after these issues became contentious in the United States and Europe (Ivy 1988; Farese and Asano-​Cavanagh 2018/​2019). As this example shows, other cultures may have slightly different notions of nostalgia even when they adopt the modern Western concept; and this concept, of course, can further take on different meanings according to context. Instead of universalizing the modern Western concept of nostalgia –​in itself anything but clear cut and precise –​nostalgia studies need to tease out these differences to develop a more precise and analytical concept of nostalgia which may lead to a better understanding of nostalgia more generally. While it seems permissible under these conditions to apply the term, and with it the concept of nostalgia, to periods and regions outside of Western modernity, it is nevertheless important to be aware that it was in this context that the term took on the meanings it carries today, and that the way in which nostalgia is understood is closely connected to normative ideas about modernity. This, among other reasons, is why the older research is still very important. It helps us to understand how nostalgia came to be what it is today –​which is, after all, what most studies of nostalgia are primarily interested in. To them, the discourse of the 20th century, when nostalgia took on its current meaning, is more relevant than the medical discourse on nostalgia as homesickness which preceded it. Having a term for nostalgia –​even if the term itself, as well as the concept it described, was much older –​constituted an important caesura, as it allowed historians to express and to discuss the feeling it described in new ways. Without the term nostalgia, there would have been no nostalgia critique.

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How to historicize nostalgia? This brings us to the question of how we can study nostalgia and what approaches we can draw on in doing so. Due to its ambivalent meaning, different approaches are imaginable, so the following ones –​conceptual history, the history of temporality, memory studies and the history of emotions –​constitute only suggestions.

Conceptual history As we have seen, nostalgia can mean very different things to different people: homesickness, yearning for the past, distorting the past, wanting to escape the present, a sign of cultural decline and so on. This calls for conceptual histories of nostalgia that tease out these different meanings, contextualize them and reconstruct how they have changed over time. Starobinski laid the groundwork for this approach in the 1960s by tracing nostalgia’s original career in medical discourse, on which additional histories of homesickness have built. What we know comparatively less about is when and how nostalgia’s meaning or meanings changed over the course of the 20th century. Rather than adding new definitions of nostalgia, such a history would need to take a step back and survey the ones it has already attracted –​to place them in their historical contexts, and to tease out their ideological implications and connotations, in order to track how they still shape our understanding of nostalgia today. Instead of further expanding nostalgia’s meanings to the point where it threatens to become synonymous with memory as such, it is important to differentiate between nostalgia and other forms of memory, as well as other uses of the past.

The history of temporalities Establishing a relationship between the present and the past, nostalgia is rooted in how societies make sense of time, to the extent that some have even claimed that it can occur only under a modern understanding of time. Whether or not that is the case, this makes nostalgia a suitable subject for the history of temporalities, a field that has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Building on the work of Koselleck, historians like François Hartog, Aleida Assmann and others have contributed to historicizing temporalities, often focusing on the period between the 1960s and 1980s as an important caesura –​that is, the same period when the nostalgia critique was at its height (Assmann 2013; Hartog 2015; Esposito 2017). How these two elements –​the contemporary interest in time, and the so-​called ‘nostalgia wave’ –​were interrelated warrants further research. While historians of

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nostalgia could profit a lot from drawing on the research on temporality, historians of temporality would find in nostalgia an interesting case study for how societies’ relationship with the past, and hence with time, changes.

Memory studies Memory studies is probably the field one would expect to learn most from for the purpose of researching nostalgia, especially as Halbwachs, whose theories had such an abiding influence on the subject, recognized its importance early on. Yet, as Patrick Hutton notes, an ‘interest in the topic of nostalgia has come late to discussions of the workings of memory’ (Hutton 2013: 1). Indeed, even the most recent surveys and handbooks in the field often lack any sustained discussion of nostalgia (see, however, Pickering and Keightley 2006). Apart from Fritzsche, few historians involved in memory studies have turned their attention to nostalgia; Les Lieux de Mémoire, however, raises the question of how far the memory boom itself may have been driven by nostalgia –​or, in the face of nostalgia’s pejorative connotations, consciously downplayed its importance so as to avoid criticism. While the field of memory studies acts as a useful reminder that memory is more than nostalgia, it does not provide a systematic approach for historicizing nostalgia. There is, for example, little research on the role of nostalgia in how people make sense of the past in ego-​documents or oral history. Nora even explicitly opposed the use of oral history because it did not offer an ‘intentional record of actual memory but a deliberate and calculated compilation of a vanished memory’ (Nora 1996: 10) –​a criticism that applies equally, if not more, to his own project, compared with which oral history provides a much more bottom-​up approach to how people remember the past.

The history of emotions As a ‘historical emotion’ in a double sense –​that is, as an emotional response to a memory of the past as well as an emotion with a history –​nostalgia also falls within the purview of the history of emotions. Still a relatively young field, the history of emotions, aside from Matt’s history of homesickness, has not paid much attention to nostalgia, favouring instead more visceral emotions. Nevertheless, it offers useful concepts for the study of nostalgia, not least as it also draws on conceptual history –​indeed, it was Starobinski who first advocated historical semantics for the history of emotions. In the case of nostalgia, it is possible to ask what emotive and emotional practices it draws on –​that is, how it is communicated through language or performed through facial and bodily expressions, habits or rituals (Reddy 2001; Rosenwein 2006; Scheer 2012; Plamper 2015: 67–​74, 252–​265). For instance, are

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practices like preserving, collecting or restoring inherently nostalgic; or, if not, what would make them so (West 2000; Geraghty 2014)? Is there something like an emotional style of nostalgia –​a certain way in which it is experienced, fostered and displayed (Middleton 1989; Gammerl 2012)? Is nostalgia part of the emotional regime, the normative order of emotions, in the 20th century; or does it, on the contrary, act as an emotional refuge, a niche of deliberate slowness and intentional backwardness in societies that emphasize speed and progress (Reddy 2001; Plamper 2015: 257–​265)? How does nostalgia as a shortcut for the commodification of the past relate to the overall commodification of emotions under capitalism (Illouz 2007)? As we have seen earlier, nostalgia’s emotional quality is one of the reasons why historians feel bound to be ill-​disposed towards it. While the history of emotions promises a new, more neutral assessment of nostalgia, nostalgia would also be a promising subject for the history of emotions, not least because it poses the question of how emotions shape engagements with the past.

Conclusion As this overview has shown, nostalgia is a particularly tricky subject for historians. For one thing, it is important to distinguish between the term nostalgia and what it describes at various times, as well as determining if, and how, the modern concept of nostalgia can be applied to earlier periods. What is more, nostalgia poses fundamental questions that go directly to the heart of the historical project and can even be said to challenge its foundations, such as how history draws on preconceived and unacknowledged ideas about time, historical continuity and emotions. This may explain why historians have been so reluctant to study nostalgia, instead using the term pejoratively and polemically. At the same time, the challenges nostalgia poses, alongside the reservations historians harbour towards it, make it all the more necessary to place it in a historical perspective. In doing so, historians can draw on other disciplines, though they should be careful when applying current theories and approaches to past societies. Conversely, other disciplines would profit from historical research on nostalgia, whether in the form of conceptual histories exploring the evolution of the term, thereby raising awareness about its ambivalent and sometimes highly charged meanings, or through research into the interplay of memory and emotions in earlier periods, thus inserting today’s discussions into a longer historical perspective and, in the process, generating new questions for today. Three avenues for future research suggest themselves in particular. While it is not advisable to apply the modern concept of nostalgia to earlier periods without scrutiny, initial research implies that nostalgia was not specific to

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modernity either in its individual, anthropological form or in its social and collective form, but that related notions existed long before the term was coined, let alone acquired its current meaning. To clarify this point, additional research is required on how periods prior to modernity related to the past in emotional ways. Likewise, while researchers should be careful when applying the modern Western concept of nostalgia to non-​Western cultures, comparing concepts across cultures could help to delineate nostalgia more clearly. Specifically, doing so could provide a counterweight to the traditionally more negative view of nostalgia within Western modernity. The prerequisite for each of these approaches to work, however, would be a clearer concept of the position of nostalgia in 20th-​century Western thought. References Ankersmit, Frank (1994) History and Tropology: The Rise and Fall of a Metaphor. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Assmann, Aleida (2013) Ist die Zeit aus den Fugen? Aufstieg und Fall des Zeitregimes der Moderne. Munich: Hanser. Becker, Tobias (2018) ‘The Meanings of Nostalgia: Genealogy and Critique’. History and Theory, 57 (2): 234–​250. Borst, Arno (1993) The Ordering of Time: From the Ancient Computus to the Modern Computer. Cambridge: Polity Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brauer, Juliane (2014) ‘Heidi’s Homesickness’, in Ute Frevert et al (eds) Learning How to Feel: Children’s Literature and Emotional Socialization, 1870–​ 1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp 209–​227. Brunnert, Klaus (1984) Nostalgie in der Geschichte der Medizin. Düsseldorf: Triltsch. Bunke, Simon (2009) Heimweh: Studien zur Kultur-​und Literaturgeschichte einer tödlichen Krankheit. Freiburg: Rombach. Chakrabarty, Dipesh (1992) ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” Pasts?’. Representations, 37: 1–​26. Chase, Malcom and Christopher Shaw (1989) ‘The Dimensions of Nostalgia’, in Malcom Chase and Christopher Shaw (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp 1–​17. Davis, Fred (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press. Dodman, Thomas (2018) What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Dudden, Arthur P. (1961) ‘Nostalgia and the American’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 22 (4): 515–​530. Dwyer, Michael D. (2015) Back to the Fifties: Nostalgia, Hollywood Film and Popular Music of the Seventies and Eighties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Englund, Stephen (1992) ‘The Ghost of Nation Past’. Journal of Modern History, 64: 299–​320. Esposito, Fernando (2017) ‘Zeitenwandel: Transformationen geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom, Eine Einführung’, in Fernando Esposito (ed) Zeitenwandel: Transformationen geschichtlicher Zeitlichkeit nach dem Boom. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp 7–​62. Farese, Gian Marco and Yuko Asano-​Cavanagh (2018/​2019) ‘Analysing Nostalgia in Cross-​Linguistic Perspective’. Philology, 4: 213–​241. Fischer, Volker (1980) Nostalgie: Geschichte und Kultur als Trödelmarkt. Luzern: C.J. Bucher. Frevert, Ute and Anne Schmidt (2011) ‘Geschichte, Emotionen und die Macht der Bilder’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 37 (1): 5–​25. Fritzsche, Peter (2002) ‘How Nostalgia Narrates Modernity’, in Peter Fritzsche and Alon Confino (eds) The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp 62–​85. Fritzsche, Peter (2004) Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and Melancholy of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Gammerl, Benno (2012) ‘Emotional Styles: Concepts and Challenges’. Rethinking History, 16 (2): 161–​175. Geraghty, Lincoln (2014) Cult Collectors: Nostalgia, Fandom and Collecting Popular Culture. London: Routledge. Halbwachs, Maurice (1925) Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, Paris: Félix Alcan. Halbwachs, Maurice (1992) On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hartog, François (2015) Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Hepper, Erica G. et al (2014) ‘Pancultural Nostalgia: Prototypical Conceptions Across Cultures’. Emotion, 14: 733–​747. Hewison, Robert (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Hutton, Patrick H. (2013) ‘Reconsiderations of the Idea of Nostalgia in Contemporary Historical Writing’. Historical Reflections, 39 (3): 1–​9. Ivy, Marilyn (1988) ‘Tradition and Difference in the Japanese Mass Media’. Public Culture Bulletin, 1 (1): 21–​29. Illbruck, Helmut (2012) Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Illouz, Eva (2007) Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press. Inglehart, Ronald (1977) The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Judt, Tony (2007) Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Pimlico.

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Kammen, Michael (1991) Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Koselleck, Reinhart (2004) Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Landwehr, Achim (2014) Geburt der Gegenwart: Eine Geschichte der Zeit im 17. Jahrhundert. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Landwehr, Achim (2018) ‘Nostalgia and the Turbulence of Times’. History and Theory, 57 (2): 251–​268. Lasch, Christopher (1984) ‘The Politics of Nostalgia: Losing History in the Mists of Ideology’. Harper’s, 269: 65–​70. Lasch, Christopher (1991) The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics. New York: W.W. Norton and Co. Legg, Stephen (2005) ‘Contesting and Surviving Memory: Space, Nation and Nostalgia in Les Lieux de Mémoire’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23: 481–​504. Lowenthal, David (1985) The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lowenthal, David (1989) ‘Nostalgia Tells It Like It Wasn’t’, in Malcolm Chase and Christopher Shaw (eds) The Imagined Past: History and Nostalgia. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp 18–​32. Lübbe, Hermann (1977) Geschichtsbegriff und Geschichtsinteresse: Analytik und Pragmatik der Historie. Basel: Schwabe & Co. Lübbe, Hermann (1981) Zwischen Trend und Tradition: Überfordert uns die Gegenwart? Zürich: Edition Interfrom. Maier, Charles S. (1999) ‘The End of Longing? (Notes Toward a History of Postwar German National Longing)’, in John S. Brady, Beverly Crawford and Sarah Elise Wiliarty (eds) The Postwar Transformation of Germany: Democracy, Prosperity, and Nationhood. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp 271–​185. Matt, Susan J. (2011) Homesickness: An American History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Middleton, Dwight R. (1989) ‘Emotional Style: The Cultural Ordering of Emotions’. Ethos, 17 (2): 187–​201. Nora, Pierre (1996) ‘Between Memory and History’, in Pierre Nora (ed) Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions. New York: Columbia University Press, pp 1–​20. O’Sullivan, Lisa Gabrielle (2006) ‘Dying for Home: The Medicine and Politics of Nostalgia in Nineteenth Century France’. PhD thesis, Queen Mary University of London. Oxford English Dictionary Online, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online at: www.oed.com/v​ iew/E ​ ntry/1​ 28472?redirectedFrom=nostalgia& (accessed 28 December 2016).

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Pickering, Michael and Emily Keightley (2006) ‘Modalities of Nostalgia’. Current Sociology, 54 (6): 919–​941. Plamper, Jan (2015) The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reddy, William (2001) The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robinson, Emily (2010) ‘Touching the Void: Affective History and the Impossible’. Rethinking History, 14 (4): 503–​520. Rodgers, Daniel T. (2012) Age of Fracture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rosa, Hartmut (2013) Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press. Rosenwein, Barbara H. (2006) Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rosenwein, Barbara H. and Riccardo Cristiani (2018) What Is the History of Emotions? Cambridge: Polity Press. Roth, Michael (1989) ‘Remembering Forgetting: Maladies de la Memoire in 19th-​Century France’. Representations, 26: 49–​68. Roth, Michael (1991) ‘Dying of the Past: Medical Studies of Nostalgia in Nineteenth-​Century France’. History and Memory, 3: 5–​29. Roth, Michael (1992) ‘The Time of Nostalgia: Medicine, History and Normality in 19th-​Century France’. Time and Society, 1: 271–​286. Rothberg, Michael (2010) ‘Introduction: Between Memory and Memory: From Lieux de mémoire to Noeuds de mémoire’. Yale French Studies, 118/​119: 3–​12. Rymsza-​Pawlowska, M.J. (2017) History Comes Alive: Public History and Popular Culture in the 1970s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. Scheer, Monique (2012) ‘Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and Is That What Makes Them Have a History)? A Bourdieuan Approach to Understanding Emotion’. History and Theory, 51 (2): 193–​220. Schlesinger, Arthur Jr. (1955) ‘The New Conservatism: Politics of Nostalgia’. The Reporter, 16 June, pp 9–​12. Scott, Michael (2016) Ancient World: A Global History of Antiquity. New York: Basic Books. Sennett, Richard (1977) The Fall of Public Man. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Starobinski, Jean (1966) ‘The Idea of Nostalgia’. Diogenes, 14: 81–​103. Stewart, Susan (1993) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Toffler, Alvin (1970) Future Shock. London: Bodley Head.

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Tosh, John (2015) The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of History (6th edn). London: Routledge. Vromen, Suzanne (1986) ‘Maurice Halbwachs and the Concept of Nostalgia’, in Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present: A Research Annual (vol 6). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, pp 55–​66. Wendorff, Rudolf (1980) Zeit und Kultur: Geschichte des Zeitbewußtseins in Europa, Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag. West, Nancy Mar tha (2000) Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Whitrow, G.J. (1988) Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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3

Political Theory and Nostalgia: The Power of the Past in the History of Political Thought Andrew R. Murphy

Introduction I open this consideration of nostalgia and political theory with two passages from the history of political thought, and one from contemporary American politics. First, from Livy’s History of Rome: The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these: the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies. (Livy 1912: Preface) Livy thus introduces and frames his monumental work by contrasting a virtuous past with a degenerate present ‘in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies’. Second –​continuing with the theme of Livy –​from Niccolò Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy: Men always praise (but not always reasonably) the ancient times and find fault with the present; and they are such partisans of things past,

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that they celebrate not only that age which has been recalled to their memory by known writers, but those also (being now old) which they remember having seen in their youth. (Machiavelli 1996: 123) Here, Machiavelli distinguishes between two phenomena that ‘men … celebrate’: ‘the ancient times’, or ‘that age which has been recalled to their memory by known writers’ (in other words, times of which they can have no direct knowledge, but must rely on history books), and a past that they have, at least purportedly, experienced first hand; in other words, that ‘(being now old) they remember having seen in their youth’. Third, to come closer to the present day, the 45th President of the United States: ‘When we were all younger –​many of you are my age and many of you are younger –​but when we were all younger we didn’t lose so much, right? We don’t win anymore. As a country, we don’t win’ (Donald Trump, quoted in Johnson and Del Real 2016). Phrases like ‘when we were all younger’ appeal to direct knowledge or personal memory of past practices. To put it in Machiavelli’s terminology, Trump here evokes not so much ‘the ancient times’ but, rather, a past that ‘(being now old)’ he remembers having seen in his youth. In this chapter I will explore the relationship between past and present as it has appeared in the work of several key thinkers in the history of political thought. Of course, no single chapter can do justice to the variety of ways in which political theorists across time have engaged with nostalgic frames and drawn on the past in articulating their visions for the future, and as such I present here a sampling of a much broader phenomenon. I begin with some general remarks on nostalgia as a phenomenon (individual and collective, psychological and political) and elaborate on the distinction between nostalgic and Golden Age politics introduced earlier. I then turn to some important exemplars of these two phenomena, ranging from Thucydides and Augustine in the classical tradition, through modern thinkers like Edmund Burke and the early American expositors of the jeremiad tradition in New England. The chapter concludes by reflecting in the resurgent political force of the Christian Right in American politics since the 1980s, a powerful influence that continues into the Trump presidency.

Nostalgia and Golden Age rhetoric: some preliminary remarks Political theorists and historians of political thought have long explored the ways that memory and politics intertwine and mutually shape each other. Though its roots lie in early modern medicine, the study of nostalgia has migrated into a host of related areas and disciplines. An element of individual

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pathology has always been central to accounts of nostalgia –​from 17th-​ century Swiss soldiers to subjects in 21st-​century psychology experiments –​ yet the concept also carries a distinctly political charge. Studies such as Svetlana Boym’s analysis of reflective and restorative nostalgia in post-​Soviet political memory, and my own work on traditionalist and progressive jeremiads in the American political tradition, provide evidence of nostalgia’s fruitful role in cultural and political analysis (Boym 2001; Murphy 2009). In addition, a number of recent and forthcoming monographs illustrate the continuing appeal of such frameworks (see, for example, the 2018 reprint of Westwood and Williams 1997; Jacobsen 2020; Sayers 2020). Nostalgia presumes ‘a personally experienced past rather than one drawn solely … from chronicles, almanacs, history books, memorial tables, or for that matter, legend’ (Davis 1979: 8). Although the term emerged out of early modern European medicine, where it referred to extreme forms of homesickness observed among army recruits, by the 20th century it had come to describe not so much a medical condition as an affective state.1 Medical professionals originally understood nostalgia as related to geographical displacement, and thus Hofer connected it with the German term Heimweh, or homesickness. Contemporary usage of the term, by contrast, refers rather to a form of existential displacement, with distance measured not in miles, we might say, but in years. As Boym has put it, nostalgia may at first glance appear to be ‘a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time’ (Boym 2001: xv). When one thinks of the broad parallels between these two types of displacement, however, one sees a common thread: separation from a comforting personal referent produces a sense of acute discomfort. (In addition, if, as L.P. Hartley has written: ‘The past is a different country’, perhaps these two different types of disorientation are not so different after all (see Hartley 1953/​2002: 17).) The study of nostalgia has occupied scholars from a range of disciplines in recent years, and a vigorous debate over methodological approaches, to say nothing of the larger implications of nostalgia for individual and collective well-​being, persists. Some scholars claim that nostalgia’s negative reputation as characteristic of maladaptive, disgruntled curmudgeons is unwarranted, associating it with higher levels of well-​being in a variety of experimental settings. However, others have taken issue with this positive view of nostalgia by highlighting the artificiality of experimental settings and reporting more mixed results.2 For more details of these debates, see Chapter 5 in this volume. But nostalgia is an eminently political affective state, having served as a rallying cry for social movements and political campaigns that tie together critiques of the present and celebrations of the past, especially among individuals who share generational or other demographic characteristics. ‘Nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology’, Boym insists, tying it to ‘a

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longing for continuity in a fragmented world … [and] for the slower rhythms of the past, for continuity, social cohesion, and tradition’ (Boym 2001: xv, xiv, 16). Particularly in democratic political systems, where legitimacy depends upon an ability to attract popular support, nostalgia’s invocation of a shared experience can provide potent resources for the mobilization of such support. The remarks by Donald Trump cited at the opening of this chapter provide one example, and in tracing the emergence of the Christian Right during the late 1970s and early 1980s one scholar has argued that ‘the nostalgia wave of the 1970s is intimately related … to the massive identity dislocations of the 1960s’ (Davis 1979: 105). I return to a consideration of the American Christian Right later in this chapter. Despite its powerful effect on individual and collective perceptions, it also seems clear that nostalgia is not, or at least not primarily, an empirical phenomenon; it is subject to all the shortcomings and distortions of other forms of individual and collective memory. In other words, nostalgia does not offer unmediated insights into the way that things ‘really were’. David Lowenthal points out that that ‘the recollected past substantially diverges from the original experience’, and Boym argues that the ‘danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one’ (Lowenthal 1987: 208; Boym 2001: xvi) We might note a twofold distortion at work in nostalgia: an overly positive affect toward the reconstructed image of a personally experienced past, and an understatement of positive aspects of the present. In the opening section of this chapter I noted a distinction between valorizing a past lying within one’s own lifetime as opposed to celebrating one known only at second hand. Like nostalgia, Golden Age rhetoric (the latter of these two phenomena) is also a retrospective phenomenon. Unlike nostalgia, however, it reaches back well beyond the life experience of the speaker and the audience. The idea of a Golden Age, from Hesiod and Ovid to the American phenomenon often referred to as ‘Founders chic’, grounds a range of political narratives that assert the superiority of the past over the present and call the community to reform.3 Lowenthal calls the Golden Age ‘an imagined landscape invested with all [critics] find missing in the modern world’ (Lowenthal 1987: 25). In narrating such foundational moments, speakers often evoke the purported qualities of a community’s founders as a distinct antidote to the many failings of the present. Unlike nostalgia, however, the appeal of Golden Age politics is not an appeal to personal experience, but a link to a purer and, in part, mythic past. Of course, these two approaches –​nostalgic and Golden Age politics –​are not necessarily exclusive and, as we shall see later, often appear in tandem. With these preliminaries in place, let me offer a few examples of nostalgic and Golden Age thinking from the history of political thought.

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Nostalgia and Golden Age thinking, Part 1: Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, one of the most enduring works in the canon of Western political theory, traces the course of the titanic conflict between the Athenians and Spartans over the course of several decades beginning in 431 BCE. There are, of course, a multitude of lenses through which to interpret a classic text like Thucydides’ History; among the most germane to the concerns of this chapter and volume are as a meditation on the importance of leadership in shaping the character of public life and as a nostalgic lament for the loss of responsible leadership in Athens after the death of Pericles. As one who had lived through the events he wrote about, Thucydides put forward a pointed critique of what he saw as the declining quality of Athenian leadership as the war progressed, and the deleterious consequences of that declining leadership for the war effort as well as the quality of public life in Athens. In the opening passages of his History, Thucydides emphasizes his first-​hand knowledge of the people and events of the war, and thus offers judgements of occurrences and developments of which he had direct knowledge (a central component of a nostalgic viewpoint, as laid out earlier). Thucydides accomplishes this task in large part by reflecting on the career of Pericles, who ‘through his personal ability, his judgement and his evident integrity could freely restrain the masses’ (Thucydides 2013: 196). Scholars have long recognized the centrality of Pericles –​and his far less gifted successors –​in driving Thucydides’ narrative, with Mary Nichols describing his role in the History starkly: Pericles represented ‘the height of Athens’ greatness’ (Nichols 2017: 461). Early in Thucydides’ account he praises the leadership of Pericles, whose stirring words in the Funeral Oration belie the savagery into which the city descends during the plague that engulfs it shortly thereafter. Pericles perished in the plague, and the ensuing account often reads as a nostalgic longing for the prudent statesmanship of Pericles and tracing-​out of the disastrous course of post-​Periclean Athenian leadership. As Thucydides puts it: Pericles, through his personal ability, his judgement and his evident integrity could freely restrain the masses. He led them more than he was led by them. [He] owed his influence to his personal distinction and so could face their anger and contradict them … His successors, by contrast, being more on a level with each other and in competition each to be first, began to surrender even the conduct of affairs to the whims of the people. The consequence was –​this being a great city

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and one in possession of an empire –​that many mistakes were made. (Thucydides 2013: 196) Thucydides identifies the declining quality of Athenian leadership after Pericles’ death, the loss of his ‘balance between audacity and moderation’ that restrained hubris in Athenian politics (de Romilly 1963: 141, 330), as responsible for both discord at home and ultimate defeat in the war. He portrays the onset of decline in the quality of Athenian statesmanship after Pericles’ death most vividly in his treatment of Cleon and Alcibiades, the latter of whom represents the culmination of a number of trends in Athenian political life –​demagoguery, private ambition, personal excess –​that grew after Pericles’ death, with disastrous consequences for the polity. The decline of Athenian leadership, however, does not take place in a vacuum. It is related to the increasingly popular politics that characterized the years following Pericles’ death, in which the demos assumed an increasingly powerful role in Athenian political life. Of course, Athens had always been democratic, and that democracy had provided one of the key supports for Athenian imperialism, but what vanished after Pericles’ death was the presence of a figure with sufficient stature, will and political skill to moderate popular passions and to balance the democratic and aristocratic factions that exercised power in the city. Thucydides approvingly noted how Pericles moderated the potential for popular politics to swing erratically with changes in the public mood. Richard Ned Lebow notes how Thucydides presented Pericles as ‘mediat[ing] and mut[ing] class based tensions’ between Athenian factions (Lebow 2001: 556). If, as Walter Robert Connor has argued, the heart of the Athenian dilemma in this conflict lay between a ‘Periclean demand for restraint and tranquility and the innately restless character of the Athenians’ (Connor 1984: 73), the removal of the restraint that Pericles represented paved the way for the developments that led to Athens’s catastrophic defeat. Nor was this interpretive lens restricted to commentary on Athenian developments alone: Lebow refers to Thucydides’ account of the civil strife in Corcyra as ‘unabashedly nostalgic but also brutally realistic’ (Lebow 2001: 556). On a far grander and transcendent level, we can turn to Augustine’s City of God. Scholars have long known that Augustine undertook his monumental work at the request of a number of his fellow Christians, who were seeking a response to widespread criticisms that Christianity was responsible for Roman imperial decline late in the 4th century.4 Such debates reached a head after the sack of Rome in 410, with traditionalists claiming that this latest and crowning insult was brought on by Romans turning away from their traditional religions and embracing Christianity as the official faith of the

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empire. In other words, a yearning for the glory days of Rome –​when their city conquered much of the known world –​accompanied a yearning for the traditional Roman religion that had gone hand in hand with that expansion. What sorts of charges did such anti-​Christians level? Some critics apparently claimed that Christianity had brought with it an increase in such phenomena as plagues, famines, wars, droughts and other natural disasters. Years prior to Augustine, we find such prominent Christians as Tertullian, Arnobius and Cyprian taking issue with anti-​Christian rhetoric along these lines (see Cyprian: To Demetrianus, sections. 2, 8, in Coxe 1885, V: 458, 459; see also Arnobius: Adversus Gentes, Book I, in Roberts and Donaldson 1876: 3–​13). Far more prominent, apparently, was the claim that traditional Roman religion had facilitated the expansion and maintenance of Rome’s worldwide empire and that the abandonment of traditional sacrifices under Theodosian Christianity was responsible for the empire’s ensuing decline. Rhetorically speaking, the causal line from Theodosius’s proscription of traditional Roman religion in the early 390s to the city’s sack in 410 was clear: the enemies of Christianity, Augustine reports, ‘say that this calamity has fallen upon the city of Rome because she ceased to worship her gods’; they ‘attribute the disasters which have befallen the Roman commonwealth to the fact that our religion has forbidden the offering of sacrifices to the gods’ (Augustine 1998: 25, 49). Shortly after making these statements, Augustine summarized the aim of the City of God as a reply to ‘those who attribute the wars by which this world is consumed, and especially the recent sack of Rome by the barbarians, to the Christian religion by which they are forbidden to offer abominable sacrifices to demons’ (Augustine 1998: 50). Someone had to respond to such powerful nostalgic polemics. Dealing with the empirical claims of nostalgic anti-​Christian declinists, for Augustine, involved exploring the importance of Rome itself, and the classical heritage more generally. To do so most effectively, in the first five books of City of God Augustine drew on the classics of the Roman tradition –​just the texts most formative and familiar to the educated members of his audience. It is no accident that, within that group of texts, Augustine refers to Sallust and Livy more than to any other Roman authors, save perhaps Cicero. Both Sallust and Livy viewed the writing of history as an intensely moral task, sharing a common concern regarding the moral health of the Roman polity, which they saw as precipitously declining in their own time (note the passage from Livy on the opening page of this chapter). In other words, celebrated Roman authors from the past had viewed their own society through the lens of a nostalgic celebration of civic virtue that they viewed as quickly vanishing: years before the appearance of Christianity. Perhaps no two Latin authors (again, save Cicero) figured more prominently in the educational experience of Roman youth of Augustine’s generation, and the nostalgic

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Romans who represented a significant part of Augustine’s target audience would have known their Sallust and Livy inside out. Relying on these two stalwart Roman examples, then, Augustine suggests that the responsibility for moral decline cannot be laid at the feet of the Christians, and that aiming such nostalgic critiques at Christianity was off the mark. Other examples from the Roman literary or historical traditions (Terence, Perseus, Horace, Cicero, Virgil, Regulus, the invasion of the Gauls) served to bolster Augustine’s claim that worship of the traditional gods guaranteed neither individual nor communal flourishing, either in this life or in the next, and that Roman public life was fatally flawed well before the Incarnation. Of course, there is far more to Augustine’s City of God than this. The nostalgic attacks on Christianity depended on a larger view of human history, in which earthly fortunes reflected divine approval or disapproval. And so, ‘knowing what is expected of me and not unmindful of my duty’ (Augustine 1998: 450), Augustine turned to the elaboration of the two cities, and moved from negative critique to an articulation of his own view of history. What Augustine did so starkly, both in Book 5 and then again through the elaboration of the two cities in Books 11–​22 of the City of God, was to object wholly to the causal claim that underwrote both the anti-​Christian critique and Christian triumphalism; namely, that one could with some confidence read historical events as manifestations of divine pleasure or displeasure. It was precisely such a view that undergirded Roman nostalgia for imperial glory, and traditional religion. The rise of Rome, in Augustine’s view, was not due to the blessing of Jupiter, or any other(s) of the countless deities laid out in Varro’s impossibly complex catalogue of Roman deities. Necessarily, then, if these gods were not causally responsible for Rome’s rise, that is, if they did not grant Rome power in recognition of the city’s piety and sacrifice, then the empire’s decline cannot reasonably be ascribed to their wrath at being supplanted by worship of the Christian God. Augustine’s substitution of monotheistic providentialism overseeing the progress of the two cities in place of the Roman model of gods rewarding and punishing human piety maintained a divine principle in history, of course, but not one in which divine approval maps onto earthly flourishing. This view of historical change and causality –​this providential eschatology of the two cities moving towards their final day –​severs the long-​standing and comforting assumptions that our earthly prospects correlate, even in a rough way, with our spiritual health. In short, Augustine introduces a view of history diametrically opposed to the nostalgic Roman view that celebrated the interconnection of traditional religion and imperial expansion. Such a view, to Augustine, inappropriately blamed Christians for the empire’s decline from its glorious past based on a misunderstanding of the nature of divine and human agency.

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The opening section of this chapter included a brief reference to Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy, in which the author noted the powerful pull of the past and the attraction of nostalgic and Golden Age rhetoric. Although he pointed out the widespread fallacy of such thinking –​‘Men always praise (but not always reasonably) the ancient times and find fault with the present’, he writes, and calls this tendency a ‘deception’ (Machiavelli 1996: 123, emphasis added) –​Machiavelli nonetheless fell victim to it. Despite offering several explanations for why people succumbed to the appeal of such thinking, he insisted that it is not always in error. In fact, he maintained that the distinction between ‘the virtue that then used to reign and the vice that now reigns’ is ‘clearer than the sun’, and ‘so manifest that everyone sees it’ (Machiavelli 1996: 125). Keenly aware of what he considered to be the degeneracy of his own times, Machiavelli was profoundly drawn to Livy’s nostalgia for Roman glory. The Golden Age nature of so much of Machiavelli’s thinking is also reflected in his famous letter to Vettori, where he writes of ‘enter[ing] the ancient courts of ancient men’ in pursuit of knowledge, which he subsequently distilled into The Prince. Even warning against the temptation of unreasonably valorizing the past, it seems, provides no inoculation against it.

Nostalgia and Golden Age thinking, Part 2: Burke and his critics In a 1796 letter opposing the English government’s peace overtures to the revolutionary French regime, Edmund Burke offered the following reflection on the British past and present: For what have I entered into all this detail? To what purpose have I recalled your view to the end of the last century? It has been done to show that the British nation was then a great people ... we then had an high mind, and a constancy unconquerable, we were then inspired with no flashy passions. (Burke 1887, 5: 302) Perhaps no modern thinker is more associated with the kind of reverence for the past central to nostalgic thinking than Burke. Although much of the energy of Burke’s praise for the past and lament about the present was driven by his growing horror at the French Revolution and its aftermath, such reverence constituted a long-​standing part of his political thinking, founded upon a veneration for the English ‘ancient constitution’, a prudential and accumulative approach to politics drawn from English historical experience that he saw as increasingly vulnerable to weakening by internal and external forces.

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Burke’s appreciation for the past also contained a much farther-​ranging element, and he at times evokes the sort of Golden Age rhetoric. ‘[T]‌he age of chivalry is gone’, he lamented in Reflections, and ‘[t]hat of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever’ (Burke 1887, 3: 331). Looking back to those whom Burke called ‘canonized forefathers’ (Burke 1887, 3: 276) could provide stability and emphasize Burke’s constitutional point that the English had inherited their liberties ‘from a long line of ancestors’ (Burke 1887, 3: 339) and thus did not need abstract theories or disruptive political agitation. Burke ‘prefer[red] the collected wisdom of the ages to the abilities of any two men living’ (Burke 1887, 5: 403). He draws on both nostalgic and Golden Age thinking in lamenting recent innovations and celebrating a bygone era: ‘if there is nostalgia in Burke’, J.G.A. Pocock has commented, ‘it is for a medieval order in which popular manners were under clerical and chivalric direction’ (Pocock 1987: 382). Recent times, in Burke’s view, had seen a marked decline in the willingness of people to defer to that time-​tested amalgam of reason grasped through historical experience. ‘In former days’, Burke argued in 1782, the English constitution was ‘the admiration and envy of the world’; by sad contrast, he continued, using striking religious imagery, ‘now all its excellences are forgot ... it is despised and rejected of men’ (Burke 1887, 7: 103–​104). ‘If ’, he wrote toward the end of his life, ‘a new order is coming on, and all the political opinions must pass away as dreams, which our ancestors have worshiped as revelations’, he would ‘rather be the last ... of that race of men, than the first and greatest of those who have coined to themselves Whig principles from a French die’ (Burke 1887, 4: 215). The English constitution, however important and foundational to the traditional bases of Burke’s thought, did not stand alone. Burke leaned heavily on religion as the primary source for morality as well as a support for political order. As early as 1773 he had warned that ‘[t]‌he most horrid and cruel blow that can be offered to civil society is through atheism’ (Burke 1887, 7: 36); and furthermore, even at that relatively early point in his career Burke already saw such atheism making increasingly worrisome inroads into English society. The French Revolution, in Burke’s view, represented the culmination of this steadily growing atheism (Burke 1887, 3: 219, 4: 449–​ 450, 4: 426–​436). In Burke’s view, contemporary times also display markedly diminishing respect for the customs and practices of previous generations. He lamented, in a 1777 letter to the sheriffs of Bristol, that ‘in most of the late proceedings we see few traces of that generosity, humanity, and dignity of mind which formerly characterized this nation’ (Burke 1887, 2: 202–​203). His erstwhile

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Whig colleagues, in Burke’s view, had chosen ‘to abandon the principles of [their predecessors] and to learn new principles of Whiggism, imported from France’ (Burke 1887, 4: 120). The tone of Burke’s later writings shows clearly that, despite the largely successful and amply documented efforts of British authorities to suppress domestic radicalism, he saw Jacobinism as an ever-​present, and indeed ever-​g rowing, threat (Burke 1877, 5: 285–​287). Clearly, Burke viewed his time as increasingly characterized by innovation and abstract theorizing that carried such troubling consequences for morals and politics, as well as decreasing respect and veneration for traditional standards of political legitimacy and established practices. The other side of the coin to Burke’s veneration of the traditional constitution and the religious bases of social order lies in his opposition –​a pronounced aversion, bordering on horror –​to innovation. As with many of the issues that characterized his career, the French Revolution moved this distrust of innovation and speculation to new heights of concern and eloquence. Burke derides the ‘Men of Letters’ who arose along with the monied class in France (those academics affiliated with the Encyclopedia) as innovators (Burke 1887, 3: 376–​397; 4: 318–​319). Carefully distinguishing between innovation and reform, Burke described the French Revolution as the triumph of innovators masking as reformers, and he confessed that he had hoped for better from France: ‘a great state ought to have some regard to its ancient means’ (Burke 1887, 5: 173) and resist the allure of innovators and abstract speculators. Burke’s critics –​chief among them Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine –​pilloried him for these views. In The Rights of Man, Paine ridiculed Burke’s encomia to ‘the Quixot age of chivalry nonsense’ and sought to belittle the ‘rhapsody of his imagination’ (Burke 1887, 2: 287). For her part, Wollstonecraft (who penned the first response to Burke’s Reflections, published just a few months after Burke’s own piece appeared) criticized Burke’s ‘sentimental jargon’, denouncing his praise of tradition as little more than a ‘wild declamation’ (Wollstonecraft 1790: 68, 9). Burke’s argument against the French Revolution, she insists, boils down to the following: That we are to reverence the rust of antiquity, and term the unnatural customs, which ignorance and mistaken self-​interest have consolidated, the sage fruit of experience [and] excuse, with blind love, or unprincipled filial affection, the venerable vestiges of ancient days. These are gothic notions of beauty –​the ivy is beautiful, but, when it insidiously destroys the trunk from which it receives support, who would not grub it up? (Wollstonecraft 1790: 9–​10) For both Paine and Wollstonecraft, nostalgic reveries like Burke’s crush individuals under the weight of tradition and prevent human progress.

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Nostalgia and Golden Age thinking, Part 3: the American context In the remainder of this chapter, I move to the American context and trace the importance of nostalgic and Golden Age thinking in the American tradition, from the earliest days of the colonial era down to the Trump era. I opened my Prodigal Nation (Murphy 2009) with an exploration of the New England jeremiad, which came into its own during the 1670s and 1680s and represents perhaps the archetypal American narrative of glorious past and ensuing decline (see also Miller 1953; Bercovitch 1978; Stout 1986). No sooner had the Winthrop fleet landed in Boston Harbour in 1630, it seems, than New England clergy began bewailing their communities’ declining spiritual health and increased ‘worldliness’, and interpreting a variety of misfortunes (crop failures, conflicts with native tribes, natural disasters) as signs of God’s displeasure at such backsliding. The jeremiad became a classic American literary form and set a long-​running precedent for American social criticism. It was also a fundamentally nostalgic enterprise, a yearning of second-​generation preachers for the world their parents had made (that is, in many cases, the world of their childhoods). In fact, what makes the New England jeremiad particularly interesting is the fact that, as a decidedly second-​generation phenomenon, it provides an example of how nostalgic and Golden Age political accounts can intertwine. Nostalgic yearning for a purer religious experience and lament over spiritual decline in their midst led New England preachers to evoke both the world of their childhood and a Golden Age of godly founders. These early New England sermons claimed not only that contemporary society was flawed in key ways, but also that piety and godly order had once existed in the communities’ midst. Increase Mather invoked larger-​than-​ life founding personalities in New England history –​‘Winthrop, Dudley, Cotton, Hooker … the instruments, under God, of laying the foundation of both our civil and ecclesiastical state’ (Mather 1685: 109) –​and explicitly compared New England’s founders to biblical heroes: ‘As for … the present generation in New-​England … your fathers were such as did serve the Lord … they were Abrahams … Davids … there never was a generation that did so perfectly shake off the dust of Babylon … as the first generation of Christians that came into this land for the gospel’s sake’ (Mather 1674: 77). Heirs of a perhaps unprecedented ‘progress in Reformation’, children of the New England founders almost inevitably faced ‘gradual declinings till that light hath almost been extinguished’ (Allen 1679: 11). Samuel Danforth’s 1670 sermon A Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness operated in a classically nostalgic register: ‘Let us call to remembrance the former days, and consider whether it was not then better with us, then it is now’ (Danforth 1670: 10). Danforth contrasted the

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degenerate New England present with a glorious past (a past that stretched back just four decades; in other words, within his own lifetime and the lifetimes of many in his audience), asking the congregation to consider whether our ancient and primitive affections to the Lord Jesus … [and] his pure and spiritual worship and the order of his house, remain, abide and continue firm, constant, entire and inviolate … Let us call to remembrance the former days, and consider whether it was not then better with us, then it is now. (Danforth 1670: 10) Danforth traced a cooling of spiritual ardour, a declining godliness accompanied by growing division and worldliness that stood in sharp contrast to ‘our first and best days’ (Danforth 1670: 12–​13). In much of the American political rhetoric of the 19th century, speakers’ use of the term ‘fathers’ and ‘forefathers’ continued to evoke generational distance between the moral standards of a bygone era and the present. A number of the nation’s most prominent founders passed away during the 1820s and 1830s: Jefferson and Adams on the same day in 1826, James Monroe and Charles Carroll, the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, in 1831, John Marshall in 1835 and James Madison in 1836. This generational transition both separated Americans from their hallowed founders and made those memories ripe for partisan political usage. Frederick Douglass lamented that 19th-​century Americans had ‘forgotten their own heroic age’, tying John Brown to the memory of ‘the heroes of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill’ (quoted in Foner 1950, II: 458). The rise of the slave power and the continuing inability of slavery’s opponents to confront it effectively represented a betrayal of those ‘fathers’. In his debates with Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln insisted that he aimed only to place slavery ‘upon the basis that our fathers placed it upon’, on a course that would yield its ultimate extinction. Defending himself from Douglas’s attacks, Lincoln argued: ‘I have proposed nothing more than a return to the policy of the fathers’ (Lincoln 1858). In 1861, Henry Ward Beecher described the growing antislavery movement as a revolution ‘back to the doctrines of our fathers … We stand for the principles that our fathers gave us’ (quoted in Cherry 1998: 167).5 During the late 1970s and 1980s, the Christian Right emerged as a force in American politics, coalescing around a social and political agenda that emphasized traditional family structures and gender roles, an accommodating relationship between government and Christianity (epitomized by public school prayer and the display of religious symbols on public property), and a staunch anti-​communist approach to American foreign policy. In doing so, it advanced not merely a catalogue of political positions but a pointedly

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nostalgic generational claim, hearkening back to the 1950s and early 1960s, the formative social world of many of its supporters. Given the nature of its traditionalist cultural conservatism around issues of sexual morality and religious authority, it is no surprise that Christian Right leaders perceived the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s (not to mention Supreme Court decisions on school prayer and abortion, and an increasingly intrusive federal government) as a stark break from past practices. Such developments represented, in their view, the tip of a much broader iceberg of social transformation and the beginning of a process of national decline. The broad social vision proffered by the Christian Right evoked an earlier and simpler age, in which families and local communities were at greater liberty to express their religious faith in public without having to worry about objections from religious minorities or the intervention of activist judges. Ralph Reed’s description encapsulated the Christian Right vision well: America would look much as it did for most of the first two centuries of its existence, before the social dislocation caused by Vietnam, the sexual revolution, Watergate, and the explosion of the welfare state. Our nation would once again be ascendant, self-​confident, proud, and morally strong. Government would be strong, the citizenry virtuous, and mediating institutions such as churches and voluntary organizations would carry out many of the functions currently relegated to the bureaucracy. (Reed 1994: 36–​37, emphasis added) If this is not a nostalgic mid-​1990s reverie for 1950s America, it is hard to imagine what one would look like. The style and substance of the Christian Right’s message has continued to evolve over the years, and a robust literature traces its maturation as a political coalition in subsequent decades (see, for example, Dowland 2015; Kruse and Zelizer 2019). This coalition, which David Gutterman and I have called ‘the Orthodox Alliance’ (Gutterman and Murphy 2015, ­Chapter 3), has engaged the political process and attempted to enact policy or legislative change by, say, supporting a constitutional amendment banning abortion or legislation to make abortions rarer, or passing state-​level referenda prohibiting same-​sex marriage. In recent years, however, such actors (including individual office holders, business owners and the groups that support them) have pursued a different strategy, using the language of religious freedom to extricate themselves from activities that offend their consciences, such as providing same-​sex marriage licences or wedding-​related services for same-​sex couples (see Murphy 2019; Van Hagel and Mansbach 2017). Perhaps (or perhaps not) even more remarkably, the white evangelicals who powered the Christian Right in its earlier iterations lined up solidly behind

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the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, a thrice-​married, biblically illiterate serial philanderer. Among the many reasons that would lead moral traditionalists to support a candidate like Trump, nostalgic longing for a world in which they exercised political and cultural influence (in John Fea’s words, American evangelicals were ‘casting about for some means to bring history back under control’ [Fea 2018: 112]) surely figured heavily. MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) provided Trump with the backdrop for a series of pointed observations about life in the 21st-​century United States, contrasted with ‘the way they used to be’, when the nation was great: everything from his own personal predilections (‘Merry Christmas’ instead of ‘Happy Holidays’, doctors making house calls, violently shutting down protesters) to policy aspirations (rebuilding the American manufacturing sector, bringing back the coal industry, reinstating capital punishment). As mentioned earlier, however, nostalgia is not, or at least not primarily, an empirical phenomenon. ‘MAGA’ draws its power as a slogan from its ability to respond to a potent mix of regret and longing, in this case what Francesca Polletta and Jessica Callahan, following Arlie R. Hochschild, call the ‘deep story’ of contemporary American conservatism (Polletta and Callahan 2017).

Conclusion: Nostalgic and Golden Age politics If nostalgia presents an idealized, moralized portrait of both past and present, it is nonetheless a politically effective one, a powerful coping mechanism during times of social upheaval. This coping mechanism seems to operate on a collective level as well as an individual one, and nostalgia can serve to strengthen relational bonds among members of sub-​communities who perceive themselves to be under threat. Here we see most clearly the political aspect of nostalgia, whether it be in the nostalgic overtones of ‘Make America Great Again’ and Trump’s appeal to Whites who felt left behind in post-​ industrial America, early New Englanders’ attempts to hold on to the special nature of their community in the face of fragmentation and commercial growth (or, to range more widely, Augustine’s resistance to Roman nostalgia and Burke’s opposition to the French Revolution). More broadly, scholars have recently drawn connections between a particular kind of politicized nostalgia and the resurgence of populism in the United States and Europe (Kenny 2017; Steenvoorden and Harteveld 2018). This connection between nostalgia and politics points to another important point: nostalgia enters politics packaged in vivid narratives, stories of a virtuous past displaced by a disordered present. A generation ago, the Christian Right deployed nostalgic jeremiads to enormous political success, rallying defenders of traditional values to, in the words of Jerry Falwell, bring

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the nation ‘back to basics, back to values, back to biblical morality, back to sensibility, and back to patriotism’ (Falwell 1980: 19). ‘MAGA’, similarly, presumes a nation not presently great but with greatness in its recent past and, with proper political leadership, in its future. Nostalgia seems particularly effective within generations, a fact to which Trump frequently alluded on the campaign trail. Nostalgia and Golden Age politics have long captivated the imagination of political theorists and historians of political thought as they seek to critically engage with their societies, explore their pasts and envision their futures. Regardless of the empirical status of these imagined pasts, it is unquestionable that such cognitive and affective processes constitute a powerful resource for those seeking to articulate their discontent and draw on alternative sources of meaning and value. The past may be a foreign country, but it is always with us. Notes 1

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Johannes Hofer’s medical dissertation, the first to name the term ‘nostalgia’, was translated and published in Anspach (1934). See also Rosen (1975) and Fuentenebro de Diego and Ots (2014). For the more positive view of nostalgia see Sedikides and Wildschut (2016, 2018); also Vess et al (2012). For a critical perspective, see Newman et al (2020). Hesiod referred to a golden race, not a golden age; for the Golden Age, see Ovid: ‘That first age was an age of gold: no law and no compulsion then were needed; all kept faith; the righteous way was freely willed’ (Ovid 1993: 6). On American ‘Founders chic’, see Brands (2003). The following discussion is a compression of the much more expansive treatment in Murphy (2005). For a much more detailed account of American nostalgic and Golden Age thinkers, see Murphy (2009, passim).

References Allen, James (1679) New-​Englands Choicest Blessing. Boston. Anspach, Carolyn Kiser (1934) ‘Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688’. Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 2: 376–​391. Augustine (1998) The City of God Against the Pagans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bercovitch, Sacvan (1978) The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brands, H.W. (2003) ‘Founders Chic’. The Atlantic Monthly, 292: 101–​110. Burke, Edmund (1887) The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (12 vols). London: John C. Nimmo.

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Cherry, Conrad (ed) (1998) God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny (rev edn). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Connor, Walter Robert (1984) Thucydides. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coxe, A. Cleveland (1885) Ante-​Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325 (edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, revised by A. Cleveland Coxe). New York: Christian Literature Publishing Co. Danforth, Samuel (1670) A Brief Recognition of New-​Englands Errand into the Wilderness. Cambridge, MA. Davis, Fred (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press. de Romilly, Jacqueline (1963) Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism. Oxford: Blackwell. Dowland, Seth (2015) Family Values and the Rise of the Christian Right. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Falwell, Jerry (1980) Listen, America! New York: Doubleday. Fea, John (2018) Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Foner, Philip S. (ed) (1950) Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass. New York: International. Fuentenebro de Diego, Filberto and Carmen Valiente Ots (2014) ‘Nostalgia: A Conceptual History’. History of Psychiatry, 25: 404–​411. Gutterman, David S. and Andrew R. Murphy (2015) Political Religion and Religious Politics: Navigating Identities in the United States. New York: Routledge. Hartley, L.P. (1953/​2002) The Go-​Between. New York: New York Review of Books Classics. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (ed) (2020) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. New York: Routledge. Johnson, Jenna and Jose A. Del Real (2016) ‘25 Quotes Capturing Donald Trump’s Final Pitch to South Carolina’. Available online at www. washingtonpost.com/​news/​post-​politics/​wp/​2016/​02/​19/​25-​quotes-​ capturing-​donald-​trumps-​final-​pitch-​to-​south-​carolina/​. Kenny, Michael (2017) ‘Back to the Populist Future? Understanding Nostalgia in Contemporary Ideological Discourse’. Journal of Political Ideologies, 22: 256–​273. Kruse, Kevin M. and Julian P. Zelizer (2019) Fault Lines: A History of the United States since 1974. New York: Norton. Lebow, Richard Ned (2001) ‘Thucydides the Constructivist’. American Political Science Review, 95: 547–​560. Lincoln, Abraham (1858) ‘Debate with Stephen Douglas at Alton’. Available online at: www.nps.gov/​liho/​learn/​historyculture/​debate7.htm.

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Livy (Titus Livius) (1912) The History of Rome, Book I. New York: E.P. Dutton and Co. Lowenthal, David (1987) The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1996) Discourses Upon Livy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mather, Increase (1674) ‘To the Reader’, in Samuel Torrey: An Exhortation unto Reformation. Cambridge, MA. Mather, Increase (1685) A Call from Heaven, to the Present and Succeeding Generations. Boston. Miller, Perry (1953) The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Murphy, Andrew R. (2005) ‘Augustine and the Rhetoric of Roman Decline’. History of Political Thought, 26: 586–​606. Murphy, Andrew R. (2009) Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/​11. New York: Oxford University Press. Murphy, Andrew R. (2019) ‘The Past and Present (and Future?) Politics of Religious Liberty’. The Forum, 17: 45–​67. Newman, David B. et al (2020) ‘Nostalgia and Well-​Being in Daily Life: An Ecological Validity Perspective’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118 (2): 325–​347. Nichols, Mary (2017) ‘Leaders and Leadership in Thucydides’ History’, in Sarah Forsdyke, Edith Foster and Ryan Balot (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ovid (1993) The Metamorphoses of Ovid. New York: Harvest. Paine, Thomas (1967) The Rights of Man. In The Writings of Thomas Paine (edited by Moncure Daniel Conway) (4 vols). New York: AMS Press. Pocock, J.G.A. (1987) The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century. A Reissue with a Retrospect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Polletta, Francesca and Jessica Callahan (2017) ‘Deep Stories, Nostalgia Narratives and Fake News: Storytelling in the Trump Era’. American Journal of Cultural Sociology, 5: 392–​408. Reed, Ralph (1994) Politically Incorrect: The Emerging Faith Factor in American Politics. Dallas: Word. Roberts, Alexander and James Donaldson (1876) Ante-​Nicene Christian Library, Volume XIX: The Seven Books of Arnobius Adversus Gentes. Edinburgh: T & T Clark. Rosen, George (1975) ‘Nostalgia: A “Forgotten” Psychological Disorder’. Psychological Medicine, 5: 340–​354. Sayers, Nicola (2020) The Promise of Nostalgia: Reminiscence, Longing and Hope in Contemporary American Culture. New York: Routledge.

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Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut (2016) ‘Past Forward: Nostalgia as a Motivational Force’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20: 319–​321. Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut (2018) ‘Finding Meaning in Nostalgia’. Review of General Psychology, 22: 48–​61. Steenvoorden, Eefie and Eelco Harteveld (2018) ‘The Appeal of Nostalgia: The Influence of Societal Pessimism on Support for Populist Radical Right Parties’. West European Politics, 41: 28–​52. Stout, Harry S. (1986) The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in New England. New York: Oxford University Press. Thucydides (2013) The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vess, Matthew et al (2012) ‘Nostalgia as a Resource for the Self ’. Self and Identity, 11: 273–​284. Von Hagel, Alisa and Daniela Mansbach (2017) ‘The Battle for Recognition: Religious Freedom post-​O bergefell’. Law, Culture and the Humanities, available online at: https:// ​ d oi.org/ ​ 1 0.1177/​ 1743872117690347. Westwood, Sallie and John M. Williams. (1997) Imagining Cities: Scripts, Signs, Memory. London: Routledge. Wollstonecraft, Mary (1790) A Vindication of the Rights of Men. London.

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Sociology and Nostalgia: Micro-​, Meso-​ and Macro-​level Dimensions of an Ambiguous Emotion Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Janelle L. Wilson

Introduction Let it already from the outset of this chapter be stressed, nostalgia is not a conventional preoccupation among sociologists, it is not a hot potato ranking high in most research agendas and it is a topic only seldom taught in its own right in sociology classes. Despite this, nostalgia is in fact a phenomenon that sociologists should take seriously, not least because it is very informative about many different aspects of society or ‘the social’, which is the subject matter of sociology often defining itself as the ‘science of society’. However, looking through most sociology books, the topic of nostalgia has –​until recently –​been conspicuous primarily by its absence (Jacobsen 2020a). This situation also once made Roland Robertson remark that ‘we lack a sociological, as opposed to a psychological, theory of nostalgia’ (Robertson 1992: 146). Perhaps we do not so much lack ‘a theory’ (in the singular) but, rather, a more substantial sociological interest in theorizing and empirically exploring nostalgia. Not much has drastically changed since Robertson’s call for a sociological interest in nostalgia. This is truly a shame and quite surprising, because nostalgia offers such an important lens for understanding many other aspects of social life such as, for example, history, identity, self, culture, memory and social structure. Some of these core sociological concerns will be sent in circulation around the topic of nostalgia throughout this chapter.

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This chapter thus aspires to highlight some important contributions to the study of nostalgia from the field of sociology. Sociology offers a unique and valuable perspective from which to study nostalgia. Sociologists are especially apt to emphasize that the conceptualizations, experiences and uses of nostalgia are variable –​historically, culturally and socially. Even though many sociologists have conventionally been critical of nostalgia (see, for example, Elliott and Turner 2012), in some ways it could be said that the birth of the discipline itself had a strong nostalgic underpinning. Sociology was a child of a tumultuous era in the mid-​19th century marking an intellectual steppingstone between premodern feudal society and modern industrialized society. In this way, sociology is a product of modernity and the modern mind, of a scientific quest to understand the drastic changes taking place in the Western world at the threshold between traditional and modern society. The early sociologists –​the so-​called ‘founding fathers’ of the discipline –​focused on societal changes and psycho-​social challenges brought about by the Industrial Revolution. For example, Karl Marx’s discussion of alienation, Max Weber’s concerns about over-​rationalization, Émile Durkheim’s conceptualization of social solidarity and anomie, Ferdinand Tönnies’ distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft and Georg Simmel’s description of objective and subjective culture all express dissatisfaction with the present and a sense of loss, which is at the heart of nostalgia. Sociologists’ critique of modernity in the mid-​to late 19th century gave way to their mass culture critique in the middle of the 20th century (namely, by scholars in the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and then, in the early 1990s, for example in George Ritzer’s critical commentary on the McDonaldization of society –​a critique that remains relevant in contemporary society. All in all, sociology has throughout its history produced many theories, studies and diagnoses of the times that, although they do not directly deal with or mention nostalgia, nevertheless still provide food for thought about the sense of loss and longing which is so characteristic of nostalgia. This characteristic sense of loss and longing of nostalgia as an emotion was elaborated further by Bryan S. Turner, who suggested four main dimensions of the response to loss in nostalgic sentiments: (1) a sense of historical decline and loss, ‘involving a departure from some golden age of “homefulness” ’, (2) ‘the sense of the absence or loss of personal wholeness and moral certainty’, (3) ‘the sense of loss of individual freedom and autonomy with the disappearance of genuine social relationships’ and (4) ‘the idea of a loss of simplicity, personal authenticity and emotional spontaneity’ (Turner 1987: 150–​151). It is obvious from this listing that the experience of and response to feelings of loss and longing may be located at many different levels of social life –​individual, group or cultural –​and throughout this

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chapter we will deal with these. Moreover, it is important to emphasize that nostalgia is often described as an inherently ‘bittersweet’ emotion that creates a combined painful and beautiful realization that the past one is longing for is, for all practical intents and purposes, irretrievable and lost (Batcho 2013). Besides this continuous indirect (and mostly unacknowledged) interest in nostalgia, the discipline of sociology –​however, to a much lesser degree –​has also provided ideas for a more direct and specialized interest in nostalgia. The work of American sociologist Fred Davis (Yearning for Yesterday –​A Sociology of Nostalgia) in 1979, to which we return later, is considered the first truly sociological treatment of the phenomenon of nostalgia. Davis’s distinction between ‘private’ and ‘collective’ nostalgia as well as his identification of three successive ‘orders of nostalgia’ (simple, reflexive and interpretive) provided a solid foundation for other sociologists interested in analysing the complex and ambiguous emotion of nostalgia. Beginning with an overview of Davis’s contributions to a sociological understanding of nostalgia, this chapter addresses how nostalgia is connected to meaning, memory, the self and social structure. Furthermore, the chapter examines the role of the social structure and finally consider Zygmunt Bauman’s (2017) recent work on ‘retrotopia’, which shares much in common with key concerns of the early sociologists –​namely, a concern over the increasing individualization, incivility and fragmentation of society and the rise of nostalgia/​retrotopia as a response to these changes.

The foundational work of Fred Davis As mentioned earlier, nostalgia –​as a topic in and by itself –​has so far not attracted widespread attention among sociologists. In fact, prior to the late 1970s there was really no substantial sociological interest in nostalgia. American sociologist Fred Davis (1925–​93) offered the first truly and substantial sociological analysis of nostalgia. In his pioneering work Yearning for Yesterday –​A Sociology of Nostalgia, Davis (1979) explored many different dimensions and facets of nostalgia as a topic deserving of sociological scrutiny. He worked within a symbolic interactionist framework on nostalgia (and fashion and deviance, which he also studied), and he is described as belonging to the generation called the ‘Second Chicago School’ that developed the ideas of the classic Chicago sociologists throughout the latter part of the 20th century (Gusfield et al 1993). This meant that Davis focused particularly on the complex way in which nostalgia as an emotion linked the individual’s meaning-​making with the wider contexts of social groups and society at large. This approach is clearly evident in his book on nostalgia. It was Davis’s (1977, 1979: 104) contention that nostalgia was on the rise throughout the 1960s and 1970s (what he described as a veritable ‘nostalgia wave’ or

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‘nostalgia orgy’) as an expression of a need for stability and a search for means of coping, particularly in times characterized by cultural disruption and rapid change. It was thus his view, captured with a quote from fellow sociologist Robert Nisbet, that ‘nostalgia may tell us more about present moods than past realities’ (Davis 1977: 416). In his work, Davis observed how nostalgia ‘comes to be complicated and confounded by a variety of cognitive and emotional qualities’ (Davis 1979: 16). In order to reduce this complexity, he proposed several important distinctions and typologies of nostalgia that are useful when applying the notion to concrete studies at different levels of society. Perhaps most importantly, Davis developed a typology of three different types of nostalgia. First, the ‘simple nostalgia’ (or ‘first order nostalgia’), basically resting on an understanding that things were better (healthier, happier, more exciting and so on) in the past than they are now, thus sentimentalizing the past and censuring the present. Second, the ‘reflexive nostalgia’ (or ‘second order nostalgia’) which questions if the past was really better, thus elaborating and reflecting on the veracity of statements, thoughts and feelings about the actual/​historical status of the past. Finally, the ‘interpreted nostalgia’ (or ‘third order nostalgia’), which moves beyond such questions about the ‘truth’ about nostalgia and instead pries into the hows, whys, wheres and whens of the nostalgic experience (Davis 1979: 17–​29). These three varieties (or so-​called ‘ascending orders’) of nostalgia show the complexity and multi-​ dimensionality of nostalgia and point out that nostalgia can mean different things to different people. Besides these three varieties of nostalgia, Davis also differentiated, as we shall see later, between ‘private’ and ‘collective’ nostalgia as well as between different ‘aesthetic modalities’ and ways of securing the continuity of identity. Moreover, he showed how nostalgia was also intimately related to the ideas of the self and to identity (and also with the human life cycle and thus to the maturing and ageing self). Additionally, he illustrated how nostalgia was treated within the realm of artistic expression, showed how nostalgia was also a societal phenomenon and discussed how nostalgia in contemporary society increasingly became shaped and appropriated by the media. In this way, Davis’s book in exemplary manner provided a solid conceptual foundation for further sociological explorations of nostalgia on the micro, meso and macro levels of social life. Davis’s work has subsequently inspired many other scholars in their conceptualization of nostalgia, inside and outside the discipline of sociology. The artist/​scholar/​writer Svetlana Boym (2001) poetically noted that nostalgia is a yearning for a different time: ‘the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams’ (Boym 2001: xv). For Boym, ‘the nostalgic desires … to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition’ (Boym 2001: xv). Boym identified

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two kinds of nostalgia that echo the types of nostalgia that Davis described. The names she gave them are ‘restorative nostalgia’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’. She characterized the former as emphasizing the pursuit of a return to what has been lost (in the desire for a ‘return to home’ –​or the nostos part of the nostalgia word). As the term ‘restorative nostalgia’ suggests, this is a type of nostalgia that expresses the desire to restore things to the way they once (presumably) were. We can readily see how this kind of nostalgia is consistent with viewing an idyllic past that glosses over the way things really were. It is important to note that Boym saw this type of nostalgia as potentially dangerous, as those who experience restorative nostalgia do not think of themselves as being nostalgic but, rather, as pursuing truth. Boym’s description of this type of nostalgia as ‘characterizing national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the anti-​modern myth-​making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths, and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories’ (Boym 2001: 41) is uncannily relevant, given the recent events politically and culturally in the United States and around the world. Boym’s ‘reflective nostalgia’, on the other hand, is closely linked to the second part of the concept of nostalgia –​the algia –​that refers to the aching and longing associated with remembrance. This kind of nostalgia acknowledges that multiple ‘versions’ of the past exist and mutually compete, and that our recollection is thus always ambivalent. So ,rather than searching for an absolute truth about the past to be restored or aiming to reinstall an identical replica of the past in the present, reflective nostalgia involves a consideration of the passage of time and how individual and cultural recollections are shaped by myriad factors. In short, then, ‘[r]‌estorative nostalgia evokes national past and future; reflective nostalgia is more about individual and cultural memory’ (Boym 2001: 49). Boym wrote beautifully about nostalgia and her work is such that many disciplines (including sociology) may wish to ‘claim’ her. Surely, much of the power and impact of her contributions crosses (or even transcends) disciplinary boundaries. It is significant to note that, as an émigré herself (originally from the former Soviet Union), for Boym the topic of nostalgia was not an abstract phenomenon, but most certainly a lived experience that invited meaning-​making processes that she gifted generously through her work and that undoubtedly have resonated with multitudes of people. Returning to Davis’s seminal book, this clearly this laid the foundation for many subsequent studies, both within sociology and beyond. It is indeed difficult to overestimate the importance of Davis’s work on nostalgia for the field of sociological research into the topic. It continues to be cited and remains an important source for conceptual development and refinement within sociology and related disciplines.

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Meaning and nostalgia As mentioned earlier, for Davis –​not least due to his symbolic interactionist outlook –​the way people perceive and make sense of the world constitutes an important building block for understanding society at large. Nostalgia is in many ways an emotional mechanism for meaning-​making of one’s relationship to or recollection of the past. True, nostalgia means many different things to different people and in different historical, social and cultural contexts. The experience of nostalgia can thus be instrumental in establishing (or re-​establishing) meaning. Especially in those instances when one is reminiscing with others who shared a past experience, nostalgic recollection can, as Roger Aden suggests, allow ‘individuals to situate themselves in a sanctuary of meaning, a place where they feel safe from oppressive cultural conditions’ (Aden 1995: 21). Aden highlights the temporal qualities of nostalgia –​in particular, nostalgic communication serving as a means of temporary escape: ‘Nostalgic communication provides individuals with a means of symbolically escaping cultural conditions that they find depressing and/​or disorienting’. Indeed, ‘nostalgia indicates individuals’ desire to regain some control over their lives in an uncertain time’ (Aden 1995: 21). This was also the position advanced by Davis (1979: 35) –​nostalgia in many ways serves as a haven when people are confronted with uncertainty, crisis or discontinuity. Following symbolic interactionist Herbert Blumer’s (1969) key premises, the meaning of things, of course, ‘is derived from, or arises out of, the social interaction that one has with one’s fellows’, and furthermore ‘these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretive process’ (Blumer 1969: 2). We readily see, then, the ways in which nostalgia is both personal/​ private and collective. The past(s) being recalled inevitably links one to others. Even if the individual is reminiscing on their own, connections to others are re-​established simply because ‘the mind is “peopled” ’ (Hertz 1990: 195). Dennis Waskul, Phillip Vannini and Janelle L. Wilson (2009) conducted a study of olfactory perception and memory that dramatically demonstrates how particular odours activate one’s personal/​private nostalgic memories. Participants in the study reflected on their own olfactory experiences through the use of journals. Whether it is the aroma of sweet treats, spices or mustard pickles, research participants reveal how their olfactory perceptions are tied to memories –​and often nostalgic ones. As one participant stated: ‘I associate this odor [baking] with yummy treats, my family, holidays or celebration. My mother always baked a lot at Christmas … The smell of baking makes me think of a cozy house on a cold night with my family sitting around with a treat after dinner’ (Amy, age 31, in Waskul et al 2009: 13). Consider another excerpt from a participant’s journal:

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My most pleasurable recent smell memory would have to be the smell of cumin, cloves, nutmeg, sugar and other spices brewing in a pot of Indian chai masala (spiced tea). Not only does this remind me of how wonderful a cup of chai tastes, but it also triggers memories of a recent trip I took to the Indian subcontinent. The smell holds pungent notes of spice, bitterness, and caramelized sugar. Pure heaven! If I close my eyes when I smell that scent I can not only see the thriving street culture, but it also recalls for me the hum of a vibrant people. The image that comes to mind immediately, however, is sipping a fragrant brew while joining in Buddhist morning prayers at a 1300 year old monastery. (Nathan, age 32, in Waskul et al 2009: 14) And participant Rose (age 39) recalls a pleasurable odour from her childhood in Edmonton when her family would make mustard pickles: ‘This would take an entire weekend and involved the chopping and cutting of cauliflower, peppers, onions, and so on and the very strong scent of vinegar and mustard would take over our house.’ She offers this connotative meaning of the memory: ‘It was a happy memory of my parents together in the kitchen, engaging in a ritualistic activity as the coziness of fall and autumn surrounded us’ (Waskul et al 2009: 12). The somatic experiences that participants describe illustrate the active process of making sense of the meanings of particular odours –​meanings that are personal and that conjure up a larger context in which to place and make sense of the smells. In short, they paint a ‘picture of meaning’, and the feeling of nostalgia takes centre stage. The intimate relationship between nostalgia and meaning can also be demonstrated in considering how we imbue particular physical objects with personally relevant meanings. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-​Halton explored the relationship between people and things as described in their book The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (1981). They interviewed over 300 people living in the Chicago metropolitan area, asking them to identify special objects in their home and to describe why they were special and what it would mean to be without these objects. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-​Halton (1981: 65) found that the most highly significant object identified by participants in their study was pictures: ‘People pay particular attention to pictures in their home because in doing so they relive memorable occasions and pleasing relationships.’ Following this example, but on a much smaller scale, a study was conducted that involved asking sojourners (that is, those who are between cultures –​ for example, international college students who are living in the United States) what objects they have in their home (Wilson 2005). In both these studies we see how particular objects are valued because of their connection to important people and places in their life. The following is an illustrative

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quote from a participant in the sojourner study –​a participant originally from Romania who is describing a house that she and her husband purchased in the United States: We have just bought a house which reminds me somewhat of my grand-​parents’ house, not because of any concrete similarities, but rather because it has a large back yard and a vegetable garden and is not in the city. The objects that are most special to me in this house are memorabilia from my parents’ house and things that my husband and I bought when we were engaged or soon after getting married. To be without some of these objects would cause me serious sadness. (Wilson 2005: 125) It is evident how objects represent strong interpersonal ties, symbolizing important relationships with others (Richins 1994), but also with one’s own past. In a recent study of Western expatriates living in Pattaya, Thailand, it was shown how nostalgic longings and practices constitute an important source of meaning for the informants because it reminded them of the home, the people and the past they had left behind (Jacobsen 2020c, 2021). Often particular objects link us to others by bringing to mind a time and/​or place in the past. Nostalgic recollections, whether prompted by particular odours, particular objects or other stimuli, activate our meaning-​making processes. We could even go further and suggest that nostalgia might be a vehicle for attempting to find some higher meaning in our existence: When experiencing nostalgia, we might feel that we are getting close to something fundamental, ‘good,’ a foundation or a purpose … Nostalgia can be viewed as a picture of our meaning. There is something strongly transcendent to it –​looking for more, looking for a purpose. What we are nostalgic for reveals what we value, what we deem worthwhile and important … We may face constraints in the present, but in the past there are no constraints. (Wilson 2005: 26) In this way, nostalgia may be an important emotional experience in the meaning-​making processes that characterize our everyday lives at an existential, personal and interpersonal level.

Memory and nostalgia Besides being closely connected to personal and collective meaning-​making, nostalgia is also intimately linked to memory and memory-​creation, and many of our memories of the past are not only individual but embedded in

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the larger historical context of the groups, collectivities and communities in which we live our lives. Nostalgia is a way of relating emotionally to one’s memories of the past. This, however, does not mean that all memories are necessarily nostalgic. It was once observed by Krystine I. Bactho that ‘one can remember without being nostalgic, but one cannot be nostalgic without remembering’ (Batcho 2009: 269). Nostalgic memories are often characterized by being particularly lamenting, longing and loss inspired, sometimes even verging on the sentimental. Given the obvious relevance of memory to the experience and understanding of nostalgia, it is imperative to consider prominent sociological perspectives on memory. For Maurice Halbwachs (1941/​1992), the past is kept alive via individuals’ membership in various social groups. His concept of ‘collective memory’ suggests that one’s memories reside outside the consciousness of the individual. The collective memory, then, supersedes individuals. Halbwachs’ conception of collective memory is Durkheimian –​that is to say, collective memory is viewed as a social fact, thus implying that memory is external to individuals and exercises coercive power over them. Family, religion, social class, political ideology, nation and so on are all groups that supply collective memory/​ ies to individuals. Like Halbwachs, neo-​Marxist approaches view collective memory from a macro perspective. But, rather than viewing social structure as a social fact, Marxists view the social structure as reified. Collective memory, then, is essentially the dominant –​or hegemonic –​ideology in society, often supported by class-​based inequalities. From this perspective, the collective memory is used as a vehicle for maintaining the status quo. Indeed, both collective memory and nostalgia can be viewed (and critiqued) as used by individuals (especially those who possess power, such as politicians or privileged groups) to foster a monolithic version of the past. Furthermore, critical sociologists can point to what essentially amounts to a ‘nostalgia industry’ –​for example, nostalgia is often employed as a marketing strategy in promoting particular consumer products and experiences. To the extent that nostalgia is commodified, it could be viewed as contributing to a false consciousness as well as a deliberately distorted remembrance of the past as it ‘really was’. As the popular culture and dominant culture present romanticized, mythologized versions of the past, a culture awash in these incomplete (and often sanitized) collective memories could be perceived as a modern-​day opiate of the masses. Given the power of the nostalgia industry, nostalgia could be regarded as ideology, false consciousness or mystification. Certainly, group membership –​at micro, meso and macro levels –​supplies us with collective memories. For the sociologist looking at our subject matter from a more microsociological perspective, collective memory need not be a static entity over which we have no agency. For example,

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George Herbert Mead (1929) offered an approach more focused on the space between personality and social structure –​that is, social situations. His pragmatic approach considered how people actively use the past. The present, as the locus of reality, implies both a past and a future. Mead’s microsociological view of collective memory emphasized that people carry their pasts around with them, these pasts are ‘in great part thought constructs’ and the past is as uncertain as the future. Taking our cue from Mead, then, we see how collective memories are dynamic, evolving and negotiated. In the same way, we see how nostalgia for a past time, place or experience is not fixed. Rather, nostalgic recollections emerge and may take various forms depending upon a whole host of factors. For example: What is the current status of the individual expressing the nostalgia? Is this individual alone or with others? Are other people making competing claims, offering alternative versions or filling in gaps in the nostalgic recollection? In short, nostalgia, like memory, is affected by present circumstances. And, just as one’s circumstances change (as well as one’s perceptions, personhood, goals and intentions and so on), so do the way in which things are recalled and (re)created. Consistent with this approach, we can consider ways in which nostalgic images that may be supplied by the dominant culture are actively selected and used by individuals in ways that resonate with their individual biographies. That is to say, individuals have agentive action and thus can transform commercialized values in ways that are personally meaningful and void of commodification. The work of cultural studies scholar John Fiske (1989) provides many examples of the ways in which ‘the masses’ actively engage with resources provided by the dominant groups in society. He uses the term ‘excorporation’ to refer to the process by which the subordinate create their own culture out of the resources that the dominant provide. Another connection between memory and nostalgia becomes apparent when considering the concept of the ‘life review’. The act of reminiscing and the corollary experience of nostalgia is evidenced in one’s life review, which is described by Robert Butler as a ‘necessary and healthy process in daily life as well as a useful tool in the mental healthcare of older people’ (Butler 1995: xviii). When reviewing our lives, we are not only recalling what actually happened and when, but also actively reorganizing and reconstructing our lives and our understanding of the past, present and future. While the life review is primarily associated with those who are further along in the lifecourse, it can in fact be a healthy and useful tool throughout our lives. For example, at major transitions in a person’s life Paul T. Wong suggests that a life review can aid the individual in ‘seeking something that imbues their past with a sense of meaning and significance’ (Wong 1995: 31). One’s life review –​at whatever point in the lifecourse it

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is undertaken –​can create intrapersonal and interpersonal links that help sustain our identities and sense of purpose.

The self and nostalgia The link between the self and nostalgia is central to the aforementioned work of Fred Davis, whose main thesis is that nostalgia can facilitate the continuity of identity. Related to this work, and also adding some richness and nuance to Davis’s key thesis, is the narrative view of the self. When we consider the narrative structure of selfhood –​an approach that actually comes from a number of different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology as well as sociology –​we are alerted to human beings as self-​interpreting beings who have human agency and ‘authorship’ in constructing a self. Identity is thus not just a firmly fixed given, but something that the individual is continuously responsible for assembling, negotiating, reorganizing and so on. In this way, each of us is the protagonist in the narrative we generate. Rhetorician Andreea Deciu Ritivoi, in Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity (2002), argues that identity has continuity, while also acknowledging that we are ‘never the same persons we were yesterday. We constantly lose a part of who we are, by having to commit to memory the person we used to be’ (Ritivoi 2002: 170). It is by drawing on the narrative view of self that she reconciles these seemingly contradictory views. In one’s life story, there must be both structure and process, stability and instability, and both George Herbert Mead’s ‘Me’ and ‘I’. As Ritivoi emphasizes, one’s ‘life/​identity is a story in constant making and re-​making’ (Ritivoi 2002: 62). In focusing on the experiences of immigrants, Ritivoi convincingly –​and beautifully –​presents nostalgia as a modern day pharmakon. That is to say, as evidenced in the lives of immigrants who must adapt to a new culture while also holding on to their previous sense of self, nostalgia is both poison and cure –​it is the individual’s experience of nostalgia that facilitates a personal understanding of how the self maintains sameness while also embodying difference. Such an understanding of the self is consistent with the symbolic interactionist perspective –​a perspective emphasizing human agency, negotiated meaning and the power of the situation. From a symbolic interactionist perspective, to which Davis also subscribed, attention is directed to the way that interaction partners align and coordinate their actions and interpretations, negotiate meanings, take the role of the other and construct a meaningful self. As a perspective rooted in pragmatism, symbolic interactionism considers the self a practical matter –​we construct a self in our everyday experiences, drawing upon our relationships with others, our memories and our future imaginings.

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Davis’s concept of ‘private nostalgia’ also highlights the important link between the self and nostalgia. In Davis’s words, private nostalgia refers to ‘those symbolic images and allusions from the past which by virtue of their resource in a person’s biography tend to be more idiosyncratic, individuated, and particularistic in their reference’ (Davis 1979: 123). Returning to the relationship among objects, meanings and nostalgia, we can readily see a connection to private nostalgia. The autobiographical exercise of considering a hypothetical museum of your life –​in which you can put only three objects –​powerfully reveals the link between objects and identity. What may seem like an ordinary and relatively meaningless object to one person could have a great deal of symbolic significance and meaning for another. The purpose in examining objects in this context is not to highlight objects as representing a person being materialistic and a product of a consumeristic culture; rather, the focus is on the realization that particular objects are significant to individuals because their meanings say something about the individual’s identity –​past and present. We thus project meaning onto objects, and objects also reflect who we are. Sociologist Ira Silver examined the role that objects play in how college students construct their identities. He asserted that ‘people undergoing role transitions may invest objects with meanings that produce changes or maintain continuities in their identities’ (Silver 1996: 3). He focused, in particular, on incoming freshmen starting college. The students in his sample were asked what objects they brought with them to college and what objects they left at home. The data he collected led him to conclude that individuals make strategic choices about which objects to bring with them and which objects to leave home –​those objects left behind he described as ‘anchors’ of the students’ identities, while the objects brought to their campus dorm represent identities in transition. The anchoring objects establish one’s former identity, whereas the transitional objects represent the constructing of a new identity. Silver’s study shows how objects can play a role in facilitating continuity of identity over time. Objects are drawn upon in shaping one’s identity, helping a person to maintain a subjective sense of their ‘biography being continuous, coherent, and unique’ (Silver 1996: 3). While nostalgia most obviously directs our attention toward the past, it also contains the possibility of being forward-​directed or oriented towards the future. In fact, by considering the dynamic temporal qualities of nostalgia, we can ever more readily see how nostalgia is a useful resource in recognizing the continuity of identity. Drawing on Hazel R. Markus and Paula Nurius’s (1986) concept of ‘possible selves’, we can appreciate, again, the recognition that self is both stable and mutable, and we are able to see the self through time. Possible selves refer to the selves we might become in the future. With respect to our envisioning future positive possible selves, an

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experience akin to nostalgia may accompany our musings –​for example, we imagine ourselves perhaps occupying a particular longed-​for role or status, maybe achieving a goal, reaching a milestone, living the dream and so on. This forward-​looking nostalgia, then, can be a motivator in helping us to achieve what we long for and who we long to be. And, not only do we contemplate our own possible selves, we also think about others’ possible selves, as can readily be seen in a parent anticipating their children’s future. In an uplifting manner, the parent anticipates future selves for children that are hopeful, promising, fulfilling. Such ruminations may be juxtaposed, of course, with visions of future selves for those we love that are troubling –​for example, anticipation of future selves that represent unrealized potential, that are lacking in some significant ways (Wilson 2020). Whether positive or negative, and whether focused on ourselves or others, these possible selves are a manifestation of an important link between self-​ construction and nostalgic experience.

Social structure and nostalgia Besides being closely linked to self and identity, as we saw earlier, nostalgia is also of importance to an understanding of the impact of social structure and changes in society at large on individual lives. Social structure is a key concept for sociological analysis. Early sociologists, in their analyses of changes brought about by industrialization, focused on important effects on the social structure. The bases of social solidarity, community and meaning were changing. A sense of the communal and an understanding of both one’s identity and how one fits within the social structure seemed to be giving way to impersonal relationships, anomie and alienation. This is not to say that all that was good was gone. Rather, the structure of a more complex society required adaptations to new ways of thinking and relating. At the same time that there could be said to be a nostalgia for what had been, the engines of progress also ushered in a sense of hope. Greater heterogeneity had the potential to facilitate increased tolerance for differences and the opportunity to occupy numerous social roles. Individuals recognized their interdependence and mutuality as the division of labour increased. New processes and configurations called upon individuals and groups to forge ahead and recognize how people are connected to one another and how these connections are maintained. Increasingly, sociologists attended to both the problems and also the promises of major transformations in societies. The early Chicago School theorists, for example, studied new social problems brought about by the explosive growth of cities. During this same time frame, the Progressive Era was born, characterized by an earnest desire to promote social reform. In particular, progressives focused

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on improving working conditions, exposing political corruption and democratizing education. Some of these Chicago School sociologists, writing during the first part of the 20th century, showed how a longing for the simplicity and recognizability of the past was part and parcel of the subjective experience of the modernization process (and its concomitant industrialization and urbanization processes). In their classic book The Polish Peasant in Europe and America, William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki (1918–​1920/​1996) documented –​based on the in-​depth analysis of diaries and letters –​how many of the Polish immigrants who had moved to the United States in order to find work and a new life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries missed their old country, families and friends. For many of the newly arrived immigrants from Eastern Europe, there was a deep-​seated longing for the community, traditions and village life left behind, and many of the immigrants entertained romantic and nostalgic images of their past lives. In fact, these nostalgic longings served as an important bulwark against the demoralizing experience of now living life in much more individualized, secular and modern societal settings. Thus, changes –​rapid or gradual, substantial or even minor –​in the social structures informing and surrounding individual lives, for example as brought about by migration, can fertilize the soil for nostalgic longings. Social structure is related to nostalgia in the way the structures shape, circumscribe, sanction and penetrate the feelings, values, norms, attitudes, relations and interactions that are such important building blocks of society as such. When values, attitudes and norms change, our feelings (such as nostalgia) change with them. In fact, it has been claimed that nostalgia is itself a ‘structure of feeling’ that organizes, periodizes and imbues lives with meaning (Tannock 1995: 456). The social (and technological) structures underpinning or promoting nostalgia change over time. According to Fred Davis, nostalgia was previously very much a phenomenon related to the remembrance of past greatness –​individual and national. He insisted, however, that this was changing (when he was writing his book in the late 1970s). As he stated: ‘Whereas previously the landscape of collective nostalgia was inhabited mainly by persons, places and events of a political or civic character, today it is inhabited increasingly and perhaps even predominantly by media creations, personalities and allusions’ (Davis 1979: 125). There is no doubt that the media landscape that we confront nowadays is very different from what the Polish peasant immigrants knew back in the early 20th century (when they were writing diaries and letters to those back home) or from what Davis saw in the late 1970s. Today, nostalgia –​private and collective –​is increasingly a mediated phenomenon. There is therefore an increasing attention, also within sociological research, on how nostalgia today is in many respects a

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consumer-​driven and media-​based experience and emotion (Lizardi 2020). The fact that nostalgia is mediated by information technologies makes the appeal to nostalgia a powerful mobilizing force –​commercially as well as politically. This is also why Davis’s notion of ‘collective nostalgia’ is important (in fact just as important as his aforementioned notion of ‘private nostalgia’), because it points out how moods, feelings and sentiments are shared by people and thus how ‘symbolic resources from the past … under proper conditions can trigger wave upon wave of nostalgic feelings in millions of persons at the same time’ (Davis 1979: 122–​123). In this way, the notion of ‘collective nostalgia’ can help us explain why and how we currently seem to be entering a new period of nostalgia.

The rise of ‘retrotopia’ Nostalgia is, in one way or another, an integral part of most societies and cultures, because they must necessarily somehow relate to their past. However, perhaps nostalgic feelings and sentiments become particularly prominent whenever society experiences times of fundamental change, uncertainty, rupture or crisis. Even modern society –​ otherwise so concerned with progress and with severing the ties to traditional social formations –​entertained its own fair share of nostalgia, which was evident in the fin-​de-​siècle sentiments of loss, melancholy and despair or in the counter-​modern and conservative longings for traditional ways of life. In the passage from modern society to contemporary ‘postmodern’, ‘late-​ modern’, ‘hypermodern’ or ‘liquid-​modern’ society (sociologists use different terminology to capture this recent transition), we once again experience a shattering of the old ways and the coming of something new and unfamiliar, spawning feelings of uncertainty and resistance. Polish-​British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman is known to have coined the concepts of ‘solid modernity’ and ‘liquid modernity’ with which to capture two different, consecutive phases of modern society. In his writings he has shown –​not unlike what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels observed during the transition from premodern to modern society –​that all the solids (traditional mores, customs and forms of life) have been melted and that the moulds previously holding society together have been dismantled (Bauman 2000). In Bauman’s analysis, this recent transition from solid-​modern to liquid-​modern society has been characterized and fuelled particularly by ground-​shattering processes of globalization, individualization and consumerism impacting every aspect of human and social life. This development has also influenced our understanding and experience of nostalgia. Bauman has always been a sociologist preoccupied with the topic of utopia –​the belief that the world can be made into a better place if we take

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responsibility for the present in order to anticipate and take responsibility for shaping the future. In Bauman’s view, utopia and utopianism is an undetachable part of our human-​being-​in-​the-​world. Perhaps the same goes for ‘retrotopia’ –​the need for remembering, reorganizing, reviving and restoring the past whenever dark clouds gather and shroud us in feelings of uncertainty and insecurity. ‘Retrotopia’ is the word Bauman uses to describe the revival of nostalgia in contemporary liquid-​modern society –​and it is the title of one of his last books before his death. Bauman thus labels our time ‘the age of nostalgia’, and in his critical perspective the recent rise of retrotopian ideas and movements is a regrettable and potentially regressive tendency that removes our focus from solving the many towering problems the world currently confronts (Jacobsen 2020b). As he wrote about this transformation from a future-​oriented utopian to the past-​oriented retrotopian sentiment: ‘[R]‌etrotopias’ are currently emerging; visions located in the lost/​ stolen/​abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-​ yet-​unborn and so inexistent future … [F]rom investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever-​too-​obviously un-​trustworthy future, to re-​reinvesting them in the vaguely remembered past, valued for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness. With such a U-​turn happening, the future is transformed from the natural habitat of hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares. (Bauman 2017: 5–​6) Throughout his book, Bauman shows many different dimensions and expressions of this recent retrotopian tendency. A key characteristic of the retrotopian sentiment is a ‘back to’ mentality seeking to point out how things were much better in the past and that we need to restore and return to past ideas and practices within the realms of contemporary politics, economics, community, identity-​making and social organization. Even though Bauman does not himself specifically identify the ‘retrotopians’ or single out actual individuals or groups (besides mentioning Donald Trump), he nevertheless hints at whom he might be thinking about: all those who want to revive past glory, restore national/​tribal pride or otherwise reach back in time to find remedies for present problems. To him, retrotopian ideas are symptomatic of a world that has increasingly severed the links between power and politics, a world ruled by neoliberal politics and a world that in many ways increasingly resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. However, those who have followed Bauman’s conceptualization of retrotopia have primarily (if not exclusively) identified the retrotopian sentiment among populist right-​wing/​radical right-​wing campaigns and movements such as in Trump’s motto to ‘Make America Great Again’, in the British Brexit

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campaign and its call to ‘Take Back Our Country’ or in the agenda of the PEGIDA movement in Germany (see, for example, Beaumont 2017, 2019; Önnerfors 2020). As sociologists or political scientists, however, we need to beware not to exclusively reserve this retrotopian phenomenon to only one spectrum of the political scale, as nostalgic/​retrotopian sentiments may be found among many different groups and ideological stances, expressing a dissatisfaction with the present and a sense of longing for times much less complex, uncertain and chaotic. In Bauman’s perspective, retrotopia is the wrong answer to an otherwise right question: what do we do when the certainties and predictabilities evaporate and when no one seems to be interested in or capable of stemming the tide of changes? However, instead of arguing for retrotopia, Bauman wants us to consider how we may take responsibility for what is actually happening in the world. In his view, retrotopia –​by trying to turn back the clock to past times –​turns its back on the problems and is thus unable to provide useful solutions to the present situation. Retrotopia –​a regressive and retro-​oriented utopia –​simply cannot correct the shortcomings or meet the towering challenges of the contemporary liquid-​modern world. As Bauman stated towards the end of the book, ‘we face either joining hands, or common graves’ (Bauman 2017: 167).

Conclusion This chapter has explored the phenomenon of nostalgia from a sociological standpoint. It has been shown that nostalgia is not as straightforward or one-​dimensional an emotion as we might perhaps think. In fact, nostalgia encompasses many different dimensions, experiences, valuations and purposes depending on its specific usages. In addition, nostalgic sentiments can be located at different levels of sociological analysis ranging from the micro through the meso to the macro level. Moreover, nostalgia is not merely a ‘feel good’ or heart-​warming emotion –​it can be regarded as a positive emotional experience contributing to the overall well-​being and comfort of its possessors or it can be seen as a negative feeling that torments the mind and soul and which removes people and societies from the acute challenges and problems they confront. It is also particularly important to stress the inherent ‘bittersweetness’ that is so characteristic of nostalgia –​its simultaneously comforting and tormenting, nourishing and distressing qualities. Due to this complexity, it is surprising that sociology so far has paid only a rather sparse attention to the study of nostalgia, not least if considering the fact that nostalgia is such a widespread emotional experience on the previously mentioned different levels of social life. One might suspect –​and hope –​ that the recent rise to prominence of the so-​called ‘sociology of emotions’

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sub-​discipline may perhaps inaugurate an accompanying sociological interest in the topic and emotion of nostalgia. This chapter has highlighted a ‘sociology of nostalgia’ that demonstrates key sociological insights and contributions. Perhaps this can serve as a springboard for greater attention being paid to nostalgia by sociologists moving forward. Given that the topic of nostalgia invites such rich interdisciplinary research, more collaboration across disciplines could surely add a great deal to our understanding. For instance, perhaps sociologists could collaborate more with colleagues in psychology –​bringing together different methods and perspectives to arrive at new insights that combine an interest in society/​ social structure with a focus on the individual. The traditional experimental method in psychology could be combined with narrative analyses, surveys, unobtrusive measures and so on. There is also much to be gained from a Public Sociology point of view –​that is to say, sociologists could perhaps do more to make their work widely available and accessible to the public so that their insights on nostalgia are better understood. This has the potential for many benefits, including a call for critical thinking, an appreciation for the complexity and nuance of nostalgia and greater realization of the positive attributes of nostalgia (such as buffering against loneliness, facilitating connection and so on). Indeed, given recent challenges at local, national and global levels, this seems a perfect time to lean into nostalgia –​both in terms of understanding different facets of nostalgia and also in considering what can be gained at the individual as well as group level with this enhanced understanding. As the chapter has shown, nostalgia is a strong and powerful emotion –​ an emotion that is regarded as important to those who feel it as well as to those who either promote or criticize/​combat it. It is difficult to remain indifferent to nostalgia. There is no doubt that nostalgia serves many important functions and purposes for people –​individuals and groups –​ trying to make sense of and adjust to the times, situations and circumstances under which they live. It also serves an important role for societies, linking them with the past and creating a sense of (dis)continuity, whether ‘the past’ remembered is in fact real or imagined. Thus, nostalgia (sometimes in the shape of ‘retrotopia’) can easily be (mis)used for political purposes, for carrying forward regressive and past-​celebratory ideas that particularly in times of social turmoil may gain momentum. In this way, nostalgia is not necessarily an innocent emotion. To conclude, nostalgia is here to stay, but the specific shape and content of it largely depends on the social processes and cultural receptions that circumscribe it and make it meaningful and useful in the lives of individuals, groups and societies alike. This is why nostalgia is important to sociologists.

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Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2020b) ‘Retrotopia Rising –​The Topics of Utopia, Retrotopia and Nostalgia in the Sociology of Zygmunt Bauman’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 78–​98. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2020c) ‘Living in Nostalgia: Exploring Expatriate Experiences of Nostalgia in Pattaya’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 201–​225. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid (2021) ‘Expat Nostalgia: Nostalgic Emotions among “Permanent Tourists” in Pattaya, Thailand’. South Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities, 2 (1): 93–​115. Lizardi, Ryan (2020) ‘The Future of Nostalgia is Inevitable –​Reflections on Mediated Nostalgia’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​ Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 147–​161. Markus, Hazel R. and Paula Nurius (1986) ‘Possible Selves’. American Psychologist, 41 (9): 954–​969. Mead, George Herbert (1929) ‘The Nature of the Past’, in John Coss (ed) Essays in Honor of John Dewey. New York: Henry Holt, pp 235–​242. Önnerfors, Andreas (2020) ‘ “Retrotopia” as a Retrogressive Force in the German PEGIDA-​Movement’, in Ov Cristian Norocel, Anders Hellström and Martin Bak Jørgensen (eds) Nostalgia and Hope: Intersections between Politics of Culture, Welfare and Migration in Europe. New York: Springer, pp 135–​149. Richins, Marsha L. (1994) ‘Valuing Things: The Public and Private Meanings of Possessions’. Journal of Consumer Research, 21: 504–​521. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu (2002) Yesterday’s Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity. Langham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Robertson, Roland (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage Publications. Silver, Ira (1996) ‘Role Transitions, Objects and Identity’. Symbolic Interaction, 19 (1): 1–​20. Tannock, Stuart (1995) ‘Nostalgia Critique’. Cultural Studies, 9 (3): 453–​464. Thomas, William I. and Florian Znaniecki (1918–​1920/​1996) The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Turner, Bryan S. (1987) ‘A Note on Nostalgia’. Theory, Culture & Society, 4 (1): 147–​156. Waskul, Dennis, Philip Vannini and Janelle L. Wilson (2009) ‘The Aroma of Recollection: Olfaction, Nostalgia and the Shaping of the Sensuous Self ’. Senses and Society, 4 (1): 5–​22. Wilson, Janelle L. (2005) Nostalgia: Sanctuary of Meaning. Cranbury, NJ: Bucknell University Press.

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Wilson, Janelle L. (2020) ‘Future Imaginings: Nostalgia for Unrealized Possible Selves’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​ Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 66–​77. Wong, Paul T. (1995) ‘The Process of Adaptive Reminiscence’, in Barbara K. Haight and Jeffrey D. Webster (eds) The Art and Science of Reminiscing: Theory, Research, Methods, and Applications. Washington, DC: Taylor and Francis, pp 23–​35.

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Psychology and Nostalgia: Towards a Functional Approach Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides

Introduction The word ‘nostalgia’ was first coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer (1688/​1934). For Hofer, nostalgia was synonymous with homesickness, and he equated the two in the title of his dissertation, ‘Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe’ (‘Nostalgia, or Homesickness’). For centuries, nostalgia denoted homesickness. As recently as 1943, Willis McCann conducted what, in his words, was the first ‘systematic and controlled investigation’ of nostalgia by comparing ‘one hundred college students who were or who recently had been homesick … with 100 college students who never had been homesick while away from home’ (McCann 1943: 97). Yet, current dictionary definitions reveal that nostalgia and homesickness have acquired distinct meanings. Before we can embark on a journey through the psychological literature, then, we have to identify when nostalgia and homesickness went their separate ways. It appears that their path forked during the post-​war years, as by 1954 nostalgia had become a subject of psychological theorizing in its own right, with its now familiar positive connotations. The psychoanalyst Alexander Martin (1954) proposed that nostalgia plays an essential role during recuperation and consolidation phases of development: I … would rather think of nostalgia as a diastolic phase of the growth rhythm, which is true not only of man, but of nature as a whole. … Always after a phase of rapid development, whether it be scholastic, athletic, artistic, there is what has been referred to as a slump … On

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this natural return to strength, if not rejected, the individual surges forward to a still higher point of development. (Martin 1954: 103) By conceptualizing nostalgia as a springboard for growth, Martin foreshadowed recent evidence, to be reviewed later in this chapter, that the emotion is a source of approach-​oriented processes, including creativity, inspiration, risk taking and goal pursuit (Sedikides and Wildschut 2016, 2020). In the same year, the social and personality psychologist Gordon Allport (1954) published his influential The Nature of Prejudice. He proposed that nostalgia could play a role in reducing prejudice and forming bonds between individuals from different social groups: The plan … brings together people of diverse ethnic backgrounds in a ‘neighborhood festival.’ The leader may start discussion by asking some members to tell about his memories of autumn, of holidays, or of food he enjoyed as a child. The report reminds other participants of equally nostalgic memories, and soon the group is animatedly comparing notes concerning regional and ethnic customs. The distance of the memories, their warmth and frequent humor, lead to a vivid sense of commonality. (Allport 1954: 454) Remarkably, in his positive description of nostalgia, Allport appeared unconcerned by its historical association with homesickness, and assumed that his audience was familiar with, and shared, his understanding of the emotion. It is tempting to speculate that the relatively sudden separation of homesickness and nostalgia was accelerated by the diasporas sparked by the Second World War and the longing many would have experienced, not just for a former home, but for loved ones, communities and entire ways of life. Over the following years the view of nostalgia as a fundamental, universal and adaptive human emotion distinct from homesickness gained traction in the social sciences. The sociologist Fred Davis (1977) wrote: No matter how one later comes to re-​evaluate that piece of past which is the object of nostalgia –​or for that matter, irrespective of how one may later choose to interpret the meaning of the nostalgic experience itself –​the nostalgic feeling is infused with sentiments of past beauty, pleasure, joy, satisfaction, goodness, happiness, love, etc.; in sum, any or several of the positive affects of being. Nostalgic feeling is almost never anchored in those sentiments commonly thought of as negative –​for example, pain, unhappiness, frustration, despair, hate, abuse, etc. (Davis 1977: 418)

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Still, this emerging ‘new look’ on nostalgia had to contend with the dominant psychodynamic approach, which emphasized maladaptive aspects of the emotion. Psychoanalysts stressed ‘the importance of the preoedipal mother in the emotional developments of nostalgics’ (Kleiner 1977: 17), and viewed nostalgia as ‘a regressive manifestation closely related to the issue of loss, grief, incomplete mourning, and, finally, depression’ (Castelnuovo-​ Tedesco 1980: 110). And so, from the point of departure in the 1950s, nearly five decades would pass before nostalgia finally became the subject of systematic psychological research around the end of the 20th century. Since then, empirical findings have clarified the characteristics of nostalgia, identified its triggers and documented its functionality. We have organized these findings using the framework of a regulatory model which proposes that nostalgia serves as a homeostatic corrective: negative states trigger nostalgia, which, in turn, restores balance by counteracting these negative states (Sedikides et al 2015b; Sedikides and Wildschut 2019; Sedikides and Wildschut 2020). In this chapter we present the regulatory model by means of illustrative studies, passing a magnifying glass over findings within the social domain. We review evidence that discomforting, adverse states trigger nostalgia. We then show how, in turn, nostalgia boosts a number of key psychological functions. We come full circle with an overview of studies that tested the full model, demonstrating the positive downstream effects of adversity-​induced nostalgia. In concluding the chapter, we consider future challenges and opportunities and move from the personal to the collective level of analysis, discussing the utility of the regulatory model for understanding collective nostalgia. We begin by addressing the basic question of how laypersons view nostalgia.

What is nostalgia? It is one thing to show that contemporary dictionary definitions of nostalgia and homesickness diverge, it is another to demonstrate that the way people think about nostalgia and its characteristics dovetails with this lexicographic knowledge. Erica Hepper and colleagues (2012) carried out a systematic investigation of lay conceptions of nostalgia among participants in the United Kingdom and United States. The results of their prototype analyses, in which laypersons were asked to identify which features they considered most characteristic (or prototypical) of the construct ‘nostalgia’, revealed that participants conceptualized nostalgia as a predominantly positive, social and past-​oriented emotion. In nostalgic reverie, one brings to mind a fond and personally meaningful event, typically involving one’s childhood or a close relationship. The person often sees the event through rose-​coloured glasses, misses that time or relationship and may even long to return to the past. As

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a result, they feel sentimental, typically happy but with a hint of sadness. These results demonstrate that lay conceptions of nostalgia align with formal dictionary definitions, as do the findings of content analyses (Wildschut et al 2006; Abeyta et al 2015) and automated text analyses (Wildschut et al 2018) of written accounts of nostalgic experiences. This prototypic view of nostalgia is endorsed by people of all ages (Madoglou et al 2017; Hepper et al 2020) and cuts across cultural boundaries (Hepper et al 2014). Additional research, using diverse methodological approaches, has delineated nostalgia by contrasting it with other emotions and alternative ways of reflecting on the past. Nostalgia’s unique appraisal profile indicates that it is the only emotion elicited by events which are unique, feel temporally or psychologically distant and are predominantly pleasant but irretrievable (Van Tilburg et al 2019). Multidimensional scaling analyses comparing and contrasting 11 self-​conscious emotions revealed that nostalgia is characterized by high pleasantness and low arousal. In this regard, it is most similar to pride, self-​compassion and gratitude, and least similar to shame, guilt and embarrassment (Van Tilburg et al 2018b). Lastly, canonical correlation analyses documented that nostalgia serves different autobiographical memory functions than do other modes of past-​oriented reflection, such as rumination and counterfactual thinking. In particular, nostalgia emphasizes intimacy maintenance (that is, relying on memories to establish and maintain closeness to loved ones), but de-​emphasizes bitterness revival (that is, using memories to revive resentment and grievances) (Cheung et al 2018).

Triggers of nostalgia From a psychological perspective, nostalgia is elicited both by external or environmental triggers and by internal or subjective triggers. External triggers include music (Barrett et al 2010), song lyrics (Cheung et al 2013), smells (Reid et al 2015), tastes (Supski 2013), objects and events experienced in childhood (Holbrook and Schindler 1996) and adverse climatic conditions (Zhou et al 2012a; Van Tilburg et al 2018a). Internal triggers are discomforting states. They include negative mood (Wildschut et al 2006), life meaninglessness (Routledge et al 2011), existential angst (Routledge et al 2008), discontinuity between one’s past and one’s present (Sedikides et al 2015a) and boredom (Van Tilburg et al 2013). They also consist of loneliness, anticipated social exclusion and relationship pessimism, which we now place under the microscope to illustrate how psychologists have studied nostalgia’s triggers. Loneliness is a potent social threat marked by perceived lack of social support and by having fewer and less-​satisfying relationships than desired (Cacioppo and Cacioppo 2012). With Jamie Arndt and Clay Routledge, we tested

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whether nostalgia arises in response to loneliness (Wildschut et al 2006). To begin, we asked British undergraduates to write about the circumstances under which they become nostalgic. Instructions read: ‘When do you bring to mind nostalgic experiences? What seems to trigger your memory of the nostalgic experiences?’ Content analysis of participants’ answers to this question revealed that negative affect was the most frequently mentioned trigger of nostalgia (for example, ‘Generally I think about nostalgic experiences when things are not going very well –​lonely or depressed’). The negative-​affect category comprised discrete negative affective states (for example, lonely, scared) and generalized affective states typically referred to as negative mood (for example, sad, depressed). These two sub-​categories were not mutually exclusive. For example, some participants mentioned both discrete and generalized negative affective states (for example, ‘If I ever feel lonely or sad, I tend to think of my friends or family whom I haven’t seen for a long time’). Among participants who described discrete negative affective states, nearly two-​thirds referred to loneliness. This made loneliness the most common discrete affective trigger of nostalgia. In a follow-​up study, we then asked whether experimentally induced loneliness could increase in-​the-​moment feelings of nostalgia. We induced loneliness via false feedback. British undergraduates completed a questionnaire labelled ‘Southampton Loneliness Scale’, which comprised 15 statements from the UCLA Loneliness Scale (Russell 1996). In the high-​loneliness condition, these items were designed to elicit agreement by prefacing them with the words ‘I sometimes’ (for example, ‘I sometimes feel isolated from others’). In the low-​loneliness condition, the items were designed to elicit disagreement by prefacing them with the words ‘I always’ (for example, ‘I always feel isolated from others’). As intended, participants in the high-​loneliness (compared to low-​loneliness) condition agreed with a greater number of statements. We then informed participants in the high-​loneliness condition that they fell in the 62nd percentile of the loneliness distribution and therefore were ‘above average on loneliness’. We told participants in the low-​loneliness condition that they fell in the 12th percentile and therefore were ‘very low on loneliness’. Participants then generated reasons for their ostensible loneliness score and completed a (successful) manipulation check. To assess nostalgia, we next administered the Nostalgia Inventory (NI) (Batcho 1995), which instructed participants to rate how much they miss 18 aspects of their past (for example, ‘my family’, ‘not having to worry’, ‘music’, ‘having someone to depend on’, ‘holidays I went on’, ‘my family house’). We averaged the 18 responses to create a nostalgia index. As hypothesized, participants in the high-​loneliness (compared to low-​loneliness) condition were more nostalgic; loneliness increased nostalgia. One does not have to experience loneliness for it to be aversive. The mere anticipation of social exclusion is highly discomforting (Twenge 2007). As the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1580/​1993) observed: ‘He

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who fears he will suffer, already suffers what he fears’ (‘Qui craint de souffrir, il souffre déjà ce qu’il craint’). Johnny Seehusen and colleagues (2013) tested the impact of anticipated social exclusion on nostalgia in two experimental studies. In their first experiment they contrasted a future-​alone with a future-​ belonging condition. In the future-​alone condition, participants received a bogus personality profile indicating that they would end up alone later in life and would not have lasting friendships, relationships or marriages. In the future-​belonging condition, participants learned that they were the type of person who would have rewarding friendships and relationships throughout life and would have a stable, enduring marriage. Next, participants completed a three-​item measure assessing in-​the-​moment nostalgia (for example, ‘Right now, I am feeling quite nostalgic’). As predicted, those in the future-​alone (compared to future-​belonging) condition were more nostalgic. A second experiment addressed the possibility that anticipated social exclusion (as induced in the future-​alone condition) does not increase nostalgia but, rather, that social reassurance (as offered in the future-​together condition) reduces it. The researchers tested this alternative explanation by comparing the future-​alone condition with a neutral control condition. They proposed that, if anticipated social exclusion activates nostalgia, participants in the future-​alone condition should evince higher nostalgia than those in the neutral control condition. Results supported this prediction. Continuing this theme, Andrew Abeyta, Clay Routledge and Jacob Juhl (2015) examined the effect of relationship pessimism on nostalgia. They assigned participants to a relationship-​pessimism condition or a pessimism-​ control condition. Participants in the relationship-​pessimism condition read a text arguing that there is little reason for people to be optimistic about finding fulfilling relationships. Following this, they were instructed to take the writer’s perspective and generate five reasons why people should feel pessimistic about their future relationships. Participants in the pessimism-​control condition read a similar passage about future technology and generated five reasons why people should feel pessimistic about future technology. Next, all participants completed a brief measure of momentary nostalgia. Relationship pessimism (compared to control) increased nostalgia. Evidence abounds, then, that discomforting states, including loneliness, anticipated social exclusion and relationship pessimism, trigger nostalgia. The key question we turn to next is, for what purpose?

Functions of nostalgia By and large, psychologists have studied the functions of nostalgia in controlled laboratory settings. Although a number of studies have successfully induced nostalgia through music, song lyrics or scents, most have relied on

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the Event Reflection Task (ERT). In this task, participants are randomly assigned to recall either a personally experienced nostalgic event (nostalgia condition) or an ordinary (for example, everyday, regular) event (control condition). In some experiments, participants in the control condition have been instructed to recall a positive or anticipated (that is, future) positive event. After bringing the relevant event to mind, participants list keywords capturing its essence and typically provide a brief (that is, 5-​minute) written account. Following a manipulation check, they then complete the relevant outcome measures, which typically pertain to one or more of the postulated psychological functions of nostalgia. These functions fall into four general domains: self-​oriented, existential, future-​oriented and social (Wildschut and Sedikides 2020). With regard to its self-​oriented function, nostalgia builds, maintains and enhances self-​positivity. Specifically, it heightens the accessibility of positive attributes and boosts self-​esteem (Vess et al 2012). Turning to its existential function, nostalgia is a source of meaning in life (Routledge et al 2011) and fosters a sense of continuity between one’s past and present self (Sedikides et al 2016). As for its future-​oriented function, nostalgia raises optimism (Cheung et al 2013), inspiration (Stephan et al 2015) and creativity (Van Tilburg et al 2015). The most comprehensive findings, however, relate to nostalgia’s functionality within the social domain (Sedikides and Wildschut 2019). We zoom in on this body of research next. In our earlier work with Arndt and Routledge (Wildschut et al 2006) we instructed participants to list as many desirable and undesirable features of nostalgia as possible. We proceeded to create groups of synonyms and then distilled five categories of desirable features and five categories of undesirable features by assembling related groups of synonyms. Next, we examined which desirable and undesirable features of nostalgia participants mentioned most frequently. The category ‘social bonds’ (for example, ‘feeling loved’) was second in the list of desirable nostalgia features (‘positive affect’ was first). To test more rigorously the beneficial effect of nostalgia on social bonds, we then experimentally manipulated nostalgia in a series of three ERT experiments. In the first, nostalgia increased feelings of being ‘loved’ and ‘protected’. In the second experiment, nostalgia decreased attachment anxiety (for example, ‘I worry that romantic partners won’t care about me as much as I care about them’) and attachment avoidance (for example, ‘I am very uncomfortable with being close to romantic partners’), as measured with a state version of the Experiences in Close Relationship –​Revised scale (Fraley et al 2000). In the third experiment, nostalgia increased self-​reported interpersonal competence in relation to initiation of social interactions (for example, ‘Going to parties or gathering where you don’t know people well in order to start up new relationships’), self-​disclosure of personal information (for example, ‘Telling a close companion how much you appreciate and

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care for him or her’) and the provision of emotional support to others (for example, ‘Helping a close companion get to the heart of a problem he or she is experiencing’). But is nostalgia merely a fleeting surrogate for real interpersonal closeness or can it provide more than a temporary increase in perceived social connectedness? There is reason to be optimistic. In social relationships, social connectedness and intimacy are inextricably linked with providing support to others (Hazan and Shaver 1987). Accordingly, mental representations of social bonds, which form the building blocks of nostalgia, reflect both one’s access to social support and one’s ability to provide social support (Kunce and Shaver 1994). For instance, nostalgic memories of vacations with friends will foster a sense of mutual social support. When people feel efficacious and competent to provide social support and navigate complex interpersonal situations, they are more successful at forming and maintaining social relationships throughout life (Buhrmester et al 1988). Numerous studies have demonstrated beneficial effects of nostalgia on interpersonal efficacy, social goal strivings, socially oriented action tendencies and prosocial behaviour. A research team led by Andrew Abeyta asked if, by virtue of its capacity to increase self-​efficacy in social settings, nostalgia provides the basis for social-​goal strivings (Abeyta et al 2015a). Self-​efficacy is a key antecedent of approach motivation (Bandura 1982), and perceived self-​efficacy in navigating complex social situations (for example, disclosing intimate information about oneself to a new companion) predicts increased social-​goal striving and attainment (Buhrmester et al 1988). To test their prediction that nostalgia increases social self-​efficacy and ensuing social-​goal strivings, the team instructed participants in the nostalgia condition to search YouTube for a song that made them feel nostalgic. Participants listened to the song and then wrote about how the song made them feel. In the control condition, participants searched YouTube for a song that they liked and recently discovered, and wrote about how the song made them feel. After this (successful) nostalgia induction, participants completed a six-​item measure of social self-​efficacy (for example, ‘Rate your confidence in your ability to establish successful social relationships’). Finally, they listed a social goal and rated the strength of their intentions to pursue that goal on three items (for example, ‘How motivated are you to pursue this goal?’). Nearly all (97%) of the listed social goals were approach oriented (‘One social goal I would like to accomplish is to catch up with my childhood friends’). Participants in the nostalgic (compared to control) condition reported higher levels of social self-​efficacy and stronger intentions to pursue their stated social goal. Consistent with these findings, other studies have demonstrated that ERT-​ induced nostalgia strengthens intentions to strive for one’s most important

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goals, and that these life goals typically reference social relations (Stephan et al 2015; Sedikides et al 2018). Still, action tendencies and goal strivings may not always be strongly linked to actual behaviour (Fazio and Towles-​Schwen 1999). There are several reasons for this, a principal one being that actual behaviours are more constrained by situational factors than are global action tendencies and goals. This raises the question of whether nostalgia facilitates actual prosocial behaviour. Xinyue Zhou and colleagues first addressed this question by examining charitable giving (Zhou et al 2012b). They presented Chinese participants with printed charity appeals in aid of child victims of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake. In the nostalgia condition, the appeal contained nostalgic cues, such as the headline ‘Those Were the Days: Restoring the Past for Children in Wenchuan’. In the control condition, the appeal contained references to the future, such as the headline: ‘Now Is the Time: Build the Future for Children in Wenchuan’. Before the nostalgia induction, participants had earned a small sum of money (7 renminbi) by completing a series of laboratory tasks. Following the nostalgia induction, the researchers gave participants the opportunity to donate to charity as much or as little of these earnings as they wished. The donated amount served as an index of prosocial behaviour. Participants who had read the nostalgic charity appeal donated more money than those in the control condition. More recently, Jacob Juhl and colleagues generalized this finding to the level of personality traits (Juhl et al 2020a). They first administered two questionnaires to measure individual differences in dispositional nostalgia: the Southampton Nostalgia Scale (SNS) (Barrett et al 2010) and the NI (Batcho 1995). The 7-​item SNS assesses frequency and personal relevance of nostalgic engagement (for example, ‘How often do you experience nostalgia?’, ‘How valuable is nostalgia for you?’). The NI assesses how nostalgic participants feel about various objects from their past (as described earlier in this chapter). Given that the two scales were highly correlated, the researchers combined them to form a composite index of trait-​level nostalgia. Next, they introduced a task to measure charitable donations. For this purpose, the researchers informed participants that they had the opportunity to donate a portion of their earnings to the (fictitious) American Volunteer Association, ostensibly a non-​profit organization that recruits volunteers for several charitable causes. The higher participants scored on the index of trait-​level nostalgia, the more likely they were to donate to charity. Efforts guided by Elena Stephan examined the effect of nostalgia on two other behavioural indices of prosociality: proximity and helping (Stephan et al 2014). The researchers induced nostalgia with the ERT and then informed participants that they would have a conversation with another person waiting in an adjoining room. To prepare for this interaction,

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participants were instructed to arrange two chairs (one for themselves, one for the other person) within the meeting room. The proximity of the two chairs served as a behavioural index of prosociality. Participants in the nostalgia condition (compared to control) chose to sit closer to the interaction partner. In a subsequent experiment, the ERT induction was followed by a staged mishap. An experimenter entered the laboratory with a box of pencils and a folder of papers. She then clumsily spilled the pencils on the floor, near to where the participant was seated. The number of pencils that participants picked up served as an index of prosocial behaviour. Nostalgic participants picked up more pencils for the ostensibly butterfingered experimenter than did controls. A team led by Jacob Juhl added an interesting twist (Juhl et al 2020b). Individuals are generally reluctant to seek help from others, because it may expose vulnerabilities or inadequacies and cause embarrassment or risk rejection (Downey and Feldman 1996; Bohns and Flynn 2010). Might nostalgia increase not only helping but also help-​seeking? Social connectedness is associated with positive representations of others (Baldwin 1992) and with perceiving others as dependable in times of need (Collins and Read 1990). On this basis, Juhl’s team hypothesized that nostalgia, via its social character, should promote help-​seeking. To test this, the researchers induced nostalgia with the ERT and then instructed participants to solve an (unsolvable) insight problem, in which they had to trace each line of a geometric figure only once, without lifting the pencil and without retracing any existing lines. Participants were told to contact the experimenter by pushing a red button on an intercom system if they wanted help solving the problem. Participants in the nostalgia condition (compared to control) sought help sooner. Nostalgia is more than just a sticking-​plaster for social injury. It promotes a sense of social self-​efficacy, which provides the scaffolding for social goals and action tendencies. Most importantly, it translates to actual prosocial behaviour, as indexed by charity, proximity, helping and help-​seeking.

The full regulatory model: nostalgia as a balancing feedback mechanism So far, we have presented evidence for discrete pathways in the regulatory model, with an emphasis on the social domain. The first pathway links discomforting states, such as loneliness, anticipated social exclusion and relationship pessimism, to increased nostalgia. The second pathway links nostalgia to vital psychological functions, including social connectedness, social self-​efficacy, social-​goal strivings and prosocial behaviour. We now come full circle to consider studies that tested the full regulatory model

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by examining these pathways simultaneously. Generic support for the full model stems from an experiment by Elena Stephan and colleagues (2014), who induced avoidance motivation (that is, a discomforting concern with preventing, escaping or rectifying negative situations) and then assessed its effect on nostalgia and ensuing approach motivation (that is, promoting, maintaining and sustaining positive situations). Avoidance motivation (relative to control) led to higher nostalgia, which, in turn, predicted stronger approach motivation. Domain-​specific evidence was obtained in educational settings (Bialobrzeska et al 2019). Students who appraised their class as a threat (for example, ‘I view this class as a threat’) reported greater nostalgia over time. Nostalgia, in turn, was prognostic of higher intrinsic motivation (for example, ‘I’m glad I took this class’). With Wijnand van Tilburg, we diversified this evidence base by including discomforting environmental triggers (Van Tilburg et al 2018a). Participants who listened to audio recordings of adverse weather conditions, such as wind and thunder, reported higher nostalgia (compared to control). In turn, nostalgizing in response to weather-​induced distress was positively associated with social connectedness, meaning, self-​continuity, self-​esteem, positive affect and optimism. The model has also garnered support within the social domain and, in keeping with the theme of this chapter, we now turn to the relevant findings for closer inspection. With Xinyue Zhou and Ding-​Guo Gao we examined simultaneously the relations among loneliness, nostalgia and perceived social support (Zhou et al 2008). The regulatory model entails that loneliness affects social support in two distinct ways. The direct effect of loneliness is negative: loneliness undermines feeling socially supported. Yet, the indirect effect of loneliness via nostalgia is positive: loneliness increases nostalgia, which, in turn, boosts perceptions of social support. In this configuration, nostalgia functions as a balancing (or negative) feedback mechanism that maintains psychological homeostasis by preventing a downward spiral of loneliness. In statistical terms, the pattern amounts to suppression, which occurs when the direct effect of a predictor (here, loneliness) is directionally opposite to its indirect effect via a countervailing intervening variable (nostalgia). When, in statistical analyses, the balancing influence of the intervening variable is removed, the opposing direct effect of the predictor is enhanced. In a correlational study with Chinese migrant children and teenagers, we assessed individual differences in dispositional loneliness (UCLA Loneliness Scale; Russell 1996; for example, ‘How often do you feel completely alone?’), nostalgia (SNS; Barrett et al 2010) and social support (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support or MSPSS; Zimet et al 1988; for example, ‘I can count on my friends when things go wrong’). Lonely participants perceived little social support, but they were also more nostalgic. In turn, nostalgia

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strengthened their perceptions of social support, thereby offsetting the negative impact of loneliness. When we removed the influence of nostalgia, the negative relation between loneliness and perceived social support was strengthened. In a subsequent experiment, we induced loneliness in a sample of Chinese university students and then assessed momentary feelings of nostalgia and perceived social support (with state versions of the SNS and MSPSS, respectively). We manipulated loneliness by giving participants false feedback regarding questionnaire scores (as described earlier in this chapter). Participants in the high-​loneliness (compared to low-​loneliness) condition perceived less social support, but they also felt more nostalgic. Nostalgia, in turn, strengthened their perceptions of social support. Removing statistically this balancing influence of nostalgia accentuated the negative effect of loneliness on perceived social support. In all, a diverse body of empirical evidence supports the full regulatory model across different domains. Nostalgia, as a balancing feedback mechanism, offsets distress and maintains psychological homeostasis.

Conclusion Over the past two decades, nostalgia has stepped from the shadows into the spotlight of psychological science and is now recognized as being a common and universally shared emotion. Indeed, so rapid has been its expansion that the literature is past the point of fitting within a single theoretical framework or taxonomy. Nonetheless, in this chapter we have attempted to demonstrate the utility of a regulatory model for organizing the preponderance of empirical evidence pertaining to the triggers and functions of nostalgia. Granted, the functional approach that we have outlined in this chapter is not endorsed unanimously. Based on his research among South-​East Asian refugees who were resettled in Canada, Morton Beiser (2004) proposed that nostalgia can be dysfunctional when it highlights a contrast between favourable past circumstances and present challenges. Refugees who indicated that the past was more important than the future, and at least as important as the present, were at increased risk of developing depressive disorder. On this basis, Beiser concluded that disproportionate emphasis on a life that has been left behind can create a painful contrast between one’s present predicaments and a more felicitous past. In the same vein, Bas Verplanken (2012) proposed that nostalgia can be dysfunctional for individuals who habitually worry, because nostalgic memories of a carefree and pleasant past may create a salient contrast with the habitual worrier’s current anxious state. Aarti Iyer and Jolanda Jetten (2011) advanced an alternative version of essentially the same idea. They proposed that nostalgia is dysfunctional when the connection between one’s past and

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present self has been severed (but functional when it has been kept intact). In support, they found that nostalgia was detrimental to first-​year students who felt that moving to university had created discontinuity between their past and present self (that is, they had lost touch with their home community), but beneficial to students who perceived continuity between their past and present self (that is, they maintained strong ties to their home community) (but see Sedikides et al 2016, Experiment 6). David Newman and colleagues (2020) added additional fuel to this ‘functionality debate’ by proposing that whereas deliberately recalling nostalgic memories may enhance wellbeing, involuntarily experiencing nostalgia may have the opposite effect. Looking forward, new research objectives within the psychology of nostalgia are on the horizon. Although most attention has focused on personal nostalgia, recent efforts have encompassed collective (often, national) nostalgia (Smeekes et al in press). When individuals become part of a group, that group, its members and events or objects related to it acquire emotional significance. Collective nostalgia, then, is contingent on thinking of oneself in terms of a particular group membership, and pertains to the people, experiences and objects associated with this in-​group (Wildschut et al 2014). Initial findings support the viability of our regulatory model at this collective level of analysis. A recent cross-​cultural study (Smeekes et al 2018) demonstrated that collective angst (for example, ‘I am concerned that the future vitality of [country] is in jeopardy’) predicted higher levels of national nostalgia (for example, ‘I get nostalgic when I think back of [country] in the past’). Collective nostalgia, in turn, was related to higher levels of in-​group continuity (for example, ‘Shared values, beliefs and attitudes of [country’s] people have endured across time’) and in-​g roup belonging (for example, ‘I am proud to be [national]’), but also to stronger opposition to immigration (for example, ‘Immigrants take resources and employment opportunities away from [countrymen]’). Identifying how to harvest the beneficial effects of collective nostalgia, and attenuate its association with anti-​immigrant sentiment, is a high priority for future research. Another urgent question pertains to the potential therapeutic benefits of nostalgia. Recent studies have revealed that nostalgia’s benefits accrue not only to the university-​age samples studied in most prior research, but also to vulnerable populations, including people living with dementia (Ismail et al 2018), people living with addiction (Wohl et al 2018), refugees (Wildschut et al 2019), employees experiencing burnout (Leunissen et al 2018), low procedural justice (Van Dijke et al 2015) or low interactional justice (Van Dijke et al 2019) at work, highly neurotic individuals (Frankenbach et al 2020), bereaved individuals (Reid et al 2020) and those confronting limited time horizons (Hepper et al 2020). We propose that there is now sufficient evidence for the safety and efficacy

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of laboratory-​based nostalgia inductions to warrant the development of therapeutic interventions that can be implemented in everyday life, and have recently completed the first promising steps in this direction (Layous et al 2020). Despite its rich intellectual history, psychological theory and research on nostalgia is still in its infancy. We hope that the questions posed by this enigmatic emotion will continue to attract and challenge (and taunt) scholars for many generations to come. References Abeyta, Andrew, Clay Routledge and Jacob Juhl (2015a) ‘Looking Back to Move Forward: Nostalgia as a Psychological Resource for Promoting Relationship Goals and Overcoming Relationship Challenges’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109: 1029–​1044. Abeyta, Andrew et al (2015b) ‘Attachment-​Related Avoidance and the Social and Agentic Content of Nostalgic Memories’. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 32: 406–​413. Allport, Gordon W. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice. Cambr idge, MA: Perseus Books. Baldwin, Mark W. (1992) ‘Relational Schemas and the Processing of Social Information’. Psychological Bulletin, 112: 461–​484. Bandura, Albert (1982) ‘Self-​Efficacy Mechanism in Human Agency’. American Psychologist, 37: 122–​147. Barrett, Frederick S. et al (2010) ‘Music-​Evoked Nostalgia: Affect, Memory, and Personality’. Emotion, 10: 390–​403. Batcho, Krystine I. (1995) ‘Nostalgia: A Psychological Perspective’. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 80: 131–​143. Beiser, Morton (2004) ‘Trauma, Time and Mental Health: A Study of Temporal Reintegration and Depressive Disorder Among Southeast Asian Refugees’. Psychological Medicine, 34: 899–​910. Bialobrzeska, Olga et al (2019) ‘Nostalgia Counteracts the Negative Relation between Threat Appraisals and Intrinsic Motivation in an Educational Context’. Learning and Individual Differences, 69: 219–​224. Bohns, Vanessa K. and Francis J. Flynn (2010) ‘ “Why Didn’t You Just Ask?” –​ Underestimating the Discomfort of Help-​Seeking’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46: 402–​409. Buhrmester, Duane et al (1988) ‘Five Domains of Interpersonal Competence in Peer Relationships’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 55: 991–​1108. Cacioppo, John T. and Stephanie Cacioppo (2012) ‘The Phenotype of Loneliness’. European Journal of Developmental Psychology, 9: 446–​452.

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Castelnuovo-​Tedesco, Pietro (1980) ‘Reminiscence and Nostalgia: The Pleasure and Pain of Remembering’, in Stanley I. Greenspan and George H. Pollock (eds) The Course of Life: Psychoanalytic Contributions Toward Understanding Personality Development: Vol. III: Adulthood and the Aging Process. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, pp 104–​118. Cheung, Wing-​Yee et al (2013) ‘Back to the Future: Nostalgia Increases Optimism’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39: 1484–​1496. Cheung, Wing-​Yee, Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides (2018) ‘Autobiographical Memory Functions of Nostalgia in Comparison to Rumination and Counterfactual Thinking: Similarity and Uniqueness’. Memory, 26: 229–​237. Collins, Nancy L. and Stephen J. Read (1990) ‘Adult Attachment, Working Models, and Relationship Quality in Dating Couples’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58: 644–​663. Davis, Fred (1977) ‘Nostalgia, Identity and the Current Nostalgia Wave’. Journal of Popular Culture, 11: 414–​425. De Montaigne, Michel (1580/​1993) The Complete Essays (translated by Michael A. Screech). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Downey, Geraldine and Scott I. Feldman (1996) ‘Implications of Rejection Sensitivity for Intimate Relationships’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70: 1327–​1343. Fazio, Russell H. and Tamara Towles-​Schwen (1999) ‘The MODE Model of Attitude–​Behavior Processes’, in Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope (eds) Dual-​Process Theories in Social Psychology. New York: Guilford, pp 97–​116. Fraley, R. Chris et al (2000) An Item Response Theory Analysis of Self-​ Report Measures of Adult Attachment’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78: 350–​365. Frankenbach, Julius et al (2020) ‘Does Neuroticism Disrupt the Psychological Benefits of Nostalgia? A Meta-​Analytic Test’. European Journal of Personality. Advance online publication (doi: 10.1002/​per.2276). Hazan, Cindy and Phillip Shaver (1987) ‘Romantic Love Conceptualized as an Attachment Process’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52: 511–​524. Hepper, Erica G. et al (2012) ‘Odyssey’s End: Lay Conceptions of Nostalgia Reflect its Original Homeric Meaning’. Emotion, 12: 102–​119. Hepper, Erica G. et al (2014) ‘Pancultural Nostalgia: Prototypical Conceptions Across Cultures’. Emotion, 14: 733–​747. Hepper, Erica G. et al (2020) ‘Time Capsule: Nostalgia Shields Psychological Wellbeing from Limited Time Horizons’. Emotion. Advance online publication (doi: 10.1037/​emo0000728).

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Hofer, Johannes (1688/​1934) ‘Medical Dissertation on Nostalgia’ (translated by Carolyn K. Anspach). Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine, 2: 376–​391. Holbrook, Morris B. and Robert Schindler (1996) ‘Market Segmentation Based on Age and Attitude toward the Past: Concepts, Methods, and Findings Concerning Nostalgic Influences on Customer Tastes’. Journal of Business Research, 37: 27–​39. Ismail, Sanda et al (2018) ‘Psychological and Mnemonic Benefits of Nostalgia for People with Dementia’. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 23: 44–​57. Iyer, Aarti and Jolanda Jetten (2011) ‘What’s Left Behind: Identity Continuity Moderates the Effect of Nostalgia on Well-​Being and Life Choices’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101: 94–​108. Juhl, Jacob, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Tara Diebel et al (2020a) ‘Nostalgia Proneness and Empathy: Generality, Underlying Mechanism and Implications for Prosocial Behavior’. Journal of Personality, 88: 485–​500. Juhl, Jacob, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Xiling Xiong and Xinyue Zhou (2020b) ‘Nostalgia Promotes Help Seeking by Fostering Social Connectedness’. Emotion. Advance online publication (doi: 10.1037/​ emo0000720). Kleiner, Jack (1977) ‘On Nostalgia’, in Charles W. Socarides (ed) The World of Emotions. New York, NY: International University Press, pp 471–​498. Kunce, Linda J. and Phillip R. Shaver (1994) ‘An Attachment-​Theoretical Approach to Caregiving in Romantic Relationships’, in Kim Bartholomew and Daniel Perlman (eds) Advances in Personal Relationships, Volume 5: Attachment Processes in Adulthood. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, pp 205–​237. Layous, Kristin et al (2020) ‘The Effect of a Multi-​Week Nostalgia Intervention on Well-​Being: Mechanisms and Moderation’ (Manuscript submitted for publication). Department of Psychology, California State University, East Bay. Leunissen, Joost M. et al (2018) ‘Organizational Nostalgia Lowers Turnover Intentions by Increasing Work Meaning: The Moderating Role of Burnout’. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 23: 44–​57. Madoglou, Anna et al (2017) ‘Representations of Autobiographical Nostalgic Memories: Generational Effect, Gender, Nostalgia Proneness and Communication of Nostalgic Experiences’. Journal of Integrated Social Sciences, 7: 60–​88. Martin, Alexander R. (1954) ‘Nostalgia’. American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 14: 93–​104. McCann, Willis H. (1943) ‘Nostalgia: A Descriptive and Comparative Study’. The Journal of Genetic Psychology, 62: 97–​104.

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Newman, David B. et al (2020) ‘Nostalgia and Well-​Being in Daily Life: An Ecological Validity Perspective’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 118: 325–​347. Reid, Chelsea A. et al (2015) ‘Scent-​Evoked Nostalgia’. Memory, 23: 157–​166. Reid, Chelsea A. et al (2020) ‘The Past as a Resource for the Bereaved: Nostalgia Predicts Declines in Distress’. Cognition and Emotion. Advance online publication (doi: 10.1080/​02699931.2020.1825339). Routledge, Clay et al (2008) ‘A Blast from the Past: The Terror Management Function of Nostalgia’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44: 132–​140. Routledge Clay et al (2011) ‘The Past Makes the Present Meaningful: Nostalgia as an Existential Resource’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101: 638–​652. Russell, Daniel W. (1996) ‘UCLA Loneliness Scale (Version 3): Reliability, Validity, and Factor Structure’. Journal of Personality Assessment, 66: 20–​40. Sedikides, Constantine et al (2018) ‘Nostalgia Motivates Pursuit of Important Goals by Increasing Meaning in Life’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 48: 209–​216. Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut (2016) ‘Past Forward: Nostalgia as a Motivational Force’. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 20: 319–​321. Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut (2019) ‘The Sociality of Personal and Collective Nostalgia’. European Review of Social Psychology, 30: 23–​173. Sedikides, Constantine and Tim Wildschut (2020) ‘Motivational Potency of Nostalgia: The Future is Called Yesterday’. Advances in Motivation Science, 7: 75–​111. Sedikides, Constantine, Tim Wildschut, Clay Routledge and Jamie Arndt (2015a) ‘Nostalgia Counteracts Self-​Discontinuity and Restores Self-​ Continuity’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 45: 52–​61. Sedikides, Constantine, Tim Wildschut, Clay Routledge, Jamie Arndt et al (2015b) ‘To Nostalgize: Mixing Memory with Affect and Desire’. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 51: 189–​273. Sedikides, Constantine et al (2016) ‘Nostalg ia Foster s Self-​ Continuity: Uncovering the Mechanism (Social Connectedness) and the Consequence (Eudaimonic Well-​Being)’. Emotion, 16: 524–​539. Seehusen, Johannes et al (2013) ‘Individual Differences in Nostalgia Proneness: The Integrating Role of the Need to Belong’. Personality and Individual Differences, 55: 904–​908. Smeekes, Anouk, Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides (in press) ‘Longing for the “Good Old Days” of Our Country: National Nostalgia as a New Master-​Frame of Populist Radical-​Right Parties’. Journal of Theoretical Social Psychology.

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Smeekes, Anouk et al (2018) ‘Regaining In-​Group Continuity in Times of Anxiety about the Group’s Future: A Study on the Role of Collective Nostalgia across 27 Countries’. Social Psychology, 49: 311–​329. Stephan, Elena et al (2014) ‘The Mnemonic Mover: Nostalgia Regulates Avoidance and Approach Motivation’. Emotion, 14: 545–​561. Stephan, Elena et al (2015) ‘Nostalgia-​Evoked Inspiration: Mediating Mechanisms and Motivational Implications’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 41: 1395–​1410. Supski, Sian (2013) ‘Aunty Sylvie’s Sponge: Foodmaking, Cookbooks and Nostalgia’. Cultural Studies Review, 19: 28–​49. The New Oxford Dictionary of English (1998) (edited by Judy Pearsall). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Twenge, Jean M. (2007) ‘The Socially Excluded Self ’, in Constantine Sedikides and Steven J. Spencer (eds) Frontiers of Social Psychology: The Self. New York: Psychology Press, pp 311–​324. Van Dijke, Marius et al (2015) ‘Nostalgia Buffers the Negative Impact of Low Procedural Justice on Cooperation’. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 127: 15–​29. Van Dijke, Marius et al (2019) ‘Nostalgia Promotes Intrinsic Motivation and Effort in the Presence of Low Interaction Justice’. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 150: 46–​61. Van Tilburg, Wijnand A.P., Eric R. Igou and Constantine Sedikides (2013) ‘In Search of Meaningfulness: Nostalgia as an Antidote to Boredom’. Emotion, 13: 450–​461. Van Tilburg, Wijnand A.P., Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut (2015) ‘The Mnemonic Muse: Nostalgia Fosters Creativity Through Openness to Experience’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 59: 1–​7. Van Tilburg, Wijnand A.P., Constantine Sedikides and Tim Wildschut (2018a) ‘Adverse Weather Evokes Nostalgia’. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44: 984–​995. Van Tilburg, Wijnand A.P., Tim Wildschut and Constantine Sedikides (2018b) ‘Nostalgia’s Place Among Self-​Conscious Emotions’. Cognition and Emotion, 32: 742–​759. Van Tilburg, Wijnand A.P. et al (2019) ‘An Appraisal Profile of Nostalgia’. Emotion, 19: 21–​36. Verplanken, Bas (2012) ‘When Bittersweet Turns Sour: Adverse Effects of Nostalgia on Habitual Worriers’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42: 285–​289. Vess, Matthew et al (2012) ‘Nostalgia as a Resource for the Self ’. Self and Identity, 3: 273–​284.

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Wildschut, Tim and Constantine Sedikides (2020) ‘The Psychology of Nostalgia: Delineating the Emotion’s Nature and Functions’, in Michael Hviid Jacobsen (ed) Nostalgia Now: Cross-​Disciplinary Perspectives on the Past in the Present. London: Routledge, pp 47–​65. Wildschut, Tim, Constantine Sedikides and Dalal Alowidy (2019) ‘Hanin: Nostalgia Among Syrian Refugees’. European Journal of Social Psychology, 49: 521–​532. Wildschut, Tim, Constantine Sedikides and Sara Robertson (2018) ‘Sociality and Intergenerational Transfer of Older Adults’ Nostalgia’. Memory, 26: 1030–​1041. Wildschut, Tim et al (2006) ‘Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91: 975–​993. Wildschut, Tim et al (2014) ‘Collective Nostalgia: A Group-​Level Emotion That Confers Unique Benefits on the Group’. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 107: 844–​863. Wohl, Michael J.A. et al (2018) ‘Discontinuity-​Induced Nostalgia Improves the Odds of a Self-​Reported Quit Attempt among People Living with Addiction’. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 75: 83–​94. Zhou, Xinyue, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Xiaoxi Chen and Ad J.J.M. Vingerhoets (2012a) ‘Heartwarming Memories: Nostalgia Maintains Physiological Comfort’. Emotion, 12: 678–​684. Zhou, Xinyue, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, Kan Shi and Cong Feng (2012b) ‘Nostalgia: The Gift That Keeps on Giving’. Journal of Consumer Research, 39: 39–​50. Zhou, Xinyue et al (2008) ‘Counteracting Loneliness: On the Restorative Function of Nostalgia’. Psychological Science, 19: 1023–​1029. Zimet, Gregory D. et al (1988) ‘The Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support’. Journal of Personality Assessment, 52: 30–​41.

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Anthropology and Nostalgia: Between Hegemonic and Emancipatory Projections of the Past Michael Herzfeld

Introduction: Anthropology’s dilemma, anthropology’s advantage This chapter should perhaps have been titled ‘Nostalgia in Anthropology’.1 Anthropologists often labour to preserve vanishing or already extinct cultures. As a discipline which has undergone a particularly wrenching confrontation with its colonial past, anthropology has forthrightly addressed the role of nostalgia in its complicity with hegemonic ideologies –​notably colonialism and racial hierarchy –​which destroyed whole cultural complexes, and which it has since resolutely criticized. Anthropologists are well placed to appreciate the pain (Greek algos, a term perhaps better glossed as ‘regret’) conveyed by the etymology of ‘nostalgia’, thereby potentially recovering the emotional and affective intensity of nostalgia still conveyed in the Greek term today (see Seremetakis 1994: 4). They investigate how the concept of nostalgia is locally (‘emically’) understood (Orr 2017: 644), and how one might apply the English term without violating the multiplicity and complexity of concepts in local languages that we too easily read as nostalgia. Nostalgia takes on different meanings according to the historical, cultural and sensory contexts in which it is evoked (Emoff 2002). There are indeed multiple variations in the discipline’s use of the term ‘nostalgia’, almost always qualified by an adjective conveying temporal and

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political specificities. Olivia Angé and David Berliner (2014) have already laid out a magisterially comprehensive account. Placing the many approaches and usages in a larger philosophical and historical context, their essay will long remain the gold standard for such a summary, laying out both the nostalgic character of much early anthropology and the sometimes excessive fierceness with which its modern practitioners have rejected the nostalgic trope of cultural loss.2 Confrontation with the discipline’s origins offers the compensation of reflexive clarity. Anthropology, arriving on the coat-​tails of colonialism, initially served both Victorian disdain for conquered ‘savages’ and its converse –​lamentation for the corruption of the paradise of which the savages were viewed as the last survivors. It was an exercise in the nostalgic imagination and reconstruction of what colonialism had resolutely and ruthlessly destroyed. This is the cruel truth of what Renato Rosaldo (1989) has dubbed ‘imperialist nostalgia’. The early social evolutionists, or ‘survivalists’ as they are aptly called (see Hodgen 1936), saw in the conquered peoples the living fossils of their own social and cultural ancestors. Such practices have not disappeared, but anthropologists no longer embrace them. Thus, ‘bureaucratic nostalgia’ celebrating the former presence of communities sacrificed to modernist town-​planning provides a local and ongoing parallel to imperialist nostalgia (Herzfeld 2021a); nostalgia is implicated in all the levels at which hegemony operates. Berliner (2014a, 2014b) characterizes anthropology as ‘exo-​nostalgic’, by which he means that it cultivates nostalgia for what ‘other’ cultures have lost. This is the basis of what is sometimes called ‘salvage anthropology’. Thus, Maurice Bloch, although a Marxist who has been no friend of colonialism, has frequently argued that studying ‘Western’ societies is a waste of scarce academic resources (for example, in Houtman 1988: 19–​20; see also Jakoubek and Budilová nd). The lingering hints of salvage anthropology thus risk perpetuating imperialist nostalgia by preserving as museological relics the fragmentary remains –​ fragments being a favoured trope of romantic discourse –​of what a largely Western-​inspired modernity, heir to colonialism and its depredations, has rejected as ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilized’. The practice, adopted by some ideological secularist (and usually socialist) national regimes, of relabelling religion as ‘culture’ (for example, Zhu 2015: 601, 2020: 96–​97) or in promoting a royal past as cultural heritage (Berliner 2010), similarly expropriates as its own past what it has taken great care to destroy. Hegemonies, no matter their ideological stripe, tend, in the monumentalization of the past for mass consumption, to generate strikingly similar ironies. Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (2016: 25) folds these implications back into the practice of ethnography. ‘Ethnographic nostalgia’, the longing for that

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original field experience that has already dissolved in local changes (and perhaps in improvements in the ethnographer’s knowledge over time?), latches on to this logic with alacrity. Citing Johannes Fabian’s (1983) well-​ known critique of anthropological ‘allochronism’ –​the tendency to treat ‘the natives’ as inhabiting a different kind of time from that of the Western observer –​ Theodossopoulos (2016) with exquisite delicacy unearths the lingering complicity of the discipline with the political system that gave it birth: the passion to recover the initial experience of fieldwork is a refraction of that larger desire to salvage the studied subject for all time. Every ethnographer, in every succeeding generation, seems destined to reproduce this image of a lost time –​‘the field as it was back then when I was a young scholar’ –​as the start of a personal adventure, limned in the warm and fuzzy recall of a cordiality that was all about reciprocal respect and affection, only to see it dismissed as the predictable nostalgia of the ageing generation. Awareness of this dynamic may not protect us from it entirely; moreover, the memories may not be entirely false. But Theodossopoulos uses the concept of nostalgia to historicize and contextualize a disciplinary practice that otherwise runs a real risk of becoming assimilated to colonial or indeed even to imperialist nostalgia, turning it into a tool for constructive reflection on the nature of our engagements with the people we study. In the remainder of this chapter I will trace the origins of anthropology’s double vision –​an analytical view of nostalgia coupled with the recognition of the discipline’s own nostalgic preoccupations, starting with the romantic yearning for lost innocence in such theorists as Marcel Mauss. That particular form of nostalgia replicates that found in many societies studied by anthropologists. It also figures prominently in societies where a history of harsh repression acquires the roseate hue of affectionate memory amid the more immediate tribulations of the present. This surprisingly frequent version of nostalgia prompts important questions about how it is created: what forms of agency and performance are entailed in its production –​aspects that ordinarily become accessible only through the long-​term, intimate ethnographic fieldwork favoured by anthropologists. It is this specificity, which emerges in a distinctive style of ethnographic writing attentive to minute detail and cast in the form of a first-​person, experiential narrative, that distinguishes the anthropological contribution to the study of nostalgia.

Social theory as nostalgic practice Such developments have steadily increased anthropology’s capacity for self-​ critique. One effect of this radical –​if gradual –​volte-​face has been to equip anthropology with analytical purchase on its own modernity and especially on its theoretical underpinnings. Comparison of the objects of traditional

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ethnographic inquiry with the discipline’s theoretical capital both enables and requires the defamiliarization of its practitioners’ intellectual habitus. The writings of Marcel Mauss provide perhaps the most instructive case in point. Mauss, an ethnologist as guilty as any of what Arjun Appadurai (1996: 78; see also Berliner 2010: 54) calls ‘armchair nostalgia’, clearly absorbed much of his perspective indirectly from the peoples described in various scholarly reports and travelogues, as is most clearly evident in his celebrated Essay on the Gift (Mauss 1954).3 The view expressed there that formal economic measures (cash), formal rules of conduct (codified law) and formal styles of social interaction (etiquette) have corrupted a once pure-​minded reciprocity, based entirely on mutual trust and custom, is documented in many societies studied by anthropologists (see, for example, Douglas 1958; Lévi-​Strauss 1974; Battaglia 1995; Angé 2014; Herzfeld 2016: 146–​160). The explorers and anthropologists who originally reported those ideas in the early 20th century would have been especially susceptible to indigenous commentaries that appealed to their search for an age of innocence. They already had a model in the Genesis story of the Fall. Shepherds in the mountains of western Crete express deep distrust of the bureaucratic nation-​state (for example, Herzfeld 2016: 156–​158). They live with a constant sense of grievance, not only because the state disapproves of and punishes acts that follow the local ethical code (vengeance killing and reciprocal animal-​theft in particular), but also because they blame the state’s influence for their seeming inability to live up to their own exacting moral standards. Those standards include the importance of reciprocal trust and respect, to the point where asking for a written contract or exacting an oath over a sacred icon becomes a marker of social decline from the imagined lost state of Edenic harmony. Villagers invoked a sense of tragic loss as they appealed to a past in which, allegedly, people would rely on the personal word of honour and a handshake, rejecting formalization in favour of trust, whereas nowadays, they complained, everyone operates through the alienating third-​party structure of the law-​courts. The taking of oaths represents an intermediate way-​station on this evolutionist allegory of the descent from trust to litigation, and allegory which exemplifies what I have called ‘structural nostalgia’ (Herzfeld 2016: 139–​164). Structural nostalgia takes the form of a yearning for an idealized time of perfect mutuality, modelled over the generations so that each age group can accuse its children of doing things that would have been unacceptable in the speaker’s own time. It is as present in Mauss’s and his contemporaries’ writings as it is these ethnographic examples. In most cases, such charges are repeated endlessly from one generation to the next, so durable is the conceit that society’s current ills are the result of damage to a once-​perfect structure. Kathleen Stewart’s (1988: 235)

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informants experienced ‘a world that is always emptying itself out’, allowing for infinite repetition of nostalgic recall; emptiness itself, as Dace Dzenovska (2020) has demonstrated for Latvia (and arguably more generally for much of the post-​Soviet world), becomes the ground against which the figure of nostalgia represents an attempt to come to terms with a sense of abandonment that may reflect either a unique or a recurrent betrayal by global economic forces. The nostalgia for a time of fullness is a discourse that typically blames the advent of the cash economy for some presumed loss of innocence. Angé (2014) employs this framework for exploring barter practices in the Argentine Cordillera, showing how the moral reproach implicit in structural nostalgia can be an effective form of agency as trading partners try to extract more advantageous terms from each other. In the Cordilleran barter markets, cash transactions also enter the economic activity, modelling in countless small bargaining sessions the struggle to maintain the ancestral purity of the barter system against the corrosive greed engendered by money. With the substitution of codified law for the precision of cash, that stance also characterizes the Cretan shepherds’ more directly political negotiation of their identity with the bureaucratic state.4 In the same vein, too, Luciana Lang (2017: 631) recounts the recall by Brazilian fisherfolk of a time when, allegedly, ‘though poor, they could rely on the mangrove and on the sea, enjoying the freedoms of self-​employment and the benefits of community life’. Lang further suggests that Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1982) concept of ‘chronotope’ allows us to see how structural nostalgia operates on the mutual convertibility of time and place. Inasmuch as place (in this case, the mangrove) can serve as a fixed point of reference for memory, its stability becomes the outward sign of an original perfection, visible change –​especially in the form of environmental pollution –​evidence of the disruption of that paradise. States clearly attempt to project a model of original national perfection, uncontaminated by the passage of time; nationalist folklorists, especially in 19th-​century Europe, used the concept of textual contamination to model the hypothetical image of a curable imperfection –​which, moreover, they assumed the responsibility for curing. In that sense, the widespread concept of urtext, the suppositious original version of a song or story, provided a benchmark for measuring textual corruption, and each successive generation’s folklore could be subjected to the same entextualizing hierarchy based on what the folklorists saw as relative degrees of corruption.5 Such models were useful for ranking regions and social groups as more or less faithful to the nation’s original culture. They underwrote the logic of official uses of historic conservation as a way of providing ‘originals’ for the styles of each successive period. While some countries –​Italy, for

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e­ xample –​have preferred to conserve evidence of the passage of time and attendant processes of decay (see Herzfeld 2021b), the commoner practice among national archaeological services is to ensconce structural nostalgia in the materiality of allegedly perfect reproductions of old buildings and monuments representing a sequence of epochs and styles. This example provides us also with a window onto the relation between nostalgia and heritage, to which we shall return later. It is telling that national conservation programmes constitute one common exception to the usual association of structural nostalgia with rueful acknowledgement of both the material poverty and spiritual purity of the lost epoch. For those imagining a time prior to that of social stratification –​in the words of John Ball at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ –​monumentalization of the official past may in fact be a perpetual insult that refuses recognition that the poor have their own history, and that both workers’ poverty and state grandeur are the indelible marks of the original sin that created class and other forms of difference. Structural nostalgia reconstitutes a long-​ distant (and ever receding) epoch into which money had not yet inserted its insidious poison, bringing suffering to those who lacked it and investing others with terrible punitive powers. Some may see in this definition of structural nostalgia the outline of a Judaeo-​Christian allegory. It is certainly possible that Christian tradition played a role in many such instances, although Angé’s Cordillerans, at least, seem closer to indigenous ideas about the divine than to imported Catholic doctrines. Christian influences do pervade Western social theories and concepts, which are often formulated in quasi-​theological language; one prominent example appears in the eschatological resonance of the word ‘corruption’. Such comparisons can be immensely eye-​opening. I began to see the underlying model of Mauss’s nostalgic tale of moral corruption only after exposure to the Cretan shepherds’ wistful invocation of an age before cash and law-​courts. Raymond Orr (2017: 648), following Kathleen Stewart (1988), uses the idea of nostalgia as ‘structural’ in a rather different sense, as a symbol of stability in times of uncertainty. The search for certainty, as we shall see in the next section, produces unexpected effects. Those effects may occasion embarrassment if they represent the longings of neglected or marginalized groups for advantages bestowed by now discredited regimes; but they also suggest agency –​proactive management of the present and future –​ under specific cultural and historical conditions that partially explain the paths taken. Indeed, nostalgia has long been recognized in anthropology (for example, Battaglia 1995; Werbner 1998: 15) as an active disposition

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amenable to the creation of new subjectivities rather than simply inclined to resuscitate the old.6

Longing for hard times: colonialism, totalitarianism, apartheid The regret implied –​ or, sometimes, rendered explicit –​ in nostalgic utterances assumes the loss of a better world in the past. The longing for the rural life, exemplified by Melissa L. Caldwell’s (2011: 60, 82) description of how urban Russians treat their country dachas as havens from modernity where they can seek moral regeneration rests on deep regret –​‘sorrow’, as it was described to Caldwell (2011: 29–​30) –​for the wasteful consumerism and corrupt politics of the present. Such utterances reproduce a common trope of a lost rurality as moral purity. Often, however, nostalgia conflicts with what we might assume to have been the real state of society. Whether in respect of colonial rule, control by a Soviet-​directed dictatorship, the harshness of an apartheid or other racist regime, or the rigid exclusions of class and caste, it expresses regret for conditions that from the outside appear to range from the unbearable to the unspeakable. This type of nostalgia calls for careful attention if we are not to assume that people want what we think they ought to want (or what we imagine we would want in their place). Here again, a reflexive approach encourages anthropologists to inspect their own presuppositions. Precisely because anthropology, following its own nostalgic instincts for ‘the field’ (see Theodossopoulos 2016), has typically focused on marginalized and otherwise disadvantaged populations, practitioners tend to assume the universal appropriateness of their critiques of colonial, class and other hierarchies. Individuals and groups whose nostalgia takes the form of regretting the disappearance of a time of harsh poverty or oppression may be idealizing that past or focusing selectively on it; but the equally utopian idealization of modernity and ‘development’ is often the spur that provokes such counter-​intuitive nostalgias. As Lauren Yapp (2020: 195) has shown in her study of the preservation of colonial architecture in Indonesia, official promotion of colonial heritage may prompt productive conversations about present-​day resources and their distribution, but it may also have the inadvertent effect of reproducing the ‘stark inequalities’ of colonial times. A further potential effect is then the emergence of a nostalgia which misrecognizes that cruel epoch as something more benign, generating ‘the risk of reproducing some of the same logics and discourses that governed their city [Semarang] a century ago’ (Yapp 2020: 193).

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Such effects have often followed the collapse of authoritarian regimes. Among the resulting nostalgias are those which express yearning for Soviet-​ style communism; these include East German Ostalgie (Berdahl 1999; Bach 2002, 2014; Boyer 2006) and ‘Yugonostalgia’ (Lindstrom 2005; Chushak 2013; but see Gilbert 2019), as well as other, less well-​defined varieties reflecting country-​specific realities and aspirations (for example, Klumbytė 2006; Hann 2014; Haukanes 2017). These recrudescent devotions to authoritarian socialism disturb and puzzle complacent observers from the established capitalisms of the West. Similar surprises attend nostalgia for colonial rule, times of harsh separation (such as apartheid) and other totalitarian systems. But these nostalgias are not necessarily calls for a return to deprivation. Rather, they express a yearning to combine new liberties and prosperity with a return to the safety of an ordered life. Their motivation may be much simpler: the human proclivity, famously discussed by Mary Douglas (1966), to fear the absence of order. This fear produces a disposition to seek in structural nostalgia both the explanation of present-​day insecurity and the means of restoring a sense of order. Nationalisms which seek the ‘rebirth’ of newly imagined nations are grounded in the same logic. Even nostalgic discourses which seem to represent a single objective may in reality index highly variable sources and interpretations. As several authors have noted, for example, post-​socialist nostalgia has meanings and forms that vary according to the local (national) version of Soviet governmentality and its culturally specific underpinnings, as well as to more narrowly local, professional, gender-​based or social identities. For example, writing of Hungary, where the government of János Kádár was able to secure some freedoms not to be found elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, Chris Hann (2014) notes that nostalgia for that era varies according to the personal circumstances of the speaker. By juxtaposing the situations of two informants he had known over more or less the entire arc of his long ethnographic experience, he shows how the pragmatic significance of nostalgic sentiments is always filtered through a speaker’s personal experiences. His analysis resonates closely with the comparative study of Hungary and Russia offered by Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko (2014), who reveal stark (and internally varied) contrasts generated by very different experiences of Soviet governmentality, as well as those revealed by generational change. Nostalgia for Soviet-​style rule thus covers a wide arc of subject positions. That it has attracted so much attention highlights the common assumption that the Soviet era was so terrible that no one would ever want it to return. Perhaps even more surprising to a discipline proud of turning against its colonialist origins, however, are the increasingly frequent mentions of nostalgia for colonialism and even, on the part of Black South Africans, for apartheid. Explanations of these phenomena might well reflect the success

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of the former rulers in ‘colonizing minds’. I have heard Greek Cypriots praising the old British bureaucracy, which, while it restricted their liberties, was largely predictable and provided services that, with their yearning to be considered as Europeans rather than as colonial subjects, appealed to their sense of order. Here we can extend Rebecca Bryant’s (2014) insightful observation that Turkish Cypriots find in nostalgic reconstructions –​redolent with the synaesthesia to be discussed later in other contexts –​a means of essentializing a national identity (‘Northern Cyprus’) not recognized by any other country except Turkey. Some Greek Cypriots, ideologically constrained to support unification with Greece but viewing that country as deprived of the social advantages of having been colonized, may indeed prefer to defer that moment indefinitely, preferring to essentialize their own identity as occupying an equal and distinctive status in the civilizational hierarchy enshrined in the European Union. Berliner (2010, 2020) identifies a converse concern –​fear of ‘losing’ an already essentialized cultural identity –​ as a cogent motivator of nostalgic activity. Already two decades ago, Richard Werbner (1998: 1) described the burgeoning incidence of colonial nostalgia as ‘striking’, and that situation remains largely unchanged. Yet it is unquestionably a complex and unpredictable phenomenon. In Zanzibar, for example, William Bissell (2005) encountered colonial nostalgia in people whose age (and therefore temporal relationship to colonialism) as well as social position strongly influenced their significantly varied uses, understandable only in the context of long-​term ethnographic fieldwork, of nostalgic discourses. He shows why the harsh certainties of yesteryear, including poverty, often fade into insignificance before the far harsher uncertainties of neoliberal precariousness today. There is thus an ironic parallel between nostalgia for the colonial order and nostalgia for the orderliness of the old Soviet system. Colonialism is remembered ‘as a time when things worked, the law was the law, and a shilling went a long way’ (Bissell 2005: 222). Confronted with the evidence of poor administration in the colonial archives, Bissell launched a comparison of his own anthropological nostalgia with what he heard from his informants, and discovered a disconcerting convergence. Heritage conservation and nostalgia, on the other hand, usually do not so converge. Bissell’s accurate observation that nostalgia instead contests heritage regimes representing neoliberal interests over those of the local population shows up the shallowness of representations of gentrification as nostalgic. Indeed, the history that gentrification evokes is rarely that of those who were evicted to make it happen (see, for example, Herzfeld 2021a). The Chinese organization that generated this dynamic in Zanzibar, in tandem with the Tanzanian government of the time, showed little interest in

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the local population or its concerns, a pattern common in top-​down official heritage practices in China itself (see later). The nostalgia that emerged was not for the oppressive aspects of colonialism, nor yet for the austerity that arrived with socialist revolutionary rule, but for a period before neoliberalism rendered economic existence so precarious: ‘In broad terms, colonialism was deployed as a figure to evoke images of economic bounty, the rule of law, a well-​managed state, and a graciously maintained city. The revolution, by contrast, stood for stability, broad provisions of social welfare, discipline, and basic rights to housing, health, work, and wages’ (Bissell 2005: 236–​237). Today’s residents enjoyed neither set of desirable conditions; regardless of what their choice of nostalgia evoked, it always expressed a longing for the restoration of some kind of order. Neoliberal heritage management works to persuade consumers that it has provided the object of their yearning and thereby has removed the algos. In its place, it has installed another, more realistic pain: the awareness of lost sociality. Instead of expressing nostalgia, therefore, neoliberal heritage management generates it. Grandiose state heritage projects have little to do with nostalgia; they absorb the past into the here-​and-​now, rather than presenting it –​as true nostalgia does –​as recalling moral and affective loss. Nostalgia for the South African apartheid regime similarly reflects present-​ day problems. The native peoples of colonial South Africa consisted of groups speaking sometimes interrelated but often mutually unintelligible languages. Nostalgia for apartheid thus looks back to a system that rigidly separated the ‘Bantustans’ both from the European settler communities and from each other (Reed 2016). In consequence, within each Bantustan traditional authority structures provided both identity and security, as well as the sometimes harsh discipline that sustained them. In the current situation, in which corruption at the highest level of government is seen as a descent into disorder, some Black citizens claim to long for the clear ethnic demarcations, traditional forms of authority and disciplined lives that they now read into the apartheid years. Yet another example of this retrospective embrace of an oppressive past is what Elisabeth Schober (2016) calls ‘navy nostalgia’. Subic Bay, a notorious red-​light area once dominated by a United States naval base, has now been developed by a Korean conglomerate, whose representatives, unlike the American sailors who used to live and work there, ignore local Philippine citizens and their services and needs. Again, navy nostalgia appears to express discomfort at the lack of clarity about present relations and future directions. As Subic Bay undergoes the decomposition of the older American structures and the more distanced Korean presence brings employment without the warmth of intimate engagement, there is regret –​contrary to the dominant view in the country at large –​that the Americans have left.

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Navy nostalgia is an idiosyncratic refraction of colonial nostalgia; so is nostalgia for the apartheid regime. Nostalgia for the Soviet past similarly expresses a yearning that is counter-​intuitive from the perspective of those who worked to destroy the Soviet system or profited from its collapse. As the post-​Soviet cases show, local circumstances refract and redirect the conventions of nostalgic discourse, allowing us to see in it a malleable symbolic representation of the difficulty of coming to terms with social and cultural change and of identifying the sentiments associated with such change. The anthropological commitment to the contextual understanding of local perspectives requires patient ethnographic fieldwork and intimate friendships with local actors. These seemingly counter-​intuitive nostalgias emerge as idealizations of pure order from which the memory of real suffering has been displaced by persistent present discomfort. They are ways of contesting new and poorly understood forms of authority. They do sometimes threaten to morph into ultra-​rightist populism, with its attendant intolerance of difference; in such cases, they feed off collective experiences of helplessness to regenerate a racialized, nationalized and ideologically purged order. Some reconstructions of the past, especially of its more horrific aspects, may also exceed reality and thereby dwarf or disrupt nostalgic recollection (see, for example, Lankauskas 2014).7 But nostalgia may also revive dreams of an inclusive and generous future grounded in the failed idealizations of the past.

The social dimensions of nostalgia: performativity, intimacy, commensality All the examples of nostalgia discussed here, while couched in the language of personal emotion, are representations of shared social experience. ‘Phatic communion’ (Malinowski 1936: 313) –​the sense of mutual recognition enjoyed by those who share a code of especially linguistic etiquette –​often takes nostalgic form: using the recognizably stylized conventions of their social class, for example, two upper-​class Englishmen who meet for the first time might bewail the loss of good manners, respect for ‘one’s elders and betters’ and the dependability of servants. Workers might instead bemoan the increasing ruthlessness of the wealthy. Each code suggests a social paradise lost. Each depends more on recognizable class markers than on literal semantic content. Conversely, for nostalgia to succeed as a form of utterance, it must engage others in such phatic communion. Its social nature, expressed as individual but socially appropriate sentiment (Campbell, Smith and Wetherell 2017), requires such coding to be performatively effective. It may not be speech at all; table manners or intimate gestures, for example, can perform the same ‘phatic labour’ (Elyachar 2010) in hinting at a shared sense of fragile or decayed solidarities.

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Nostalgic utterances often tacitly acknowledge flaws in the idealized pasts they celebrate. They draw sustenance from the admission of collective failings that nonetheless enhance the sense of sociability –​the ruefully recognized, and enjoyed, areas of tolerated naughtiness, or cultural intimacy (Herzfeld 2016), which cannot easily be admitted to outsiders but which occasionally peek out from behind the façade of propriety; examples include the displays in the Subic Bay museum and some individual memories openly recounted to Schober. Such cultural intimacy works best when it plays on the ordinary and quotidian (see Angé 2015). Its temporal dimension reveals the changing dynamics of taste and power, as in Daphne Berdahl’s (1999: 195–​197) account of how the ‘Trabi’ (Trabant car) moved from proud possession under the East German regime to embarrassing sign of failure after German unification, and then to proud identity marker as unity began to lose its shine. All nostalgia entails some play with cultural intimacy, implying that while you may think those times were bad (totalitarian, tribal, destitute, colonial and chaotic), we know for a fact that we once enjoyed solidarities enabled by the conditions of life under regimes now discredited and dismantled. The social nature of nostalgia and its play on the dynamics of cultural intimacy is nowhere clearer than in the language of food and commensality. David E. Sutton has emphasized the synaesthesic properties of food in triggering recall (Sutton 2010; Korsmeyer and Sutton 2011),8 and has more largely explored the links between food and memory (notably Sutton 2001) and between cooking and the theorizing of social life (Sutton 2018). He, Angé (2015), Caldwell (2004) and Richard R. Wilk (1999) have variously shown how nostalgia is often the target of commercial ventures exploiting the affective associations of familiar food practices, which may also then be transformed by the popularity such commercial reuse creates abroad. The nostalgic implications of taste may be intended to reinforce nationalist resistance to overseas influence (see especially Caldwell 2002, 2006, 2014), but consumers may also resist such blandishments while absorbing what they recognize as new elements into their existing repertoires (Sutton and Vournelis 2009). In the passage from the memory work involved in producing and consuming food to its commercial reproduction as nostalgia, the reification of affect –​an important constituent of the way authenticity is manufactured (see Brulotte and Di Giovine 2014) –​does not always fall on receptive ears, although it may trigger creative responses. Commercial food nostalgia may be as unconvincing as the heritage-​making claims of top-​down cultural resource management. The ordinariness of food makes it central to the management of nostalgia. As Mary Douglas (endorsing Sutton 2001) wryly remarked: ‘It must be important to say something that everybody knows, but is ignored by the specialists’. This pithy observation summarizes what ethnography brings

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to the table of nostalgia studies. The mutual recognition of members of a cultural group may even take the commonplace form of acknowledging that they share some guilty secrets, such as not following dietary rules or accepted cooking procedures; nostalgia for these derelictions sometimes creates a sense of collective loyalty and identity. Food is an important –​because largely unnoticed –​medium of ideological persuasion, often operating in intimate spaces thought to be safely inaccessible to outsiders. Because food consumption dissolves the distinction between the corporeal and the conceptual –​ and makes nonsense of the Cartesian formula contrasting tangible and intangible heritage (Herzfeld 2014) –​it provides a particularly appropriate realm in which to explore the pragmatics of nostalgic discourse. Music, too, with its capacity for evocation, can play a significant role in evoking ‘placeness’, reinforcing or reshaping assumptions about regional identity (Kavouras nd; Stokes 1996; Sant Cassia 2000). The habitus demands the comfort of sociability, often incorporating the enjoyment of those practices constitutive of cultural intimacy which become sources of embarrassment when revealed to the outside world. Nostalgia is as likely to point back to intimately shared violations of formal rules –​to the essence of cultural intimacy –​as it is to the imagined perfect order of a past that in reality was never so pure.

Nostalgia, heritage and agency Not all recollection of the past is nostalgic. Some forms of recall seem instead to fit a model of ‘heritagization’ (see, for example, Sheriff 2019). This publicity stunt rarely evokes the pain of loss, since what was lost has already allegedly been recovered. Nostalgia laments irreversible loss; heritage claims to reverse loss through various forms of creative invention that may be as banal as calling certain hostelries ‘heritage hotels’. Sometimes the rhetoric of heritage and tradition obliterates the proactive, agential aspect of nostalgic discourses, as when the attribution of ‘tradition’ to Native American communities ignores their nostalgic discourses as active attempts to grapple with present and future (Orr 2017: 643–​644). If nostalgia can both celebrate and resist forms of repression, we must always ask what forms of agency are involved. Heritage displays, for example, often leave open –​or ignore –​the question of whose heritage is at stake. Close attention to these dynamics often reveals complex patterns of agency and contestation. Ema Pires (2014: 138), for example, shows how local people in Melaka, Malaysia use nostalgic discourses to fight off government-​authorized attempts to expropriate colonial history for nationalistic purposes. The official line constitutes what Smith (2006: 29–​34) has labelled ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (AHD) and represents an attempt to direct the thinking of both

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local populace and visiting tourists. Changes in party-​political control, as Pierpaolo De Giosa (2021) has now demonstrated for the same city, can change the AHD dramatically, if not always durably. Locals, too, evince a wide range of ethnic and class-​based variation in the narration of the colonial past, sometimes in concert with political leaders and sometimes in explicit refusal of their interpretations. Such recollections also point up complex and often competing solidarities within the highly stratified and variegated local population. One size does not fit all. Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell (2017) draw an analytical distinction between ‘reactionary’ and ‘progressive’ nostalgias. Their insight bears an instructive similarity to Sharika Thiranagama’s (2018: 39) distinction between repressive and emancipatory models of civility (and, for that matter, a possible further distinction between exclusive and inclusive modalities of phatic communion). Nostalgia, civility and communication are all often presented as culturally positive, regardless of the intentions that undergird them. The service that these authors’ distinction provides is therefore to warn precisely against such conflation. It is also important to specify what is not nostalgic at all. In this context, I have proposed a concept of subversive archaism to address the invocation of political and social structures that predate the bureaucratic nation-​state (Herzfeld 2021a). Among these are patrilineal clans in nation-​states that are predominantly cognatic in their preferred kinship arrangements, and South-​East Asian polities with flexible boundaries and power structures. Other instances might include indigenous political arrangements in postcolonial nation-​states; attempts to preserve national identities submerged in larger states, including separatist movements in Scotland and Catalonia; and indigenous nations striving for respect within settler-​ colonial societies such as the United States and Australia. Subversive archaism is not necessarily about nostalgia as such, although it often appeals to nostalgia in order to gain wider public support for its goals. Usually, however, the role of nostalgia comes in the form of the bureaucratic nation-​ state’s repressive response, as in the ‘bureaucratic nostalgia’ mentioned in the introductory section. This kind of nostalgia seeks the erasure of what it ostensibly celebrates. Even carefully curated reconstructions of traditions and architecture from the past –​the work of ‘heritagization’ –​are not strictly nostalgic. They are, rather, products of nostalgia, stimuli for its production or mere imitations. They usually trigger nostalgic reactions only when observers lament that they are ‘not the real thing’ –​a bow to the rhetoric of authenticity and the sense of loss. They may stimulate nostalgic recollections, but only in the sense of deploring the reconstruction of a past that, in the form now made visible, never existed for the local population. In this sense, heritage conservation

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is often trenchantly anti-​nostalgic for local actors, especially when deployed in the service of ideologies touting national revival and renewal.

Conclusion without closure: The open-​ended anthropology of nostalgia In the varieties of discourse considered in this chapter, anthropology’s distinctive contribution emerges as an enhanced awareness of how local actors engage with multiple pasts. The methods of long-​term ethnography reveal cracks and fissures in authorized discourses of various kinds; the ethnographer must become an apprentice in the appreciation not only of historical narratives but also of smells, tastes and other sensory experiences which are (at times deliberately) organized to trigger synaesthesic connections and thereby to generate that sense of yearning that distinguishes nostalgia from more generic forms of memory and commemoration. Perhaps the greatest challenge for the ethnographer is thus that of how to write the nonverbal into that most verbal of texts, an academic monograph. By attaining access to cultural intimacy, anthropologists also learn to understand, especially through reflection on their own preconceived ideas, why certain nostalgic invocations of the past seem unexpected but make sense to local actors. They discover why some nostalgic yearnings are embarrassing for local social actors, especially when they are asked to articulate them on an official stage. In such circumstances, when fear of ridicule or punishment looms large, struggles over which nostalgia to emphasize can as easily result in restricted as in enhanced agency. Defiance can carry a heavy cost, as when a community opposes its vision of the national past to that of a heavy-​handed bureaucracy; traditionalism that appears to defy official law often results in punitive measures and, in extreme cases, the extirpation of entire communities. Such experiences teach anthropologists the importance of being sensitive to the distance between the affective communality of nostalgia on the one hand and the alienating effects of many official heritage discourses on the other; they also acknowledge the deep roots and enduring presence of the pain and distress of which nostalgia, removed from its everyday association with retro chic and reunited through sensory triggers with powerful memories, is often still compounded. Tracing expressions of nostalgia may sometimes offer an effective entry to those intimate and sometimes potentially embarrassing spaces of real social life whereby people achieve mutual recognition, rapport and respect. But they can also, especially under authoritarian forms of nationalism, expose the limits imposed on such intimate understandings by the humourless power of bureaucracy, itself often both a purveyor of politically motivated nostalgia-​speak and a ruthless extirpator of alternative, potentially subversive nostalgias.

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The spaces of cultural intimacy are thus vulnerable as well as volatile, and opportunities to gain access to them may fall foul of suspicion of the anthropologist’s intentions. Such is the practical and ethical problem of field research on the subject. But this difficulty often brings new insight into the relations between communal and bureaucratic concerns as anthropologists learn to ask what precisely causes local people to be so hesitant in expressing their nostalgic yearnings or admitting to their emotional power. What aspects of these yearnings so deeply offend official actors that they trigger defensiveness on the part of our interlocutors? As anthropologists consider the nostalgic implications of their own profession, they can usefully reflect on the extent to which they are –​inadvertently or otherwise –​reproducing colonial, imperial or bureaucratic forms of nostalgia, and turn that reflexive perception back on battles over collective memory in the communities they study as a means of unearthing the internal inequalities that similarly rest on the varied uses of nostalgia as resource, weapon and refuge. Not all the members of a given community will long for the same past. Nostalgia is thus a moving target. Its capricious lability is further intensified by the multiplicity of triggers associated with it. Accessible by turns through verbal discourse and through sensory recall triggered by stimuli from music to cooking, nostalgia presents serious problems of representation, especially in the writing of academic monographs. These problems underscore the contrast between nostalgia as a form of social experience on the one hand and, on the other, the official monumentalization of a repressively invariant, singular past or the touristic trivialization of an equally simplistic history. While official discourses often entail evocations of nostalgia, those discourses no less frequently stumble over their inability to appreciate (or even to permit) the evanescent, informal, local, trivial-​seeming and even illicit objects of sometimes painful yearning that constitute the common focus of nostalgia in any community. Seeking to understand such socially grounded and embodied nostalgia is not necessarily the romantic quest of an exoticizing discipline driven by its own nostalgia for a vanished past or an irretrievably marginalized present –​the historical entailment against which more reflexive anthropologists constantly push. To the contrary, it has become a central aspect of anthropology’s commitment to speaking truth to power –​ to understanding the numerous ways in which dissatisfaction in the present may instrumentally deploy a reading of the past that conflicts with officially authorized scripts and images. If such nostalgias sometimes occasion shock because of their unexpectedness, especially when they seem to yearn for a brutal yesteryear (as in colonial nostalgia), they thereby generate critical questions about the discipline’s own commitments. An anthropology newly aware of its collusion in the colonial project, for example, should not seek to

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jettison all texts written in the context of that collusion, but should instead understand how this might relate to the apparent embrace of a colonial past by some of its presumed victims. The reflexive stance of modern anthropology, moreover, has enabled its practitioners not only to inspect the nostalgic origins of their own perspectives but also to use that self-​critical stance as a vantage-​point from which to develop a framework for understanding the persistence and varieties of nostalgia in a remarkably wide range of socio-​cultural contexts and to avoid an over-​determined or monolithic, essentialized framing of ‘what nostalgia is’. Nostalgia is best defined contextually and provisionally, always in relation to the shifting contexts of social action. For anthropologists, nostalgia is what nostalgia does; and what it does is as often the embodied, painful and occasionally ironic evocation of bitterly experienced loss as it is the pleasurable recollection of a time that never was. Notes 1

2 3

4 5 6

7

8

I am using the generic term ‘anthropology’ to signify only its social and cultural incarnations. Biological anthropology may carry a similar load of nostalgic reconstruction, but its practitioners’ general reluctance. The term ‘aboriginal’ itself is patently nostalgic in intent. Maya Nadkarni and Olga Shevchenko (2014): 76) invoke the concept of habitus, implicitly raising the question of why so little has been done in discussions of nostalgia with this originally Maussian concept (Mauss 1935) subsequently elaborated by Pierre Bourdieu (1977). I return to this theme later in the brief discussion of subversive archaism. On entextualization, see Silverstein and Urban (1996). C. Nadia Seremetakis (1993: 7), however, usefully distinguishes the active reconstruction of present selfhood through the transference of accumulated memories and personal substance (for example, a grandmother’s saliva), which she calls colportage, from both nostalgia and what she calls realism (but which, with Bourdieu (1977), I would call objectivism, to distinguish it from a realism that recognizes the inchoate and indeterminate as dimensions of reality –​an important aspect of the pliability of nostalgia to which this chapter attests; see Herzfeld 2018). Gediminas Lankauskas (2014: 40) agrees with Boyer’s (2012: 19) ‘nostomaniac’ characterization of post-​socialist studies, suggesting that indeed this allowed anthropologists from the capitalist West to orientalize the former Soviet bloc and at the same time to acquiesce in its nostalgic domestication. In making a film about restaurant food production in Rome (Roman Restaurant Rhythms, Berkeley Media LLC, 2011), I was made aware of how long cuts showing food being handled would provoke memories of its smell. Such devices lend themselves to multimedia nostalgic discourses.

References Angé, Olivia (2014) ‘Social and Economic Performativity of Nostalgic Narratives in Andean Barter Fairs’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 178–​197.

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Angé, Olivia (2015) ‘Le goût d’autrefois: Pain au levain et attachements nostalgiques dans la société contemporaine’. Terrain, 65: 34–​51. Angé, Olivia and David Berliner (2014) ‘Introduction: Anthropology of Nostalgia –​Anthropology as Nostalgia’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 1–​15. Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bach, Jonathan P.G. (2002) ‘ “The Taste Remains”: Consumption, (N) ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany’. Public Culture, 14: 545–​556. Bach, Jonathan P.G. (2014) ‘Consuming Communism: Material Cultures of Nostalgia in Former East Germany’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 123–​138. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1982) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Battaglia, Debbora (1995) ‘On Practical Nostalgia: Self-​Prospecting among Urban Trobrianders’, in Debbora Battaglia (ed) Rhetorics of Self-​Making. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp 77–​96. Berdahl, Daphne (1999) ‘ “(N)Ostalgie” for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things’. Ethnos, 64 (2): 192–​211. Berliner, David (2010) ‘Perdre l’esprit du lieu: Les politiques de l’Unesco à Luang Prabang (RDP Lao)’. Terrain, 55: 91–​105. Berliner, David (2014a) ‘On Exonostalgia’. Anthropological Theory, 14: 373–​386. Berliner, David (2014b) ‘Are Anthropologists Nostalgist?’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 17–​34. Berliner, David (2020) Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage and Our Accelerated Times. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.Bissell, William Cunningham (2005) ‘Engaging Colonial Nostalgia’. Cultural Anthropology, 20: 215–​248. Bourdieu, Pierre (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boyer, Dominic (2006) ‘Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany’. Public Culture, 18: 361–​381. Boyer, Dominic (2012) ‘From Algos to Autonomos: Nostalgic Eastern Europe as Postimperial Mania’, in Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (eds) Post-​Communist Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 17–​28. Brulotte, Ronda L. and Michael A. Di Giovine (eds) (2014) Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing. Bryant, Rebecca (2014) ‘Nostalgia and the Discovery of Loss: Essentializing the Turkish Cypriot Past’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 155–​177.

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Caldwell, Melissa L. (2002) ‘The Taste of Nationalism: Food Politics in Postsocialist Moscow’. Ethnos, 67: 295–​319. Caldwell, Melissa L. (2004) ‘Domesticating the French Fry: McDonald’s and Consumerism in Moscow’. Journal of Consumer Culture, 4: 5–​26. Caldwell, Melissa L. (2006) ‘Tasting the Worlds of Yesterday and Today: Culinary Tourism and Nostalgia Foods in Post-​Soviet Russia’, in Richard Wilk (ed) Fast Food/​Slow Food: The Cultural Economy of the Global Food System. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, pp 97–​112. Caldwell, Melissa L. (2011) Dacha Idylls: Living Organically in Russia’s Countryside. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Caldwell, Melissa L. (2014) ‘Digestive Politics in Russia: Feeling the Sensorium beyond the Palate’. Food and Foodways, 22: 112–​135. Campbell, Gary, Laurajane Smith and Margaret Wetherell (2017) ‘Nostalgia and Heritage: Potentials, Mobilisations and Effects’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23: 609–​611. Chushak, Nadiya (2013) ‘Yugonostalgic against All Odds: Nostalgia for Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia among Young Leftist Activists in Contemporary Serbia’. PhD thesis, University of Melbourne. Available online at: https://​minervaaccess.unimelb.edu.au/​handle/​11343/​38288 (accessed 4 October 2020). De Giosa, Pierpaolo (2021) World Heritage and Urban Politics in Malaysia: A Cityscape Below the Winds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Douglas, Mary (1958) ‘Raffia Cloth Distribution in the Lele Economy’. Africa, 28: 109–​122. Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dzenovska, Dace (2020) ‘Emptiness: Capitalism without People in the Latvian Countryside’. American Ethnologist, 47: 10–​26. Elyachar, Julia (2010) ‘Phatic Labor, Infrastructure and the Question of Empowerment in Cairo’. American Ethnologist, 37: 452–​464. Emoff, Ron (2002) ‘Phantom Nostalgia and Recollecting (from) the Colonial Past in Tamatave, Madagascar’. Ethnomusicology, 46: 265–​283. Fabian, Johannes (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Gilbert, Andrew (2019) ‘Beyond Nostalgia: Other Historical Emotions. History and Anthropology, 30: 293–​312. Hann, Chris (2014) ‘Why Post-​Imperial Trumps Post-​Socialist: Crying Back the National Past in Hungary’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 96–​122. Haukanes, Haldis (2017) ‘Futures Full of Promise, Futures of Despair: Contrasting Temporalities in the Life Narratives of Young Czechs’. Slovensky Narodopis, 2: 120–​134.

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Herzfeld, Michael (2014) ‘Drunken Noodles and Prostitutes’ Pasta: The Intangible Delicacy of Cultural Embarrassments in International Policy Settings’. Ethnologies, 36: 47–​62. Herzfeld, Michael (2016) Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics and the Real Life of States, Societies and Institutions (3rd edn). New York: Routledge. Herzfeld, Michael (2018) ‘Anthropological Realism in a Scientistic Age’. Anthropological Theory, 118: 129–​150. Herzfeld, Michael (2021a) Subversive Archaism: Troubling Traditionalists and the Politics of National Heritage. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Herzfeld, Michael (2021b) ‘ “Vile Corpse”: Urban Decay as Human Beauty and Social Pollution’, in Ghassan Hage (ed) Decay. Durham: Duke University Press, in press. Hodgen, Margaret T. (1936) The Doctrine of Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man. London: Allenson. Houtman, Gustaaf (1988) ‘Interview with Maurice Bloch’. Anthropology Today, 4 (1): 18–​21. Jakoubek, Marek and Lenka Budilová (nd) ‘An Interview with Prof. Judith M. Okely: “I Seem to Provoke Controversy …” ’. Available online at: https://​core.ac.uk/​download/​pdf/​295553633.pdf. Kavouras, Pavlos (Καβουράς, Παύλος) (nd) Αλληγορίες της νοσταλγίας: μουσική, παράδοση και νεωτερικότητα στη μεσογειακή περιφέρεια [Allighories tis nostalyias: mousiki, paradhosi ke neoterikotita sti mesoyiaki periferia]. Available online at: http://​scholar.uoa.gr/​sites/​ default/​files/​pkavouras/​files/​kavouras_​gr_​2013b.pdf Klumbytė, Neringa (2006) ‘Ethnography of Voting: Nostalgia, Subjectivity and Popular Politics in Post-​Socialist Lithuania’. PhD thesis, University of Pittsburgh. Available online at: http://​d-​scholarship.pitt.edu/​7217/​1/​ KlumbyteNeringa2006-​ETD.pdf. Korsmeyer, Carolyn and David Sutton (2011) ‘The Sensory Experience of Food’. Food, Culture and Society, 14: 461–​475. Lang, Luciana (2017) ‘Simulating Fisherfolk and Performing Heritage through Ritual, History, and Nostalgia’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23: 628–​642. Lankauskas, Gediminas (2014) ‘Missing Socialism Again? The Malaise of Nostalgia in Post-​Soviet Lithuania’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 35–​60. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude (1974) Tristes Tropiques. New York: Athenaeum. Lindstrom, Nicole (2005) ‘Yugonostalgia: Restorative and Reflective Nostalgia in Yugoslavia’. East Central Europe/​L’Europe du Centre-​Est, 32: 227–​237.

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Malinowski, Bronislaw (1936) ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, in Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards (1923) The Meaning of Meaning. London: Kegan Paul, Supplement I, pp 296–​336. Mauss, Marcel (1935) ‘Les techniques du corps’. Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, 32: 271–​293. Mauss, Marcel (1954) The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen & West. Nadkarni, Maya and Olga Shevchenko (2014) ‘The Politics of Nostalgia in the Aftermath of Socialism’s Collapse: A Case for Comparative Analysis’, in Olivia Angé and David Berliner (eds) Anthropology and Nostalgia. Oxford: Berghahn, pp 61–​95. Orr, Raymond (2017) ‘The Nostalgic Native? The Politics and Terms of Heritage and Remembrance in Two Communities’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23: 643–​653. Pires, Ema (2014) ‘Re-​Scripting Colonial Heritage’. Cultura: International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, 11: 129–​139. Reed, Amber R. (2016) ‘Nostalgia in the Post-​Apartheid State’. Anthropology Southern Africa, 39: 97–​109. Rosaldo, Renato (1989) ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’. Representations, 26: 107–​122. Sant Cassia, Paul (2000) ‘Exoticizing Discoveries and Extraordinary Experiences: “Traditional” Music, Modernity, and Nostalgia in Malta and Other Mediterranean Societies’. Ethnomusicology, 44: 281–​301. Schober, Elisabeth (2016) ‘Building a City: Korean Capitalists and Navy Nostalgia in “Overheated” Subic Bay’. History and Anthropology, 27: 488–​503. Seremetakis, C. Nadia (1993) ‘Memory of the Senses: Historical Perception, Commensal Exchange and Modernity’. Visual Anthropology Review, 9 (2): 2–​18. Seremetakis, C. Nadia (1994) The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Boulder, CO: Westview. Sheriff, Abdul (2019) ‘Contradictions in the Heritagization of Zanzibar “Stone Town” ’, in Burkhard Schnepel and Tansen Sen (eds) Travelling Pasts: The Politics of Cultural Heritage in the Indian Ocean World. Leiden: Brill, pp 221–​245. Silverstein, Michael and Greg Urban (eds) (1996) Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Laurajane (2006) Uses of Heritage. London: Routledge. Smith, Laurajane and Gary Campbell (2017) ‘ “Nostalgia for the Future”: Memory, Nostalgia and the Politics of Class’. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 23: 612–​627. Stewart, Kathleen (1988) ‘Nostalgia –​A Polemic’. Cultural Anthropology, 3: 227–​241.

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Media Studies and Nostalgia: Media Philosophy and Nostalgizing in Times of Crisis Katharina Niemeyer

Introduction As most of us experienced, 2020 was a challenging year for the vast majority of people and countries around the world due to the consequences of the coronavirus pandemic. For a scholar in the humanities, it is difficult to omit current events from critical reflections, but it is also not adequate nor possible to analyse the present situation without the necessary historical distance. Nevertheless, one of the sentiments that has been expressed, narrated, experienced and performed via social media networks, media companies and ‘traditional’ news media alike during this crisis is –​somehow unsurprisingly –​one of nostalgia. For quite some time, scholars such as Svetlana Boym (2001) have pointed out that feelings of nostalgia emerge as protective reactions to crises and to so-​called progress –​both inevitable historical companions to most of our societies and systems (Hartog 2015). Being obliged to stay at home and/​or to maintain distance from others has triggered great loss: people –​some of whom are close to us –​dying; limited or no physical relations with other individuals; restricted freedom to walk and to be in public spaces; losing jobs and so on. For some, the lockdown has also led to an awareness of the necessity to decelerate and slow down the current accelerated rhythm of life and to fight against, more

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than ever, social inequalities and dysfunctional healthcare systems. The role of journalists and news media during a crisis is, and has always been, crucial when it comes to sharing public health and political information. As forms of social media networks, they also assure a sort of presence and symbolic connection between their readers and viewers. It is therefore no surprise that informational and fictional media consumption has received a tremendous amount of hype during this crisis (Lee and Koblin 2020) in order for us to stay in touch with the ‘outside’ world from within the confines of our walls. Likewise, ‘nostalgic’ leisure activities (playing board games, watching television shows and so on) have occupied the ‘free’ time of those privileged enough to have any, as a means by which to distract themselves, calm their anxiety (Gammon and Ramshaw 2020) or to cope with the uncertainty of the situation by ‘nostalgising’ (Niemeyer 2014; Sedikides et al 2015). At some point, nostalgia became viral. The current world we live in is, of course, not only characterized by the coronavirus crisis, but likewise by an ecological urgency and by a ‘generalized’ uncertainty and anxiety about politics, culture and the future itself. Numerous phenomena have triggered different types of nostalgia throughout recent years, ranging from sustainable (Davies 2010), environmental (Howell et al 2019) and political nostalgia (Steenvoorden and Harteveld 2018; Landgrebe 2020; Richards et al 2020), for example, to emancipatory (Kisukidi 2014), motivational (Sedikides and Wildschut 2020) as well as mediated and media nostalgia (Niemeyer 2014; Lizardi 2017; Menke 2018). All of these nostalgias (the plural here underpins the diversity of its forms, expressions and meanings) are not necessarily new; however, they have gained greater visibility and (un)popularity with their potential spread and accumulation in news media cycles and via social media networks. In other words, the increasing role of media and mediatization in our everyday lives has altered –​ and to some extent accelerated –​the ways in which we interact with people both privately and publicly. This is especially relevant in regard to recent media technologies and, more specifically, to social online media which create new spaces for emotional experiences, expressions and exchanges. This leads not only to an extended visibility of political opinions or intimate feelings, but also to an accumulation of the latter in the form of big data. It is now possible to access different expressions and practices of nostalgia that would normally circulate in separate social spheres. Media and media technologies are therefore not only communicative platforms of and for nostalgia, but they can also serve to provoke and to ‘heal’ it (Niemeyer 2014; Menke 2017). This short introduction hints at the intrinsic relationship between media and nostalgia, which will be explored in this chapter from a media-​philosophical standpoint by discussing the current theoretical and empirical scholarly work in the field.

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Media philosophy, nostalgia and medi(a)cation The emergence of media studies is very recent in comparison to other disciplines and academic domains. It is therefore necessary to introduce the different disciplinary crossings and influences from other research domains in order to tackle the recent and increasing visibility of nostalgia in the field of media studies. A second important point here is that media studies is an open discipline, drawing scholars from other academic fields that are often interested in media or communication. As Jussi Parikka states, ‘media study also happens outside Media Studies’ (Parikka 2020: 60). In this way, media scholars may be understood as in-​disciplined (Niemeyer 2020) as they cross, reject and blur traditional disciplinary boarders. For these reasons, this chapter will not place emphasis on media studies as an academic discipline nor on its relations to nostalgia; rather, it will primarily situate the historically intrinsic relationship between media and the sentiments, performances and experiences of nostalgia from a media-​philosophical perspective (Hartmann 2002; Krämer 2015; Peters 2015; Barker 2020) in order to provide a better understanding about the recent interest in media and nostalgia, as well its communicative expressions and performances. A media-​philosophical perspective is informed by the concept that media does not exclusively refer to the commonly associated ‘traditional’ media such as television, radio, media industries and institutions, platforms or online social networks. Rather, media philosophy embraces diverse media as potential correlation makers and breakers and as human, technical or imaginative transmitters (Krämer 2015) that share, construct, inform, observe and understand realties by considering their historical contexts, archaeological emergence and persistence as well as their entanglements with ‘nature’ and physical matter. This approach offers the possibility to bring into the forefront that which media scholars are primarily interested in: the concept of relation as well as the concept of difference. A media-​philosophical approach does not suggest that everything can be interpreted as a media, but it offers, at the very least, a possibility to expand conceptual perspectives and to remind us that ‘there is always an outside of media’ (Krämer 2015: 19). More specifically in accordance with this chapter, media-​philosophy is one of the approaches in media studies and media theory that is responsible for developing the intrinsic relation of media and nostalgia from a historical standpoint: nostalgia is a question of loss and a bittersweet feeling that surfaces amid change –​physical or social change (such as distancing), the change of landscapes or urban areas –​or it may be triggered by (material) perception: scents, sounds or images. Nostalgia comes and goes as other feelings do and media is its point de passage (passage point). Historically linked to melancholia, nostalgia was initially known as homesickness. Located

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between remembrance and forgetting, between idealization and creativity, it is a recollection of times and places that are no more, no longer accessible or perhaps never were. Nostalgia can also refer to a desire to return to a past that has never actually been experienced by the yearning person, or to the longing regret for a past that never was but that could have been, or for a future that never will be. This chapter characterizes nostalgia as something that we actively feel, do and perform with and via media on an individual and collective level –​not only in the form of an (imaginative) return to a past place or time but also, and more overtly, in the form of thinking about the present and imagining the future. One of the probable explanations that can lead us to the current virality of nostalgia in society is the historically double-​sided entanglement between media and nostalgia, a relation that has not been the typical or main focus of historical or psychological research on nostalgia. For that reason, it might be useful to rapidly recall some historical aspects and interpretational shifts of nostalgia without delving into the details of its numerous conceptualizations in other scholarly fields, as this type of literature already exists (recent informative overviews, for example, are Kalinina 2016; Becker 2018; Jacobson 2020). The coining of the medical neologism ‘nostalgia’ to signify homesickness, a feeling recognized and expressed in Homer’s Odyssey, first appeared in a medical thesis written by Johannes Hofer in 1688 in Switzerland, making reference to a recurring sickness in the army. The Greek etymology of the concept thus comes from nostos (to return home) and algia (longing/​yearning or the German Sehnsucht). In other words, a sickness of time and space. The sick were cured when they went home or with the promise of returning home, when they were visited by members of their family or when they listened to music or stories that evoked images and memories of their homeland (Bolzinger 2007). Thus, in the 17th century, the power of narratives, images and sounds acting as medi(a)cines made it possible to alleviate the symptoms of nostalgia, transporting one to another space/​time –​which still holds true today. Media can also be located at the origin of the nostalgic feeling precisely by functioning as a cure (Estévez 2005; Burman 2010; Niemeyer 2014; Menke 2017; Wulf et al 2018). The potential of media and technologies as helpful coping mechanisms and imaginative, creative resources has been empirically analysed by Manuel Menke (2018), whose study reconfirms the notion that nostalgia often appears in times of transition (Boym 2001; Zhou et al 2008; Hamilton et al 2014) and that ‘recent’ media changes themselves trigger different types of nostalgia. Approaching media exclusively as simple medications for ‘healing’ nostalgia or for coping unreflectively with change is not the aim here and must be put into perspective. The relationship between nostalgia and media is more complex than that, but its historical ‘medi(c)al’ roots hint, once again, at

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the virality of nostalgia in times of crisis; nostalgia itself navigates between its bittersweet tendencies –​between joyful sadness and sad joy.

Recent research on media and nostalgia Until very recently, most academic work interested in media and communication focused on nostalgic aesthetics or narrative elements without reflecting in detail on their performative or functional link with nostalgia and/​or with the readers and viewers themselves. Where such links were made, emphasis was always placed on a single medium such as television (Holdsworth 2011), film (Dika 2003), video games (Suominen 2007) or on media-​technological nostalgia per se (Böhn and Möser 2010). Despite the quality of the available research and conceptual reflections, something has been missing: in these works, nostalgia continues to be mainly (and pejoratively) connected to the past and has been approached as a westernized, mostly regressive or ‘stylish’ concept. Since the mid-​2000s this conceptualization of nostalgia has been challenged –​which might coincide with the arrival of Web 2.0 and the possibility of an ‘accumulation’ of the past in online archives or digital storage media (Niemeyer 2016). It was Sean Scanlan (2004) in cultural studies, as well as Michael Pickering and Emily Keightley (2006) in sociology, who launched a call for rethinking nostalgia, and, in the same year, scholars in psychology empirically demonstrated the more constructive and positive nature of nostalgia as a means for overcoming personal crises of the present (Arndt et al 2006). Moreover, the publication of a special issue of the journal Memory Studies, focusing on historical misconceptions about nostalgia, finally paved the way toward a more performative and subtle approach to individual and collective nostalgia (Dames 2010). Thus, the transition toward the verb ‘to nostalgize’ became possible (Niemeyer 2014; Sedikides et al 2015). Without attempting to deny nostalgia’s ‘dark side’ –​often as the object and tool of manipulative economic and political interests –​its status as a dialectical, Western, retrogressive and postcolonial construction is changing. In anthropology, Olivia Angé and David Berliner (2015), as well as Annika Lems (2016), took a step in this direction. Another step toward a more inclusive and cross-​disciplinary approach to nostalgia and media in a broader sense has also been demonstrated by the creation of the International Media and Nostalgia Network in 2015 (https://​medianostalgia. org/​), a network that has grown from an initial 8 members to more than 60 members across all continents and diverse academic backgrounds. However, it was especially the work of Alastair Bonnett (2016) that put an end to the idea of nostalgia as something constructed and invented by the West for the West. Basing his work on studies of different continents, he revealed the diverse facets of nostalgia and its universal existence and power.

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Almost within the same time frame, media scholars began developing an interest in the changing perspectives on nostalgia and its more general relations to media (Niemeyer 2014; Lizardi 2015). Primarily interested in the question of mass media, especially in regard to video games and audio-​visual productions, Ryan Lizardi embraces nostalgia mainly as a generational phenomenon. Media industries seek motivation in the latter by producing nostalgic texts, reboots and reruns. The authors of the chapters in Media and Nostalgia (2014) offer a cross-​disciplinary reflection with several methodological essays on television, television series, literature, the web, film, music, art and family movies –​but more precise research on production processes, economic aspects and reception studies was still lacking at that time. For several years now, we have seen an increasing interest among researchers from different cultural and scholarly backgrounds regarding the relation of media and communication with nostalgia, retro and vintage cultures. We can first and foremost note the presence of many articles and books dealing with the performative approach of nostalgia and ‘media texts’ such as film (Ochonicky 2020b; Dwyer 2015; Sperb 2015; Fevry 2017), digital and platform television (Pallister 2019), cultural and media industries (Natterer 2017), interactive nostalgia (Lizardi 2019), visual cultures and aesthetics (Kay et al 2017; Bevan 2019; Sielke 2019; Steiner 2020), video games (Ivănescu 2019; Toniolo and Giovannini 2020) or media cultures in the broad sense of the term (Sielke 2017; Abend et al 2018; Santa Cruz and Ferraz 2019), followed by Dominik Schrey (2017), who offers a detailed reflection on analogue nostalgia primarily in relation to media and visual arts. During the same period, a profusion of special issues dedicated to the topics of media, nostalgia and retro/​vintage cultures emerged. The Italian publication H-​ ermes: Journal of Communication: Nostalgia 8 (2016) embraces the general theme of nostalgia with various articles that tackle the concept itself, as well as its historical, cultural and communicational aspects. Also highlighting nostalgia, but with a focus solely placed on media and communication, is the Austrian journal Medien & Zeit which published a special issue (Menke and Schwarzenegger 2017) outlining new empirical perspectives. Other publications have also stood out, both by addressing media and cultural texts and production, as well as by offering an explicit or implicit reflection on nostalgia in connection with a specific topic. Kim Knowles (2015) edited a special issue for the European Journal of Media Studies on vintage with a wide-​ranging exploration of theoretical questions, the relationship between retro and vintage and media-​nostalgic phenomena. In the French journal Le Temps des Médias, Emmanuelle Fantin and Thibault Le Hégarat (2016) also devoted a special issue to the question of the Golden Age (the myth of the golden past), in which they question the historical and mnemonic media-​ constructions of often-​idealized times. With the publication of ‘The New

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Old: Archaisms and Anachronisms across Media’, Stefano Baschiera and Elena Caoduro (2017) delve into the topic by focusing on past-​ness styles and retro aesthetics (at times nostalgic). With an emphasis on media and objects of popular culture, the recent publication of Recherches en communication (Fevry et al 2018) reinforces the necessity to interrogate all temporal aspects of nostalgia, especially the idea of retro-​futurism. Furthermore, the issue of queer nostalgia and popular culture is the subject of two recent major publications (Padva 2015; Kies and West 2017) that reveal the importance of including aspects of intersectionality and gender when studying nostalgia. This brief and non-​exhaustive overview of the thriving research activities in the field of media and communication, intersecting frequently with cultural studies, shows a broadening interest in nostalgia. The ways in which nostalgia is approached, however, differ among the scholars mentioned. Which types of ‘nostalgia’ are studied in these works, and is it possible to infer a typology?

From media nostalgia to mediated nostalgia and media-​induced nostalgia In the introduction to Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future, a modest attempt at establishing conceptual relations between communicative practices, media and nostalgia is made by asserting that media offer spaces and temporalities for ‘nostalgizing’: Media produce contents and narratives not only in the nostalgic style but also as triggers of nostalgia. Media, and new technologies in particular, can function as platforms, projection places and tools to express nostalgia. Furthermore, media are very often nostalgic for themselves, their own past, their structures and contents. Perpetual media changes render media nostalgic for their non-​existent end. (Niemeyer 2014: 7) What is absent from this attempt at definition is, firstly, a more practice-​ oriented or user-​oriented approach toward nostalgia and an acknowledgement of the intersections between vintage technology-​practice and aesthetics, even if the concept of ‘nostalgizing’ does allude to it. Paolo Magaudda and Sergio Minniti (2019), as well as Mani Mehrvarz and Maryam Muliaee (2020), recently made important progress in addressing this discrepancy. Likewise, the body of literature published in the last several years has increasingly digressed from a straightforward notion of either media or their users as ‘being nostalgic’, toward an interpretation of how media and their users are intertwined in a performative process. The latter at once seems to involve the pleasure of cultural consumption associated with mediated nostalgia (very

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often the content or experience of such ‘nostalgias’ is related to the memory of media devices and their texts, but also to ritual leisure activities of the past shared with friends or family) alongside a more profound search for ‘home’. The different types and expressions of mostly, but not exclusively, media-​ related nostalgia evidently overlap with and oscillate between media nostalgia, mediated nostalgia and media-​induced nostalgia. Media nostalgia refers here to the longing that is expressed for specific media texts (television shows, films and so on), media technologies (old television devices, video-​game consoles or cameras) and media practices or professions (spinning vinyl, cutting film or projecting slides). Media nostalgia also concerns media institutions and industries that predominantly yearn nostalgically for their own past productions, practices and archives. Mediated nostalgia refers to the explicit communication, performance, expression or transmission of nostalgic feelings or aesthetics, but it does not necessarily concern media as being the object of the nostalgic longing. In other words, similar to political or environmental nostalgia, for example, media nostalgia is always mediated at some point by placing nostalgia at the forefront of media texts, practices and technologies. Mediated nostalgia, on the other hand, is the communicative process of nostalgic feeling in form of language, pictures or design through media. Media-​induced nostalgia (which will not be the focus of the following discussion) does refer to the fact that media texts and objects can trigger nostalgia even if there is no economic, political or other ‘intention’ to provoke or programme it. Likewise, media nostalgia or mediated nostalgia does not necessarily induce a nostalgic feeling among viewers or readers. Which types of conceptual frameworks and empirical studies have been realized in recent years concerning mediated nostalgia and media nostalgia? The following overview is not exhaustive; rather, it is an attempt to organize and classify the proliferation of numerous theoretical and empirical studies in the field of media and nostalgia.

Mediated nostalgia as a cultural style in media texts Media texts that use ‘nostalgic’ aesthetics (black and white, sepia, grains and so on) or narratives are certainly not new and have already been analysed in the past. With his postmodern critique, Fredric Jameson (1991) names such aesthetics nostalgic modes, whereas Paul Grainge (2000) reworks this concept and discusses in detail nostalgia as a cultural style by depicting nostalgia as a feeling –​a nostalgic mood: While the relationship between mood and mode cannot be ignored, neither should it simply be assumed. Nostalgia modes are not, by necessity, generated by nostalgic moods, or vice versa. Reducing

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sentiment and style to a fixed and causal relation can underestimate the way that, as a cultural style, nostalgia has become divorced from a necessary concept of loss. (Grainge 2000: 29) Currently, more and more researchers are engaging with an even broader analysis of nostalgia as a cultural form in relation to diverse media texts and objects of popular culture (advertising, television shows, films, video games and so on) by addressing questions of commodification and interrogating the technological tools that render those styles possible. For example, recent texts edited by Baschiera and Caoduro (2017) are an important contribution as they consider the place of these styles within media theory, media archaeology and within (audio-​)visual media in general. Further steps in this direction can be witnessed in a recent chapter about nostalgia and visual culture that discusses various visual modes that represent or simulate the past (Menke and Niemeyer 2019) and in three other recently published books that include reflections on nostalgic styles (Kay et al 2017; Abend et al 2018; Bevan 2019). And not to be forgotten are also the works on amateur uses of filters in everyday photography (Bartholeyns 2014; Chopra-​Gant 2016), for example, or the role of such nostalgic styles in media art (for example, Schrey 2017). As mentioned earlier, these nostalgic modes or styles do not automatically generate nostalgic feelings, yet sometimes they are the ‘results’, experimentations or creations that can be described as being ironic, playful or serious performances of analogue and digital (tech-​)nostalgias, which are a specific type of media nostalgia.

Analogue and digital (tech)nostalgias Nostalgia for media technologies and devices, often labelled technostalgia, is also not a new phenomenon and has deep historical foundations (Böhn and Möser 2010; van der Heijden 2015). Likely a result of passionate ‘digital-​ analogue’ discussions in media and communication studies, especially in the domains of media history (for example, Natale 2016; Balbi and Magaudda 2018) and media archaeology (for example, Huhtamo and Parikka 2011), interest in this type of nostalgia is more palpable than ever as it offers a range of methods for grasping numerous crystallizations of media change. Moreover, technostalgia can encompass a yearning for the rituals, practices, places and ways of life associated with certain technologies (for example, Niemeyer 2015; Ferraz 2017; Menke 2017; Magaudda and Minniti 2019; Mehrvarz and Muliaee 2020). Why make a distinction here between analogue and digital (tech)nostalgia? The ‘digital’ in digital nostalgia is not in opposition to the analogue, of course. These two concepts are often misinterpreted historically and technologically and their artificial separation is primarily a

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political and economic one (Sterne 2016). The concept of digital (tech)nostalgia emphasizes the idea that ‘reality is just as analogue as it is digital’ (Sterne 2016: 41). In this sense, the differentiation of these two types of nostalgia is at some point artificial, but it serves also to highlight entanglement: analogue nostalgia (for example, Marks 2002; Schrey 2014; 2017) and digital nostalgia (Wills 2002; Niemeyer 2016). These two nostalgias converge particularly in terms of their emotional involvement and, in both cases, the contraction and passage of time allows for a contrast with the past to manifest. Nostalgia is concerned with both analogue and digital objects; their technological functions and construction; their contents and forms and the social rituals, personal narratives and stories associated with them. While a Polaroid camera can materially bear traces of the time that passes, an animated GIF does not age in the same way. It is with a temporal distance that a design appears ‘old’, as is also the case with certain aesthetic forms and styles in general. Unlike retro objects that reproduce past designs as contemporary imitations, analogue vintage objects transport and depict the passage of time in and of themselves; they are essentially like ‘ruins’ that travel through time (Niemeyer 2015). Such objects may consist of an old wooden box full of photos found in your grandparents’ attic or even a Super 8 camera. This is, therefore, a concrete materialization, perceptible through the tangible senses of touch and smell. Furthermore, ‘fake’ vintage objects, such as Polaroid cameras made today, do not need to be ‘old’ in order to produce nostalgic feelings: the sentimental effect of the past is entirely created and simulated in the present. Encoding objects from the past can thus produce a kind of ‘true past’ effect, often in the form of skeuomorphs (Baschiera and Caoduro 2017; Schrey 2017). Similarly, using new techniques to make content sound and appear old is no longer ‘new’, as demonstrated by the television series Stranger Things (Steiner 2020). A second form of analogue nostalgia concerns the vintage techniques and rituals connected with these objects. This type of nostalgia can be found dispersed across all media –​in music, video games, gastronomy and so on –​and, once again, reiterates the importance of the technology or the tool in nostalgic production through a quest for authenticity or, at the very least, its simulation. We often reject the idea that digital objects are sensorial agents, that they are at the same level or have the same symbolic value as objects that we can physically touch. And yet, nostalgic feeling can also be expressed for objects that have never been present to us in their analogue form. They are ‘digital icons’ that transport us to a social space and time in the past, shared with friends or family. It is thus ‘our’ personal or institutional history that is bound to this ‘digital’ object. In other words, it is rituals and stories that transform these digital objects into agents. An old video game or animated

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GIF can, therefore, have the same nostalgic potential as a car from the 1920s or a VHS cassette.

Institutional media nostalgia and nostalgia programming The accumulation and increased availability of images, texts and sounds from the past (or at least from parts of the past) –​especially since the development of Web 2.0 and different forms of digital storage or transformation techniques from analogue to digital data –​may be a factor that can potentially amplify and trigger nostalgia. These new ways of accessing the past are particularly interesting for media institutions of all kinds: news media, media industries (video games, film and so on), streaming platforms as well as traditional television channels. Netflix is a prominent example for rerunning old shows and also for creating new ones with nostalgic tones (Pallister 2019). Nevertheless, more traditional television broadcasters such as Radio Canada, for instance, draw inspiration from the past by producing shows that invite local and national television celebrities to discuss the past –​mainly via archival footage. Bringing the past back onto the screen can potentially trigger the viewer’s nostalgia, but it is also a technique for attracting new, younger viewers in order to create connections between generations. For example, by running the remastered show Friends on Netflix, older fans are able to reconnect, while younger people can access their parents’ (nostalgic) past. Such strategies do not necessarily work seamlessly, as the show underpins and emphasizes the privileges of White people and does not at all correspond to current historical changes. Essentially, through nostalgia –​often for their own pasts –​media institutions and industries use this potential in different ways. For example, they reuse their archives by commodifying them or creating new shows with archival material. Jérôme Bourdon (2018) analyses not only the changing discourse on television, attributing the concept of institutional nostalgia mainly to programmers and researchers who long for former media organizational forms, but also examines the ways in which journalists worked, for example. Closely related to this institutional nostalgia, Bourdon evokes the rebroadcast of old television shows as potentially categorized within so-​called media nostalgia. Berber Hagedoorn (2017) suggests a hybrid form of institutional and media nostalgia by coining the term programmed nostalgia. Ryan Lizardi makes similar observations (2017), specifically discussing how media and video-​game industries intentionally attempt to produce nostalgia via reruns of vintage films and shows. More recently, Adam Ochonicky (2020a) has delivered an appealing essay on the Halloween franchise. This type of

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nostalgia research mainly concerns the analysis of the production and cross-​ media work that public and private media and cultural institutions implement (for example, Natterer 2017). Netflix occupies a very special double role here as it mediates nostalgia in the form of new home-​made productions with nostalgic styles and tones while simultaneously implementing nostalgic programming (Avilés-​Santiago 2019; Pallister 2019). During the COVID-​19 crisis, nostalgic programming has become a way to offer the public a homelike journey back to the past by screening significantly more old films, even including productions usually reserved for Christmas time. This reaction to the crisis has also served as a necessity for broadcasters to fill airtime as numerous events like the Olympic Games were postponed or cancelled and as previously planned recordings of entertainment shows or fictional productions were cancelled due to sanitary restrictions. In most parts of the world, public television channels chose to broadcast archived sports such as iconic soccer games or historical Olympic achievements. Of course, this does not necessarily mean that viewers, readers, players or users become automatically nostalgic as a result of consuming content diffused by industries or institutions; ‘nostalgic reception’ is more complicated than it might initially seem. Some researchers are already working on the potential curative possibilities of media nostalgia, which is certainly not always intentional or prefabricated. Media-​induced nostalgia understood as triggers of well-​being (Wulf et al 2018) accompany some ideal functions of nostalgia programming. Future research on these interrelations asks for some observer distance in order to distinguish between the different psychological and cultural layers of nostalgia. It also asks for us to critically penetrate the nostalgia loops that might surface between production and reception standpoints. In other words, further work on the production and reception of media nostalgia is still needed because it implies a nostalgic a priori of the potential consumers, but also of the industries and institutions themselves.

Conclusion This chapter has aimed at synthesizing and discussing current scholarly work on nostalgia and media. If we continue to distinguish –​without imposing a strict categorization –​between the different nostalgias that are shared in, via and with the media and (new) information and communication technologies, particularly on the worldwide web, we must not unconditionally surrender to or accept their political or economic exploitation. What nostalgia does is that it allows us to be joyful and creative, while also acting as an individual and collective way of relieving the pain of space, time and personal loss. It makes it possible to confront the irreversibility of time and of our finiteness, allowing humans to (re)connect with one

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another. And this is precisely where the danger of its political and commercial abuse lies: nostalgia as a profound feeling of loss, and sometimes of joy, is a vulnerable and exploitable feeling. Nevertheless, researchers can, of course, rely on critical and resisting viewers, listeners and users. The distinction between joyful nostalgia and more deeply rooted yearnings cannot exclusively be governed by media industries or other social institutions. People are capable of self-​‘medi(a)cating’ their personal nostalgia, to nostalgize as they wish, by making family films (Sapio 2014) or taking photographs (Arnold-​ de Simine and Leal 2018), for example, or to participate in the activities of online communities (Kalinina and Menke 2016). The heterogeneous universality of nostalgic feeling and its diversity of expressions (Bonnett 2016) has the potential to lead to an epistemological decolonization of nostalgia. To do so, one must critically approach the often viral commodification of nostalgia which undermines deep-​rooted yearnings for the past, present and future. Otherwise stated, nostalgia as a feeling and as a practice will not disappear in the future and will likely pursue its usual historical waves and moments. Media institutions and industries will always be able to rely on the existence of nostalgia for use in their business strategies. What remains, often hidden behind these production cycles, is the reality that industries and institutions often use nostalgia as a simple, bittersweet comforting tactic, an amusing reminder of the past or an entertaining anachronism. The problem here is that nostalgic media programming often inhibits other productions that could offer a more progressive and emancipative nostalgia for the future –​such as ecological topics, for instance. Likewise, viewers might be under the impression that the media of the past, as well as their own consumption of media in the past, were not very diverse, since many archives have been lost or are unprofitable, which leads to the reiteration of dominant power and privilege patterns as witnessed with the rerun of Friends, for example. One future possibility to avoid such outcomes and to create more space for various types of nostalgia is to continue to theorize and analyse mediated nostalgias that are shared ‘online’ (mostly via social media networks), which can subsequently lead to interesting fieldwork ‘offline’, permitting us to dig deeper under the surface of contemporary nostalgic yearnings in order to render them visible. Media studies can contribute here from a conceptual, but also methodological, perspective. The undeniable idea of nostalgia as a communicative practice with intrinsic and historical relations to media texts and technologies as triggers, alleviating agents and spaces for expressing and performing nostalgia is now, more than ever, evident as a consequence of the research that has been done internationally over the past few decades. In this sense, the contribution of media and communication scholars to nostalgia studies is and will continue to be crucial.

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Marketing and Nostalgia: Unpacking the Past and Future of Marketing and Consumer Research on Nostalgia Ela Veresiu, Thomas Derek Robinson and Ana Babić Rosario

Introduction Nostalgia permeates nearly all contemporary markets and has become a central theme for numerous brands in a wide array of industries including automotive, entertainment, technology, music, food, fashion and tourism. Marketers and consumers appear united in valorizing nostalgia as a meaningful framework for almost any conceivable consumption activity. Contemporary consumers’ nostalgia is found to be triggered by increasingly intense mass migrations, environmental catastrophes, technological discontinuities, accelerating urbanization, economic fluctuations and geopolitical shocks (Goulding 2001; Brown et al 2003; Holak et al 2007; Precourt 2013; Hamilton et al 2014). Studies have consistently shown that in tough times individuals desire to live a simpler life from a personally experienced or imagined past (Baker and Azzari 2020). Our addition to this astute finding is that people engage in nostalgic consumption not only when they experience profound social turmoil and personal alienation in the present, but also heightened anxiousness about the future. Consequently, as the world becomes increasingly unpredictable, marketers intensify their exploitation of consumers’ desire to return to a more peacefully perceived past in order to sell their products. Nostalgia is therefore a highly lucrative marketing strategy (Hartmann and Brunk 2019), and hence important to

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consumer research because it can create strong and enduring bonds between different market offerings and a wide variety of consumer segments. This chapter elucidates how nostalgia has been conceptualized and mobilized in different marketing research domains. We do this by scrutinizing how scholars study and understand nostalgia across three different levels of theoretical and empirical observation –​individual nostalgia among consumers, producers’ application of nostalgia in advertising and branding, as well as collective nostalgia in broader consumer culture. On this basis, we discuss the role of consumption, production, exchange and markets for nostalgia as a substantive topic, providing examples from extant work. We conclude by offering an outlook on upcoming trends within nostalgia marketing and consumer research. One of the earliest mentions of nostalgia in marketing research is found in a study on optimizing promotional segmentation strategies for television programming (Gensch and Ranganathan 1974). Programmes such as The Andy Griffith Show and Walt Disney are used to exemplify how nostalgia and traditional values play an important role in this regard. However, such early work does not provide any explicit definition of nostalgia. One early and influential conceptualization within the marketing lexicon can be found in Russell W. Belk’s (1988) study of consumer possessions and the extended self. Specifically, this paper concludes that consumers’ fascination with things past can involve nostalgia. The scholar informs his analysis by drawing on Susan Stewart’s (1984) description of nostalgia as a sadness without an object in combination with Immanuel Kant’s (1798) explanation of it as a longing for one’s childhood, Grant McCracken’s (1988) account of it as maintaining idealized values and visions of a golden age that never existed, as well as Fred Davis’s (1979) theorization of nostalgia as it applies to the self: Nostalgia (like long-​term memory, like reminiscence, like daydreaming) is deeply implicated in our sense of who we are, what we are about, and (though possibly with much less inner clarity) whither we go. In short, nostalgia is … a readily accessible psychological lens … for the never ending work of constructing, maintaining, and reconstructing our identities. (Davis 1979: 31) However, Belk (1990: 670) did not establish his own definition of consumer nostalgia until a few years later, capturing it as ‘a wistful mood that may be prompted by an object –​a scene, a smell, or a strain of music’. Since then, nostalgia has received ample attention in marketing and consumer research, especially in lockstep with the end-​of-​the-​millennium ethos. Researchers have predominantly focused on nostalgia as a selective recall of the past through rose-​coloured glasses (Belk 1991; Havlena and Holak 1991; Holak

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and Havlena 1992), and romanticized it as a time ‘marked by spiritual unity and an absence of present-​day complexities and stresses’ (Thompson et al 1994: 443). Since the 1970s, consumers’ nostalgia has been defined in multiple ways, ranging from an individual’s measurable ‘consumption preference toward objects (people, places, or things) that were more common (popular, fashionable, or widely circulated) when one was younger (in early adulthood, in adolescence, in childhood) or even before birth’ (Holbrook and Schindler 1991: 330) to a ‘collective sentimental or bittersweet yearning for the past which represents a culture, a generation, or a nation’ (Baker and Kennedy 1994: 170). In accordance, nostalgia has spanned individual (Holbrook 1993), interpersonal (Havlena and Holak 1996) and collective (Brunk et al 2018) consumer forms, playing an important role in influencing consumer memories, preferences, identities and experiences. Scholars have found that nostalgia can be stimulated by ads (Stern 1992), brands (Brown et al 2003), objects (Belk 1988) and places (Goulding 2001). It can refer to a past personally experienced during a consumer’s lifetime (Schindler and Holbrook 2003), a historical period before a consumer’s birth vicariously drawn from secondary sources (Goulding 2001) or even a past that never existed but, rather, created and promoted by marketers (Brunk et al 2018). As such, nostalgia has been instrumental in theorizing not only individual consumer behaviour but also broader, market-​mediated collective popular memories and consumer culture. Overall, for marketing scholars, nostalgia represents a market-​mediated (or influenced by market actors) memory or emotion that emerges from circumstances in the present and filters out more negative aspects of the past. In other words, market actors, resources and offerings mediate consumers’ nostalgic memories and emotions. For this reason, nostalgic consumption exhibits a dark side, as people can become obsessed and seduced by the sirens of nostalgic marketing to such an extent that they fail to meaningfully engage with both the present and the future.

Nostalgia in individual consumer behaviour Nostalgia was initially interpreted as an individual, psychological phenomenon of looking back and yearning for an idealized past through consumption. This complex human state consists of both a cognitive dimension (that is, memories of personal experiences) and an affective dimension (that is, emotions that these memories evoke) that simultaneously affect consumer behaviour (Sierra and McQuitty 2007; Hamilton and Wagner 2014). Two main classes of consumer nostalgia are distinguished: (1) ‘personal nostalgia’ that ‘reflects direct experience with the object of nostalgia where the meaning is unique to the individual’ (Havlena and Holak 1996: 35; also Stern 1992;

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Goulding 2001), and (2) ‘cultural nostalgia’, which is not only ‘rooted in direct personal experiences’ but also ‘based on shared symbols, so that the resulting feeling of nostalgia reflects the individual’s connection to other members of the culture’ (Havlena and Holak 1996: 37). This latter form of nostalgia can, for example, appear by reminiscing about consumption experiences such as the famous 1969 music festival Woodstock or the US-​ centric, consumption-​fuelled celebration of Thanksgiving. In this type of marketing research the past is often discussed as essential to a consumer’s identity or sense of self (Belk 1990). Individual consumer nostalgia is widely conceptualized as a positive emotion (Holbrook and Schindler 1991; Holak and Havlena 1998), although some scholars argue that it has a bittersweet component (Havlena and Holak 1991; Baker and Kennedy 1994; Walder 2014) as pleasant memories involve unpleasant, irreversible loss of or distance from the past. Researchers have demonstrated that the past can bring comfort to consumers and make them feel better about themselves (Loveland et al 2010). Particularly, prior work shows that when consumers feel sad and powerless they experience higher levels of nostalgia and prefer consumption objects that provide short-​term distraction from the present (Goulding 1999, 2001, 2002; Rutherford and Shaw 2011). However, nostalgia in consumerism is not only self-​relevant but also found to be a social emotion (Zhou et al 2012). Nostalgic consumption of past familiar objects and settings can thus serve as a temporary coping mechanism or a means of escapism. Turning to memories, Morris Holbrook and Robert Schindler (1991) show that consumers maintain, sometimes for the rest of their lives, early imprinted preferences toward people, places or things that were common when they were young. Yet, consumer researchers argue that nostalgic memories also contain an imaginary character. Accordingly, despite being rich and evocative, they are often more imaginary than ‘real’. Building on this idea, scholars have expanded the conceptualization of consumer nostalgia to include: (1) ‘vicarious nostalgia’, defined as ‘a strong sense of identification with figures and movements from previous eras … that were felt to have been aesthetically or intellectually superior to the present’ (Goulding 2001: 584); (2) ‘simulated’ (Baker and Kennedy 1994) or ‘interpersonal nostalgia’ that ‘results from indirect experience obtained through direct interpersonal contact’, such as ‘the recollections of family members or close friends’ (Havlena and Holak 1996: 36); as well as (3) ‘historical’ (Stern 1992) or ‘virtual nostalgia’ dealing with ‘indirect, collective experiences’ (Havlena and Holak 1996: 37) derived from consuming historical information across various media. These different forms of nostalgia all result from consumers’ indirect and/​or imaginary experiences of the past through the recollections of friends and family or non-​personal communications, such as historical books,

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art, movies and museums. As a concrete example, one study demonstrates how Russian consumers evoke interpersonal nostalgia through everyday consumption in their mixed-​generation homes (Holak et al 2007). Psychologically oriented consumer research has therefore largely focused on consumers’ nostalgia as a quantifiable individual preference toward consuming objects from one’s past (Holbrook and Schindler 1991) that can serve as a means of escaping the present (Belk 1990). As an illustration, a common survey item that is still used to measure consumers’ nostalgic sentiment is ‘this brand reminds me of a golden age’ (Napoli et al 2014: 1093). However, such a survey item decontextualizes the notion of golden age by failing to address which Golden Age is meant. On a more critical note, nostalgia as an individual psychological consumer phenomenon (Hirsch 1992; Stern 1992; Holbrook 1993; Goulding 1999) can filter out more negative aspects of the past, and therefore lead to selective consumer recall. Furthermore, it can become detrimental to the self by encouraging hoarding, excessive materialism and socially inhibiting behaviours (Baker and Azzari 2020). As a result, the commodification of the past in nostalgic market offerings creates a fetishistic relationship to objects and events from before, which conceals or even obliterates other drivers of history for the individual consumer. Future researchers can therefore explore in greater empirical detail how the consumer psychology of nostalgia is embedded within wider sociological processes of commodity fetishization, with a view to emancipatory engagements within the market (Murray and Ozanne 1991; Murray et al 2019).

Producers’ nostalgia in branding and advertising From the producers’ perspective, nostalgia is conceptualized as a fundamental element of value that will sustain a company’s revenue growth (Lasaleta et al 2014; Almquist et al 2016). Within branding research, Stephen Brown et al (2003: 19) pioneered the idea of retro branding, which they define as a company relaunching ‘historical brands with updated features’. The authors not only demonstrate that consumers resort to retro brands, such as the Volkswagen New Beetle and Star Wars: Episode I –​The Phantom Menace, in order to connect to original brand communities –​‘a specialized, non-​ geographically bound community, based on a structured set of social relations among admirers of a brand’ (Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001: 412). They also find that contemporary, market-​mediated nostalgia is more concerned with aesthetics than emotions. A comparison of consumer brand relationships of nostalgic versus non-​nostalgic brands further illustrates how nostalgic brands preserve memories that enhance consumers’ lives, as these consumption objects allow people to re-​experience or, perhaps more precisely, create an

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idealized past in the present (Kessous et al 2015). For a case outside North American or European consumption contexts, developing a retro brand community in post-​apartheid South Africa requires marketers to shape a sense of an imagined community of resistance in the minds and hearts of contemporary consumers (Drewett 2008). Most recently, it has been noted that effective nostalgic marketing strategies should focus on enchantment –​ ‘the rendering of the ordinary into something special’ (Hartmann and Brunk 2019: 669). Concerning advertising, consumers’ personal memories are specifically primed to elicit nostalgia with the use of special characters in campaigns (Callcott and Alvey 1991). Autobiographical narration is commonly utilized in advertising to evoke consumers’ memories of past experiences. For example, Walt Disney celebrated the 25th anniversary of Disney World in Orlando with a past-​inspired campaign titled ‘Remember the Magic’ (Braun et al 2002), and a 2012 Werther’s Original commercial invited nostalgic consumers to ‘Feel Like a Kid in a Caramel Shoppe Again’ (Fritz et al 2017). Nostalgic ads frequently juxtapose a feel-​good cultural, generational or personal memory with a current product-​use situation (Holbrook and Hirschman 1982; Stern 1990). In a study on nostalgic typologies used in advertising, Barbara Stern (1992) recounts a television commercial for Rascals candy that evokes generational consumer nostalgia by narrating a child’s enjoyment of 1960s science fiction movies enhanced through eating the candy. The ad’s aim is to reposition the brand as an adult candy and remind baby boomers of their idealized childhood. Following this producer-​oriented perspective, nostalgia presents numerous opportunities for the creation of successful market offerings. Unsurprisingly, the most prominent types of nostalgic products include museums and heritage sites. On the one hand, static museums host original collections of cultural and branded heirlooms, as well as contemporary reproductions of past memorabilia, making them ideal nostalgic retailscapes for contemporary consumption (Goulding 1999; Devine 2014; Chaney et al 2018). On the other hand, living museums are highly interactive, themed spaces that include industrial, architectural and societal recreations of specific glorified golden ages, making them even riper for nostalgic consumption. As a prime example, England’s Blists Hill (Goulding 2001) is a reconstructed 19th-​century Victorian village with functioning shops, staff dressed in period costume, romanticized public squares and cobbled streets cleansed of Victorian-​era detriments such as disease and poverty that contemporary consumers can uncritically experience. Heritage tourism –​centred on historic sites, buildings and even artwork –​ has emerged to recreate the ‘places of the past through the lens of the present’ (Balmer 2011: 1383). Yet, the historical accuracy of artefacts appears irrelevant

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to nostalgic consumers. For instance, Eric Gable and Richard Handler (1996) demonstrate the complementary relationship of original artefacts from a historical period (for example, cannons from the American Civil War at Colonial Williamsburg) with carefully designed, authentic looking and artificially aged artefacts reproduced to accomplish an image of arrested decay. Fictional elements (for example, a 1938-​looking street) allow contemporary consumers to relate past locations to their present lives (Devine 2014). Yet, nostalgic consumers also recreate historical settings without the help of such artefacts (Hede and Thyne 2010). As an example, nostalgic consumers use personal assumptions and their imagination at the Riverside Museum to re-​ enact a historic Glasgow city that never actually existed (Jafari and Taheri 2014). Along these lines, Jan Logemann’s (2013) study of mom-​and-​pop stores shows how nostalgic consumers create romanticized visions about the past in the present. Small stores are perceived as part of a past bourgeois, organic and harmonious retailscape worthy of emulation in the present. Past retail shops therefore become an alternative ideal in the present age of alienating suburbia and strip malls. This is not unlike Disneyland’s Mainstreet, U.S.A., which captures the essence of a lost, walkable and thus more social retailscape that has been supplanted by alienating, sprawling, car-​centric urban spaces (Francaviglia 1996). Art-​deco cafés play a similar role as sites for contemporary consumers’ nostalgic recollection (Devine 2014). In this sense, café consumption becomes representative of what Elizabeth Carnegie (2010) refers to as the enactment of a nostalgic ‘heritagized culture’, allowing consumers to re-​experience positively perceived aspects of a local area’s past. Similarly, but for a different epoch, present-​day Edwardian tearooms are steeped in nostalgic consumers’ romanticized ideas about a past polite and demure British upper class in contrast with today’s crass society (Hamilton and Wagner 2014). Bradford T. Hudson (2011) further underscores this aspect of consumers’ nostalgia by unpacking how art-​deco themed transatlantic cruise ships appeal to an anglophile upper-​class consumer that idealizes past classism. As a final example, Ralph Lauren boutiques achieve a nostalgic retail atmosphere by reproducing a romantic vision of a traditional elite’s Anglo-​Saxon home (Kessous et al 2015), however without ever questioning its exclusionary, elite function in society. From a critical perspective, although these nostalgic retailscapes are indicative of consumers’ quest for ‘imaginative nostalgic escapism’ (Goulding 2001: 575) to romanticized versions of the past, they nonetheless have the potential to exclude certain consumer segments in the present. Ultimately this second type of marketing research has established that marketers increasingly use various nostalgic appeals in order to pitch their offerings, which range from retroscapes (Brown and Sherry 2003), heritage attractions (Goulding 1999) and high street shopping (Maclaran and Brown 2001) to

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cinematic experiences like remakes, sequels and prequels (Brown 2001). This has led Brown (2007) to establish the retro-​dominant logic of marketing, whereby the drivers of marketing endeavours are neither goods nor services but, rather, stories, in this case compelling stories about the past. These stories, in turn, can play on consumers’ present-​day anxieties and fears about the future (Baker and Azzari 2020), which further fuels their dissatisfaction, turning it into a potentially perpetual viscious cycle. Inversely, nostalgia in consumerism can also function as a form of ideology, where market stakeholders maintain a certain status quo through ongoing curation of the past in the material culture and symbolic resources they set up for consumers in the present. A recent study, for instance, shows how luxury retailers have a vested interest in maintaining social inequalities (Dion and Borraz 2017), but less in known about what role nostalgia plays in this regard.

Collective nostalgia in consumer culture Finally, in consumer culture, collective nostalgia is seen as ‘a contemporary obsession with the simulacra of the past’ (Hamilton and Wagner 2014: 815). This stream of marketing scholarship has linked consumer nostalgia to broader sociocultural transformations, such as industrialization, revolutions and world-​changing terrorist attacks (Hamilton et al 2014; Marcoux 2017). Here, consumer nostalgia is conceptualized beyond the merely individual or producer levels as a broader phenomenon that includes marginalized histories (Samuel 1994; Hamilton et al 2014), as well as the market-​mediated shaping of popular and collective memories (Thompson and Tian 2008; Brunk et al 2018). As such, this body of work emphasizes socioeconomic and cultural critiques of consumers’ nostalgic memories that result from interactions with the contemporary marketplace and its vested interests. At the societal level, consumers can experience ‘collective’ or ‘communal nostalgia’ in the wake of world-​changing events (Ebenkamp and Odiorne 2002; Nadkarni and Schevchenko 2004). Following Gary Cross’s (2017) overview of nostalgic collections, communal nostalgia can unite consumers around ephemeral commodities from bygone eras in communities of consumption. These consumer goods include music, television series, kitsch items, automobiles and playthings such as dolls. Given the ephemeral nature of these consumption items, collective nostalgia creates distinct age boundaries for group members. More importantly, however, societies exhibit collective nostalgia for a version of the past that never really existed but is, rather, reimagined through marketing efforts. Exploring post-​unification German consumer culture, Katja H. Brunk et al (2018) identify three salient, market-​mediated nostalgic frames that marketers use to depoliticize Germany’s socialist past in order to make it compatible with its capitalist

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present: moralistic, pastoral and carnivalesque nostalgia. According to the authors, market actors try to appease former East German consumers’ anxieties by shaping depoliticized and romanticized popular memories through market offerings of, and from, the former German Democratic Republic, ranging from mustard to summer camps. As another illustration, American consumers’ collective nostalgia about past American society is subject to what Richard Godfrey and Simon Lilley (2009) term ‘periodization’ in their study on visual consumption and collective memory in representing war. According to the authors, each stage of social development gives rise to its own particular form of nostalgia for past American societies. In accordance, certain consumers long for the colonial, puritan American society, while others yearn for ‘the youth and innocence of the 1940s USA’ as exemplified in the box office hit Pearl Harbor (Godfrey and Lilley 2009: 287). However, Sarah Edwards and Juliette Wilson (2014) maintain that the glorification of past American societies through the market takes on a toxic and disturbing note, when discussing the Tea Party Movement, which later turned into Trumpism and its America First creed. Here, a ‘fictitious vision of the past’ (Edwards and Wilson 2014: 112) is created to frame the rebarbative nature of the present. Specifically, nostalgic consumption serves to restore or safeguard early American liberties that are perceived to be lost or at risk, such as those pertaining to guns and Second Amendment rights. Importantly, these forms of consumer nostalgia about early American or East German societies involve the purposeful absence of ‘negative aspects’, especially pertaining to racial inequality and segregation that was ‘institutionally widespread’ (Godfrey and Lilley 2009: 287). Hence, from a critical viewpoint, contemporary consumers’ nostalgia pertaining to past societies involves a selective editing of past social structures of inequality and human suffering. This, in turn, can lead to different social groups being pitted against one another, creating cultural pathologies (Baker and Azari 2020) and maintaining socioeconomic inequalities into the future.

Nostalgia marketing and consumer research trends Although marketing and consumer researchers have recently begun to pursue a wider set of questions regarding what specific social structures influence consumers’ nostalgia, what role the market plays in this phenomenon and whether it is contextually sensitive, the literature stream has nonetheless almost completely elided non-​Western forms of nostalgic consumption. The few notable exceptions include Michael Drewett’s (2008) study of nostalgic consumption in South Africa, Ling Zhou et al’s (2013) quantification of consumers’ nostalgia in China, as well as Kalman Applbaum and Ingrid Jordt’s

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(1996) exploration of consumers’ nostalgia as a means of communality in Japan. Likewise, while marketing research understands the role of Orientalism and the exoticization of otherness (that is, representations of the non-​Western world) in Western consumer nostalgia, little is known about the role of Occidentalism (that is, representations of the Western world) in non-​Western consumer nostalgia. Perhaps non-​Western consumers’ nostalgia is difficult to identify, theorize and incorporate. Yet, we worry that without an inclusion of substantive, empirical research on nostalgic marketing and consumption from multifarious and underexplored consumption contexts outside the North Atlantic region, marketing and consumer research on nostalgia does not paint a full picture. This suggests an urgent need for future research into consumer nostalgia outside the Western hemisphere, as tacit regional assumptions about the roles and meanings of nostalgia in marketing practices and consumer behaviour currently hamper academic progress. On a related note, consumers’ nostalgia is rarely a constant condition but, rather, one that waxes and wanes with time and with the conditions in which consumers may find themselves (Baker and Azzari 2020). As such, future researchers can pursue longitudinal qualitative and quantitative analyses (Smith and Lux 1993) of nostalgia experienced at different points in a consumer’s lifetime to determine a nostalgia life cycle of sorts. Such studies can explain how novel forms of consumer nostalgia appear, mature and subsequently decline. Similarly, but from a producer perspective, it would be interesting to explore longitudinally why certain periods and ages in history are more relevant in marketing efforts at a given time, only to diminish in importance at a later point (Holt and Cameron 2010). A third under-​researched complexity of nostalgia and marketing concerns assumptions about its benevolent nature. It has been recently demonstrated that marketers can use nostalgia as a regulatory mechanism, especially in a given market undergoing massive economic, social and cultural changes, such as through the marketization of former socialist societies (Brunk et al 2018) or the reconstruction of former confederate states into the US (Thompson and Tian 2008). Market-​mediated nostalgia can therefore have regulatory, disciplinary and exclusionary potential, as it not only renders romanticized, consumable versions of history in the present but also occludes more sinister or morally problematic aspects of the past. Jean-​Sébastien Marcoux (2017), for example, finds that there is power in consumers’ memory work, as they frame not only what is worthy of celebration and emulation in the present but also what is to be disregarded, marginalized and forgotten. Nostalgic consumption is thus a highly selective engagement with the past that both censures and valorizes it simultaneously. Market-​mediated nostalgia curates the past to exclude and include certain people, places and events

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in particular ways, which in turn can create religious, classist, ethnic, racial and/​or gender tensions. Future research can therefore explore how the dialectical exchange between various in-​g roups and out-​g roups affects nostalgic marketing and consumption. For example, how do West Germans experience the Ostalgie marketplace that ‘commemorates East German socialism through a broad array of nostalgic products, brands, memorabilia, and consumption experiences’ (Brunk et al 2018: 1326), and how does this affect Germany’s overall consumer culture? How do working-​class Brits perceive the upper-​ class Edwardian style of the luxury department store Harrods or expensive vintage tearooms (Hamilton and Wagner 2014)? How do African Americans experience the nostalgic consumption of space through touristic Southern plantations (Thompson and Tian 2008)? How do women experience the objectifying potential of male nostalgia about burlesque dancing (Blanchette 2014)? As we show from these extensions of empirical contexts explored in extant consumer research, nostalgic consumption is not necessarily innocent and innocuous. One consumer’s nostalgia is often another consumer’s abomination. The dialectical exchange between nostalgia and its ‘other’ desperately needs further unpacking. As global markets and capitalism speed up societal transformations, we recommend returning to a given nostalgic consumption context and exploring it from the perspective of the ‘other’ or out-​group. Furthermore, since Fred Davis’s (1979: 107) work, which stresses the role of nostalgia in ‘holding onto and reaffirming identities which had been badly bruised by the turmoil of the times’, consumer nostalgia has been largely treated as a grand emotion that is deeply constitutive of self and identity (Belk 1988). As such, little is known about consumers’ more fleeting or liquid (Bardhi and Eckhardt 2017) ties to nostalgia. Researchers can therefore uncover how fleeting pangs of nostalgia frame consumer experiences, such as in online shopping environments or temporary pop-​up stores. Furthermore, how does this short-​term consumer nostalgia differ from the more profound, identity-​shaping long-​term form? Although immersive forms of nostalgic consumption have been explored in the context of open-​air museums (Goulding et al 2018), little is known about nostalgia and digitalization. Some researchers posit that the virtual environment in cyberspace can make nostalgic consumer experiences more vivid than reality (Holak 2014). Bernard Cova and Stefano Pace (2006), for instance, discuss Nutella’s online chatroom dedicated for customers to share their childhood memories involving this iconic chocolate spread. Future research can investigate online gaming and the role of virtual reality as an immersive environment for nostalgic consumption. For example,

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the multibillion-​dollar gaming market already exploits different forms of nostalgia through games such as Chivalry: Medieval Warfare or Age of Empires. Furthermore, while virtual reality is currently being tested for museum visits (Matchar 2017), it will most likely draw on historical gaming genres, creating new avenues for nostalgic marketing research and practice. Augmented reality also poses opportunities for future consumer nostalgia research. While some museums already integrate augmented reality into their exhibits (Billock 2017), mobile notifications about historical locations from Google Maps and other augmented reality services such as tour guides (Holovis 2017) provide novel ways of inscribing historical time references into contemporary consumers’ lives. Exploring such nostalgic marketing and consumption phenomena would require novel digital research methods pertaining to geographical information systems. A final area of nostalgic consumption that is the most under-​examined concerns consumers’ relationship with an imagined future. In other words, consuming how the future was envisioned at one point in the past. According to Jill Bradbury (2012: 341), ‘nostalgia is not only a longing for the way things were, but also a longing for futures that never came, or for horizons of possibilities that seem to have been foreclosed by the unfolding of events’. This type of future-​oriented nostalgic consumption brings nostalgia into the sphere of ‘counterfactual consumption’ (Prendergast 2019), as it informs consumers’ imagination of what could have been but never was. Researchers can investigate a whole range of nostalgic retro-​ future consumption, including the increased fascination with the Paleo or caveman diet (Ertimur and Chen 2019), which emphasizes unprocessed foods dating back to a prehistorical time (the Stone Age) that was lost to the age of agroindustry. We propose that Paleo consumers are nostalgic for an imagined, counterfactual, caveman life-​style in an effort to change their future embodied selves. Moreover, the ultramodern tiny house movement represents a relatively new consumption phenomenon through which, we suggest, consumers are nostalgic for a retro-​future termed ‘New Americana’ or an imagined American pioneering time that never really existed but is nonetheless employed as a template to change future climate change outcomes. Furthermore, future-​oriented nostalgic consumption can take the form of reflective consumer nostalgia ‘that is not innate or an emotion, but rather performatively enacted’ (Veresui et al 2018: 823). We follow Bradbury (2012: 341) in pointing out how nostalgic ‘narratives of the past’ are important, since they ‘may provide resources for articulating future possibilities’. Reflectively engaging with, and reframing, the past thus plays a pivotal role in consumer processes by replenishing the symbolic resources available for ‘imaginative anticipation of, or speculation about the future’ (Campbell 1987: 83), which requires further empirical verification.

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Conclusion Contemporary marketers and consumers continue to be fascinated with the past. Nostalgia –​generally understood in marketing research as ‘a longing for the past, a yearning for yesterday, or a fondness for possessions and activities associated with days of yore’ (Holbrook 1993: 254) –​plays an important role in shaping consumer behaviour and market offerings. Consequently, researchers across five decades have theoretically, empirically and managerially explored various facets of the role of nostalgia in marketing and consumption. Nostalgia has been directly defined in this body of work as a personal state of melancholy, a bittersweet emotion linked to the past, a measurable consumption preference, an aesthetic component of advertising and branding efforts, as well as a collective experience that occurs at the societal level. In this chapter we have therefore demonstrated that nostalgia is a complex marketing and consumer issue with profound variations. As such, consumer nostalgia is not purely an introspective state but, rather, a complex phenomenon that orbits consumers’ societal awareness. Consequently, we note that the conceptualization of nostalgia in marketing and consumer research is neither a priori nor definitive –​it may be amended, restructured or expanded as we encourage future research to incorporate ever more findings from a growing range of especially non-​ Anglo-​European contexts. Particularly, future research in marketing and consumer behaviour can provide deeper theorizations of how nostalgia relates to other temporal phenomena and dimensions. For example, how does nostalgia relate to consumers’ efforts to forget (Marcoux 2017)? How does it shape consumers’ engagement with the future (Veresiu et al 2018)? Additionally, future marketing research can address more postmodern and playful forms of nostalgia and how they apply to consumer behaviour. For example, what is the role of nostalgia for future pasts that have not happened yet? In the Star Trek brand community, the future history of the Federation plays a significant role in negotiating what constitutes canon and provides an ongoing conundrum for brand managers in catering to various sub-​groups in its core segments. The complicated temporal dynamics of postmodern nostalgia will require a much deeper theorization in future marketing studies. Similarly, what is the role in nostalgic consumerism of past futures that never happened? Specifically, these take the shape of lost opportunities or promises that were never realized. Examples of these include consumers’ nostalgia for political promises that never materialized. The ongoing fascination with the death of John F. Kennedy, for example, not only captures speculations about what could have been for both the US and the world but is also regularly marketized in entertainment culture.

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Literature and Nostalgia: Vestiges of Paradise Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg

Introduction We have all experienced nostalgia, that peculiarly painful but nonetheless irresistible sensation of not just remembering the past, but of dwelling on it, circling around it and experiencing again its bittersweet, close-​yet-​distant otherness. We may be nostalgic for our personal pasts –​remembering a golden sun-​soaked day of childhood or a beloved city lived and left behind –​ or for collective memories –​a moment of national celebration, an old television series or even a whole historical era. Yet, despite this ubiquity, nostalgia has long had, and retains, a slightly disreputable air, and even a taint of the sickroom. We may be nostalgic, but we are embarrassed to be so. This is unfortunate, as nostalgia’s cognitive and affective patterns not only are vital to the psychic economies of individuals and communities but also play an important role in our cultural life. If art is in many of its forms a recording, representation or reimagination of past events, it is no surprise that nostalgia is one of its primary emotional modes. Roland Barthes, for example, has argued that ‘every photograph is a certificate of presence’, but of a presence from the past, ‘an emanation of past reality: a magic, not an art’, and this magical relationship between past and present is as good a way as any of thinking about the uncanny power of nostalgia (Barthes 2000: 87). The relationship between nostalgia and literature is, however, particularly close, and the contributions nostalgia makes to literature are particularly vital. This is in part, as we will argue here, because writing itself is an inherently nostalgic activity that records

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otherwise ephemeral moments for posterity. It thus always carries with it the potential to generate an emotional response to the past. In part, it is because modern literature has been largely shaped by a powerful tension between an attraction to the past and an equally powerful drive towards the future. And in part, it is because many forms of literature, from many different historical and cultural contexts, have found that the ‘remembrance of things past’ (Shakespeare 1978: 42) offers an inexhaustible and endlessly fertile source of images, and a powerful emotional reservoir. Indeed, however far back we look, we find that literature deals, by no means exclusively, but persistently and repeatedly, with an evocation of past experience that can be considered under the rubric of nostalgia. And as we move towards our own historical moment, this nostalgic orientation becomes even clearer. This chapter surveys the history of literature through some of its most prominent engagements with nostalgia and delineates the mechanics of a nostalgic literary aesthetics. It examines a selection of texts preceding the 17th-​century formulation of the notion of nostalgia and looks at nostalgic patterns in various genres of 20th-​and 21st-​century literature. It then outlines some of the most important trends in recent scholarship on literary nostalgia and summarizes different theoretical approaches to the nostalgic analysis of literary works. At the same time, it delves into the poetics of literary nostalgia, exploring a variety of aesthetic strategies that trigger nostalgic literary experiences. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the future of literary nostalgia and its entanglements with contemporary culture and politics.

Part 1: a history of literary nostalgia The state of ‘being modern’ consists of many things. We might at times emphasize Émile Durkheim’s anomie, the result of the ‘disaggregation’ of society under the conditions of modernity (Durkheim 2002: 350); at other times we may feel that Max Weber’s emphasis on the ‘iron cage’ of the ascetic rationalism of specialization is more relevant (Weber 1992: 123). These and other conceptualizations of what it means to live under the conditions of modernity offer cogent –​and often painful –​insights into the way we live now, insights that have been widely explored in modern literature. If we think more specifically about modernity and modern literature’s relationship to time, however, two seemingly contradictory things become clear. On the one hand, this is a prospective phenomenon. Ezra Pound’s famous command to ‘MAKE IT NEW’ is one example of modernity’s insistence on futurity (Pound 1967: 75); Virginia Woolf ’s discussion of the ‘life or spirit, truth or reality’ of the present moment which ‘refuses to be contained any longer’ in the ‘ill-​fitting vestments’ of Edwardian fiction

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is another (Woolf 1984: 160). But, on the other hand, modernity is also retrospective. Pound’s demand for novelty appears in Canto LIII, a poem based on an 18th-​century Jesuit history of China in which the slogan is attributed to a Shang dynasty emperor who lived three and a half thousand years ago, while Woolf ’s definition of modern fiction is inspired by the 18th-​ century novelist Laurence Sterne. Both of these modernists offer, then, not newness tout court but something closer akin to what T.S. Eliot describes as a ‘conscious present’ formed by ‘an awareness of the past’ (Eliot 1985: 38). Thus, to Durkheim and Weber’s diagnoses of the malaise of modernity we could add Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of ‘retrotopia’ –​of a present haunted by ‘visions located in the lost/​stolen/​abandoned but undead past’ (Bauman 2017: 5). This literary attentiveness to what has gone before is often infused with the sort of longing that we have learned to call nostalgia since Johannes Hofer coined the term in 1688, linking nostos (return home) to algia (pain) to describe symptoms experienced by expatriate Swiss students and soldiers (Boym 2001: 3). First seen as a sort of occupational hazard for people forced to live at a distance from home (Sullivan 2010: 585), nostalgia is now viewed as an emotion rather than a psychological condition (Davis 1979: 5) –​and one that has become a ‘cultural dominant’ essential to our understanding of modernity and its literature (Jameson 1991: 4). Yet nostalgia did not suddenly appear in the modern era, and it would be better to see modern literature’s nostalgia as the development of a pre-​ existing phenomenon, as intensification rather than innovation. We can begin with the fact that all writing systems –​‘pictorial signs … given a linguistic interpretation’ –​from cuneiform to hieroglyphics to runes, are temporally bidirectional, notations or representations of concepts, occurrences or information recorded in the present about the past for transmission to the future (Coulmas 2003: 192). More particularly, when we consider phonetic writing systems in which individual graphemes or abstract symbols correspond to particular sounds, we are dealing with systems that allow, quite literally, the fading voices of the past be preserved for the future. As Walter J. Ong writes, when spoken language is recorded in writing, the transferral of ‘the word to space … enlarges the potentiality of language almost beyond measure’ (Ong 2002: 7). Writing is, in other words, as Margaret Atwood has noted, always a ‘whisper from the past’, and the act of recording that whisper is frequently, and perhaps inherently, nostalgic (Atwood 2014: 344). Writing is of course not synonymous with literature: Chinese pyromantic oracle-​bone inscriptions or Sumerian administrative records, for example, are not what we would generally consider under this admittedly capacious rubric. Nor are these sorts of texts likely to carry a nostalgic charge. But surviving ancient examples of more recognizably literary texts do offer many

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narratives that can be considered nostalgic. The Epic of Gilgamesh, for instance, tells the tale of Enkidu, who lives freely as an animal among animals. He ‘knows not a people, nor even a country’ but ‘grazes on the grasses /​joining the throng with the game at the water-​hole, his heart delighting with the beasts in the water’ until he lies with Shamhat the harlot and is cut off from nature: he has ‘defiled his pure body’, exchanging strength and power for ‘reason, and wide understanding’ (Gilgamesh 1999: 1.108–​202). He comes to lament this transformation, nostalgically longing for his days ‘in the wild’ and cursing those who lured him away (Gilgamesh 1999: 7.131). The story of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in Genesis is even more clearly a nostalgic expression of longing for a lost paradise in which people were naked but ‘not ashamed’, where women did not ‘in sorrow … bring forth children’ and men did not ‘eat bread’ in ‘the sweat of [their] face’ as the land yielded something other than ‘thorns also and thistles’ (Bible 1997: 2.25–​3.19). Both of these myths seem to reflect a deep-​rooted undercurrent of agrarian cultural longing for a pre-​agrarian past. This is a typical nostalgic structure, in which an invidious present is compared with a remembered, and idealized past. Another example from within the Hebrew tradition is the powerful expression of the longing of an exiled people for a lost homeland: ‘By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’ (Bible 1997, Psalm 137.1). Other literary traditions are also rich in nostalgia. As James Liu notes, for example, ‘no one who has read any amount of Chinese poetry … can fail to notice the abundance of poems on nostalgia’ (Liu 1962: 55). Nor is this theme limited to a particular era of Chinese history (Xiang 2015: 212). Examples could thus be multiplied, but consider ‘In the Quiet Night’ by the Tang dynasty (618–​907 CE) poet Li Bai (701–​762), one of the most famous and widely known poems in Chinese literature: ‘So bright a gleam on the foot of my bed –​/​Could there have been a frost already? /​Lifting myself to look, I found that it was moonlight. /​Sinking back again, I thought suddenly of home’ (300 Tang Poems 1920). The movement here from present sensory experience to bittersweet memory of the past is quintessentially nostalgic. Given classical China’s powerful cultural influence on Japan, it is unsurprising that many of the thousand poems collected in the Man’yōshū, the oldest surviving collection of classical Japanese poetry, express nostalgic sentiments, like Ōtomo Yotsuna’s brief evocation of a beloved but distant place: ‘The waving wistarias are in full bloom; /​Do they not remind you, my lord, /​Of the Imperial City of Nara?’ (Yotsuna 1965: 589.1–​3). There can be no doubt that cultural influence in general, and literary influence more particularly, has a role to play in the diffusion of nostalgic patterns. There are fashions in all things, and in many times and places it has been the fashion to elegantly mourn the loss of a distant and thus

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inaccessible home. However, nostalgia’s appearance beyond the confines of any one cultural sphere means it is possible to attribute this shared nostalgic orientation to something more general than stylistic diffusion. As George Steiner argues, if as individuals we are governed not by our pasts but by ‘images of the past … as highly structured and selective as myths’, the same is true of societies. ‘Most history’, he writes, carries ‘vestiges of paradise’, memories of a time ‘more or less remote’ when ‘things were better, almost golden … The myth of the Fall runs stronger than any particular religion. There is hardly a civilization … that does not carry inwardly an answer to intimations of a sense of distant catastrophe’ (Steiner 1971: 13). And literature is, very often, the vehicle for the preservation of these lost fragments of paradise. In the Western classical tradition, for example, nostalgia may not be as central as in classical Chinese and Japanese literature, but it is certainly present. A well-​known example is the story of homecoming, or nostos. The hero of Homer’s Odyssey begins his quest –​after ‘struggling’ unsuccessfully for ‘the homecoming of his companions’ (Homer 2007: 1.6) –​trapped on Kalypso’s island ‘longing for his wife and his homecoming’ (Homer 2007: 1.13). In Homer’s Iliad Agamemnon decides to test his warriors’ resolve to continue the siege of Troy by encouraging them to abandon the struggle and return home. Their nostalgic reaction is as powerful as it is inconvenient: ‘the cry reached heaven of men longing for home’, and Agamemnon requires divine assistance to stop a stampede to the waiting ships (Homer 2015: 2: 153–​ 154). Another instance is found in the work of Ovid, the Roman poet banished by Augustus to the Black Sea city of Tomis (today Constanța in Bulgaria). In exile, Ovid wrote the Tristia (Lamentations) and Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea). The latter is ‘the classical text that many modern nostalgics have felt closest to’ (Illbruck 2012: 8), but the Tristia also offers a rich vein of nostalgic sentiment, as when the poet recalls his departure: ‘the gloomy memory of that night which marked my latest hours in the city –​when … I left so many things dear to me, even now from my eyes do teardrops fall’ (Ovid 1939: 19–​21). The loss of the homeland –​both a place (the city of Rome) and a time (the days now vanished when Ovid lived there) –​is a source of grief to which poet and reader obsessively return. Thus, while the word nostalgia is itself a relatively recent coinage, the emotion with which it is associated and its place in literature have a long history. Again, this should not be surprising. Of all the varieties of human experience, there is one that is universal –​change; and change is inevitably associated with the loss of what once was. Indeed, recent research in both psychology and sociology seems to indicate that nostalgia is both universal and useful (Anderson 2018: 355–​356). And as literature is perhaps the most naturally psychological of the arts, the most intimately bound up with

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the self and its interiority, the most deeply invested in its expression and articulation, even its creation, it is inevitable that this important aspect of the human experience has found a place within it. Nostalgia can appear in any type of text, and be experienced by any type of character, from the ‘battle-​scarred veteran, bowed with age’ who, singing of ‘the martial deeds /​of his youth and prime’ is ‘overcome /​as the past well[s]‌up in his wintery heart’ in the Anglo-​Saxon poem Beowulf (Beowulf 2000: 2107–​2110), to the young prince in Shakespeare’s Hamlet suddenly brought face to face with a haunting embodiment of the absent past in the shape of the court jester Yorick’s skull: ‘Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. /​Where be your jibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your /​flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?’ (Shakespeare 2002: 5.1, 194–​198). Hamlet’s keen awareness throughout the play that ‘time is out of joint’ (Shakespeare 2002: 1.5, 210) is in fact typical of the first half of the nostalgic equation, its ‘distinctive rhetorical signature’, as outlined by Fred Davis, in which a ‘present circumstances and conditions’ are compared to the past and found to be ‘more bleak, grim, wretched, ugly, deprivational, unfulfilling, frightening, and so forth’ (Davis 1979: 15–​16). The example of Hamlet’s nostalgia is apt, for this is a figure closely associated with a specifically modern form of consciousness, embroiled as many readers and critics have noted in the ‘dilemma of a characteristic type of modern man’ (Prior 1948: 283). As Margreta de Grazia writes, no other work in the canon has been as ‘closely identified with the beginnings of the modern age as Hamlet’, and the play’s nostalgic orientation towards a pre-​lapsarian past certainly contributes to this prescient modernity (de Grazia 2001: 355). It is arguably, and, as has already been discussed, somewhat ironically, with the most modern of literary movements –​modernism –​that nostalgia comes into its own as a literary force, permeating and shaping many of its canonical texts. James Joyce’s Ulysses, for instance, is a doubly backwards-​ looking text. Its structure is derived from the Odyssey, and by ‘manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity’ it looks back to a single day in June 1904 (Eliot 1985: 27). This is a novel ‘saturated with regret’, the ‘example par excellence of Modernist longing’ for a vanished and unobtainable past (Schulz 2018: 473). Yet the year in which Joyce’s masterpiece was published, 1922, also offered readers Sodom and Gommorah, the fourth volume of Marcel Proust’s voyage into the past In Search of Lost Time, and Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room, a novel dedicated to delineating the absence of its titular character. Proust’s masterpiece has been described as ‘directly inspired by nostalgia’ (Savage 1964: 167) and as a ‘treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place is the past’ (Nabokov 1983: 207–​208). Its attempt to revitalize the past is often associated with involuntary memory, as a physical sensation brings back to life an ‘old dead moment’ through a

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sort of ‘magnetism’ (Proust 2005: 54), but Proust offers different layers of memory –​first-​and second-​hand, original and reclaimed –​‘superimposed upon one another’ to form a ‘single mass’, all infused with the type of ‘melancholy’ longing we label as nostalgic (Proust 2005: 221). Or we might consider William Faulkner, who summed up the entanglement of the past and the present in Requiem for a Nun (1951): ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’ (Faulkner 2011: 73). For Faulkner, as for many modernists, the past is always with us even as it is simultaneously unreclaimable. ‘To want and want and not to have’ that which is no more as Lily Briscoe does in Woolf ’s To the Lighthouse (1927) (Woolf 2006: 146) is perhaps the quintessential modernist state, an articulation of what Fredric Jameson describes as ‘a properly modernist nostalgia with a past beyond all but aesthetic retrieval’ (Jameson 1991: 19). Of course, this longing is often accompanied by a critical discomfort with aspects of the past, a complexity central to the place of nostalgia in postmodern writing. The key issue here is postmodernism’s ironization of nostalgia, and its deployment as a self-​conscious literary technique. One critical tradition, best represented by Jameson, has tended to view postmodern consumer culture, like nostalgia film, as possessed by a naive, ‘depersonalized visual curiosity’, an affectless ‘return of the repressed’, that is fundamentally different from the ‘passionate expressions’ of the ‘older longing once called nostalgia’ (Jameson 1991: xvii). Even when postmodern literature engages much more seriously with the past, the problem remains: the postmodern ‘crisis in historicity’ means that the novel ‘can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only ‘represent’ our ideas and stereotypes about that past’ (Jameson 1991: 25). Jameson’s exemplary text is E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime (1975), but we could just as well consider more recent examples like Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), which evoke particular historical moments (mid-​century California and turn-​of-​ the-​millennium New York) through references to consumer and media products. This tradition sees postmodern nostalgia as a sentiment that is unable to penetrate the glossy, reflective surfaces of the past. Linda Hutcheon, however, has complicated this view by arguing that in postmodern works ‘nostalgia itself gets both called up, exploited, and ironized’ –​it is ‘invoked but, at the same time, undercut, put into perspective’ (Hutcheon and Valdés 1998–​2000: 23). Thus, writers like Pynchon can and do use the powerful affective charge of nostalgia in their work. In Inherent Vice, for instance, our last sight of the protagonist Doc Sportello’s beloved Shasta Fey Hepworth is reported in deeply, if pre-​emptively, nostalgic terms: ‘Shasta wandered slowly down to the beach and through the wet sand … Doc followed the prints of her bare feet already collapsing into rain and shadow, as if in a fool’s attempt to find his way back into a past that despite them both had gone on into the

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future it did’ (Pynchon 2010: 314). But they can simultaneously frame this evocation of nostalgia in ways that are playfully self-​deprecating: ‘The past’, as Pynchon writes in Bleeding Edge, ‘hey no shit, it’s an open invitation to wine abuse’ (Pynchon 2014: 20). While this survey of literature’s historical entanglement with nostalgia is inevitably partial, it nonetheless reveals just how important a longing for the past –​its places, its people, its experiences –​has been to literary expression. Across time and culture, through a broad range of genres and literary forms, nostalgia has provided a theme, an emotional impetus and a structuring principle for countless texts. Nostalgia is a powerful force in both psychological and sociological terms, and it is in literature that it has found perhaps its purest expression.

Part 2: the study of literary nostalgia Given the intimate relationship between nostalgia and literature, it is no surprise that academic interest in the topic has exploded since the year 2000.1 Susan Stewart’s On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (1984) is an early attempt to frame literary nostalgia within material construction. Stewart’s two most significant analyses are of the miniature and the souvenir. The former is discussed in terms of the materiality of books; for example, miniature children’s picture books offer ‘an infinite and fabulous world which had the capacity to absorb the child’s sense of reality … The miniature here became the realm not of fact but reverie’ (Stewart 1984: 43). Stewart illustrates how the miniature is often ‘a material allusion to a text which is no longer available to us, or which, because of its fictiveness, never was available to us except through a second-​ order fictive world’ (Stewart 1984: 60). Her study situates, for example, the reading of maps in fantasy books as inherently nostalgic. Stewart also distinguishes how objects (material or mental) function nostalgically in literature: the ‘capacity of objects to serve as traces of authentic experience is’, she writes, ‘exemplified by the souvenir’ (Stewart 1984: 135). Souvenirs can either be metonymic parts of real wholes from the past, such as a lock of hair or a piece of clothing, or a reproduction of something real, like a miniature gondola from Venice. In both cases, the nostalgic power of the souvenir is due to its incompleteness; if it were complete, or an exact replica of an experience, it would not be nostalgic. The souvenir itself is not the memory; instead, it initiates and structures the links between present and past. Proust’s madeleines are thus a form of literary souvenir. Stewart’s concern with real and imagined souvenirs partly echoes the distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia proposed in the most influential monograph on nostalgia to date, Svetlana Boym’s The Future of

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Nostalgia (2001). While restorative nostalgia is, as the term indicates, an attempt to restore the past, reflective nostalgia focuses on longing, loss and the instability of memory (Boym 2001: 41). These categories are not as stable as many subsequent scholars have imagined; instead, they are overlapping. In the private sphere, we are both reflective and restorative. For example, we become painfully aware that our childhoods are inevitably part of an inaccessible ‘Neverland’ by reading J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904), but nonetheless attempt the impossible by visiting the places of childhood, reading childhood books, browsing through old photo albums or even playing with our own children. The restorative phase is thus triggered by the reflective phase. If restoration were possible, it would not be nostalgic. Despite their instability, Boym’s categorization has proven extremely useful as a way of distinguishing between different nostalgic drives, and has opened up nostalgia’s role in nation-​making, patriotism, and colonial and neocolonial readings of literary texts. Although Boym’s book is devoted to history, architecture, popular cinema, museums and photography, it is also engaged with literature. The third part of the book, on diasporic intimacy (less explored by critics than her restorative and reflective nostalgias), is supported by chapter-​length studies of Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Her discussion of nostalgia and diaspora is of considerable value in understanding literature that deals with the seemingly haunted ‘lost home and the home abroad’ (Boym 2001: 251). The uncanniness of the migrant’s relation to home –​diasporic intimacy –​ is ‘rooted in the suspicion of a single home, in shared longing without belonging’ (Boym 2001: 252). Boym offers a toolbox to dissect how nostalgia operates in migrant narratives, including key factors such as an emphasis on individualism, the conflict between images of home and the pleasures of exile, the coherence of migrant experience, immigrants’ performative self-​perception, the trauma of lost objects and places, an awareness of instability, a rebirth of nationalism and an imagined community (Boym 2001: 253–​255). All of these approaches resonate well beyond the confines of her particular study, and can be productively applied to the interpretation of a variety of texts. Another early study, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (1998) by Ann C. Colley, initiated the most active area to date of nostalgic literary scholarship. Colley’s work focuses on the ways Victorian literature and culture is influenced, nostalgically, by antique myths and legends. For example, her discussion of the Orpheus myth and Victorian literature focuses on nostalgia’s dualism, locating it between ‘the tenor of death and the vehicle of life’ –​‘nostalgia attempts to recover what darkness imprisons so that it might lead what is lost back towards the light of the living present’ (Colley 1998: 209). Nicholas Dames disputes Colley’s belief that the Victorian

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novelists where particularly engaged with the past. Instead, in Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–​1870 (2001) he argues that Victorian fiction attempts to construct new concepts of memory. In Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel 1740–​1890 (2004) Tamara S. Wagner focuses on nostalgic tropes of bourgeois interior spaces and the cult of the child (Wagner 2004: 12–​13). Although Wagner is preoccupied with representational nostalgia, she acknowledges that nostalgia is central to the structure of many Victorian novels (Wagner 2004: 41). Simon Joyce’s Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007) and Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007) stress our contemporary nostalgia for a romanticized vision of the Victorian era. Joyce provides us with illuminating nostalgic readings of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1913) and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). Kaplan examines the mid-​20th-​century Victorian pastiche (for example, John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1969]) and the more recent flood of lucrative Victorian genre-​texts (for example, detective and lesbian fiction), while acknowledging the unstable reconstruction of the Victorian era in works such as David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988), A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1991) and Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). Nostalgia in Transition, 1780–​1917 (2007) by Linda Marilyn Austin links studies of nostalgia in Victorian literature and culture and the revived literary nostalgia of the 20th century, a transition Austin attributes to ‘the change from a cyclical to a linear temporal sense, as well as the accelerating speed of spatial connections’ (Austin 2007: 1). The accentuation of nostalgia in modernity has been highlighted by Kimberly K. Smith (Smith 2000: 505–​506), Sylviane Agacinski (Agacinski 2000: 20) and Boym (Boym 2001: xv). However, despite the strong nostalgic undercurrent in much modernist literature discussed earlier, there are relatively few studies of modernist nostalgia. Niklas Salmose’s thesis ‘Towards a Poetics of Nostalgia: The Nostalgic Experience in Modern Fiction’ (2012) investigates modernist fiction from an aesthetic perspective, while Tammy Clewell’s edited collection Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics (2013) links the persistence of the (often damaged) old with the production of the new.2 Robert Hemmings’ Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War (2008) opens up an exciting relation between two apparently disparate emotional reactions: ‘not only do nostalgia and trauma operate from the same liminal space between memory and forgetting, but also … they are often similarly rooted in the experience of war, and more particularly, the experience of surviving war’ (Hemmings 2008: 3). Nostalgic literary studies are increasingly set within a cultural studies frame. In Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism (2013) Janice Doane explores the consequences of gender representation in nostalgic writers. Her post-​structural analyses of authors like Thomas

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Berger, George Stade, Dan Greenburg, Ishmael Reed and John Irving reveal that even writers who create sympathetic female characters may still privilege male authority. ‘[T]‌he opposition past/​present’, she writes, ‘accumulates crucially important meanings’, recreating essentialist and mythical representations of females (Doane 2013: 9). Helga Ramsey-​Kurz investigates the role of paradise as a nostalgic trope in migration literature in Projections of Paradise: Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature (2011), dealing with authors such as Salman Rushdie, Amitav Gosh, Penelope Lively, Romesh Gunesekera, Saleh Omar and Michael Ondatjee, but much of the discussion is only indirectly related to nostalgic issues. Dennis Walder’s study Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory (2012) is more relevant, building on the scholarship on postcolonial nostalgia (for example, Renato Rosaldo’s ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’ and Patricia M.E. Lorcin’s ‘Imperial Nostalgia; Colonial Nostalgia: Differences of Theory, Similarities of Practice?’). Walder’s nostalgic analysis of colonial and postcolonial experiences in the works of Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, J.G. Ballard, V.S. Naipul and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is precise and novel, viewing nostalgia ‘as a means of resuscitating the forgotten or obscured histories of both colonised and coloniser’ (Walder 2012: 16). Nostalgia has also become increasingly entangled with ecocriticism as a way to illuminate utopian/​dystopian spaces, human/​nature dichotomies, globalization/​regionalization, ecological agency, sustainable food cultures and posthumanity, introducing new nostalgic concepts such as ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht et al 2007) and ‘retrotopia’ (Bauman 2017). By re-​reading the role of nature in American literature in Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature (2012), Jennifer K. Ladino argues for a counter-​nostalgia, or a nostalgia with a critical edge in which home is seen as fragmented, as, for example, in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) (Ladino 2012: 15). This counter-​nostalgia is not anti-​nostalgic, but a form of literary nostalgia that understands and criticizes key nostalgic tropes in American nature writing such as the pastoral, the frontier and the wilderness. In addition, a number of recent essay collections, including Once Upon A Time: Nostalgic Narratives in Transition (edited by Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg 2018), History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture (edited by Regina Rudaitytė 2018) and Contemporary Nostalgia (edited by Niklas Salmose, 2019) offer diverse analyses of literary nostalgia across genres, cultures and eras –​indicating that nostalgia is now widely seen as an important critical tool. It is important to note, however, that most scholarship remains preoccupied with nostalgia’s thematic function, or its political and cultural significance. The critical literature about the aesthetics of nostalgic is sparse. Fred Davis, in his seminal Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, is one of the few who acknowledges that ‘so frequently and uniformly does

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nostalgic sentiment seem to infuse our aesthetic experience that we can rightly begin to suspect that nostalgia is not only a feeling or mood that is somehow magically evoked by the art object but also a distinctive aesthetic modality in its own right’ (Davis 1979: 73). In his chapter ‘Nostalgia and Art’ he makes a brief but thought-​provoking attempt to define a nostalgic style in art, while complaining that ‘the musicologist, the art historian, and the literary critic’ (Davis 1979: 83) have yet to do so.

Part 3: the poetics of literary nostalgia The most obvious way nostalgia operates in literature is on the representational level: nostalgia is discussed or explicitly referred to in the content of the literary text. When Gatsby in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) confronts Nick Caraway with his peculiar idea of the past: ‘ “Can’t repeat the past?”, he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!” ’ (Fitzgerald 2003: 110), this clearly locates nostalgia as a central concept of the novel. Jamie Graham’s childhood during the Japanese occupation of the Shanghai International Settlement in J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun (1984) is rendered through the nostalgic lens of adult remembrance, and this is also a nostalgic narrative, even if nostalgia is never mentioned. These two examples are both literature about nostalgia. Representing nostalgia, however, does not necessarily create nostalgia in the reader. Of course, it is possible that an author’s meditations on nostalgia will make readers nostalgic, too, but there is also a sort of nostalgic poetics that leads to another kind of elusive and personal experience in which literature itself triggers nostalgic sensations. We can then, as Niklas Salmose argues in ‘Art About Nostalgia or Nostalgic Art?’ (2018), distinguish literature about nostalgia from nostalgic literature (Salmose 2018b: 129). If we read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945) from the former perspective (as literature about nostalgia) we might look at how the narrator values the nostalgia of Charles Ryder, or how the text figures England’s transformation from the innocent belle époque of pre-​war times through two world wars. If we study it from the latter perspective (as nostalgic literature), we would instead attend to readers’ nostalgic experience(s) of the text, and consider what it is in the text that makes them nostalgic. It could very well be that some of the reasons behind this nostalgic experience are found in the themes of the novel, but the methodological approach is different, demanding a more complex study of tropes, stylistics and reader responses –​of, in other words, the poetics of nostalgia. What constitutes a literary nostalgic experience? A literary text can trigger nostalgia in readers in a variety of ways and on different affective and cognitive levels. It can be through the very structure of the narrative,

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an effect of nostalgic imagery and tropes, or as a result of nostalgic stylistics. This kind of nostalgia is always private, but it can obviously be informed by notions of public nostalgia: marketing, trends, national mythologies and so on. Salmose divides the private literary nostalgic experience into internal and external in order to distinguish between nostalgia that is biographical (internal) and nostalgia that is related to external events and situations (Salmose 2012: 128–​144). Internal literary nostalgia occurs when a text triggers biographical memories. External nostalgia occurs when a reader feels nostalgic for a particular setting or time period they have not experienced themselves, be it the Victorian era, Ancient Rome or the Jazz Age. Narrative structure plays a significant role in triggering nostalgia. One common nostalgic structure can be described as analeptic: The analeptic structure suggests a frame structure where a narrator subsequently narrates the events of some past imagination or experience, thus creating a distinct ‘now’ and ‘then’ on which he is liable to comment. The use of first person narration further stimulates the private nature of the recollection and aids the seductive qualities of the narration; it grants the narrator a greater freedom in rearranging the temporal order of events. (Salmose 2012: 287–​88) Prominent examples of analeptic nostalgic narratives are Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and the nostalgic short stories of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. It is not only framing and narratorial presence that can create nostalgic narratives; the restructuring of temporal units in omniscient narration can also provide strong commentary on the relations between present and past. This occurs in Stephen King’s It (1986), where the interplay between adult and children’s narratives evokes a strong nostalgia for childhood events. Some versions of the analeptic nostalgic narrative can trigger textual nostalgia. In The Great Gatsby, for example, the very structure of the narrative simulates the structure of the nostalgic experience –​happiness in remembering followed by melancholia in reflecting that this memory is irretrievably vanished. The first four chapters create a sense of immersion and participation in the parties on Long Island and Manhattan in the early summer of 1922. The latter half of the book changes style, and the narrator and –​importantly –​ the reader mourn the earlier part of the book. In short, the novel creates through its stylistic and narrative structure a textual memory in the reader that is nostalgically lamented while the book is still being read (Salmose 2014: 67–​69).

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In addition to these larger structural designs, the use of flashbacks and flashforwards in general can operate on a highly nostalgic level. The ability to ‘revalue or recharge the past event with a present meaning creates a possibility of giving this event a nostalgic content’ (Salmose 2012: 292). This is exactly what happens in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, where, as discussed earlier, the taste of tea and cake involuntarily transports the narrator into his childhood past. Stephen King’s ‘The Body’ on the other hand, uses flashforwards, as the narrator interrupts his recollections of childhood dinners with his family to reflect upon these memories: ‘It took me a long time after that summer to realize that most of the tears I cried were for my mom and dad’ (King 1983: 299). Another nostalgic narrative technique is the literary iteration. Iterative frequency involves referring to narrated events as if they occurred more than once. Instead of relating to an event as happened, an author can situate it as it used to happen, as is done by Fitzgerald in the beginning of ­Chapter 3 of The Great Gatsby. Music came from Gatsby’s house not once, but ‘through the summer nights’ (Fitzgerald 2003: 39). The iterative form mirrors the vagueness of the nostalgic memory as a series of events and moods as opposed to the specificity of traditional memory.3 Free indirect speech is another narrative technique that establishes a particularly nostalgic tone. It is effective in conveying, for example, nostalgia for childhood, because of its ability to mix the real and the unreal, reality and dreams, present and past.4 Finally, nostalgic imagery has the capacity to induce nostalgic sentiments in the reader. These tropes activate readers’ sensations and emotions through descriptive prose or by carrying nostalgic weight in their capacity for allusion and symbolism. Many of these images derive from the rich repository of historical literary tropes, which can be endlessly reused for nostalgic effect. For example, Aaron Santesso, in his insightful A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia (2006), locates some of the nostalgic tropes of 18th-​ century British poetry in the pastoral’s preference, or longing, for another world (Arcadia or the Golden Age); others refer to more specific spaces such as childhood, nature, the exotic or the rural world. Santesso prefers to call the longing for utopian spaces cultural nostalgia (Santesso 2006: 81) as distinct from historical nostalgia, which is reserved for idealized historical spaces and times, as in James Macpherson’s The Works of Ossian (1765) (Santesso 2006: 95–​96). But both kinds of nostalgia rely on a lost world, real or fictive. Some of the most common nostalgic tropes concern an idyllic, innocent childhood; images of children, games, toys and so on offer a childhood phenomenology that can be reconstructed in literature to trigger nostalgia in the reader. Another common set of tropes deals with idealized spaces, from the deserted village representing a lost rural life in Goldsmiths’ ‘The Deserted Village’ or the idealization of native simplicity in Thomas Gray’s ‘The Progress of Poesy.’ This sort of idealized nostalgic space appears in a

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huge range of texts, from the Hundred Acre Wood of A.A. Milne’s Winnie-​ the-​Pooh stories to the utopian island in the stream in Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier (1918). Other nostalgic tropes are associated with ‘the ideas of decay, collapse, and change’ (Santesso 2006: 34) –​thus the potent symbol of the ruin. While a complete list of nostalgic tropes would be impossible as the set of nostalgically evocative objects and phenomena is both shifting and expanding –​and any such list would inevitably be culturally and temporally conditioned –​they are a key part of the aesthetics of nostalgia.

Conclusion There are, of course, many ways of approaching the analysis of literary texts, each capable of both highlighting different facets of individual stories, plays and poems, and of placing the literary system as a whole in a different light. Not all texts or types of text will respond equally well to all approaches, but contemporary literary critics have a vast toolbox at their disposal, and will generally be able to find the right piece of equipment to deal with works widely separated by time, geography, genre and form. This diversity of methodology and approach is one of the strengths of the field of literary criticism, but it also represents something of a problem: with such a wide variety of hermeneutic approaches available, it can be difficult to develop broader paradigms that apply to the general as well as the local case, to yesterday as well as today. Nostalgia studies represents a strong option for just this type of meta-​narrative, allowing a huge range of literary texts to be examined from a coherent, consistent and meaningful perspective. As we have argued in this chapter, nostalgia has been an important impulse and theme throughout literary history, and has recently gained strength as a theoretical and methodological force in literary analysis and scholarship. Nostalgia is about the past, but it does not belong to it; some of the most pressing contemporary issues (our ongoing ecological crisis, rising levels of migration, increasingly fragmented worldviews, the circulation of fake news, the rise of extremist politics and terrorism, the resurgence of crude nationalist politics and so on) can be understood through their interaction with both individual and collective forces of nostalgia. Contemporary literature has been quick to notice and exploit this conjunction. In post-​apocalyptic literature, such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series (2015–​17), nostalgia profoundly interacts with notions of posthumanity, while in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992–​96), its emotional resonance has a significant impact on the terraforming of Mars. Nostalgia is a major component in contemporary migration writing (both on the representational and narratological levels), as is evident in recent novels on migratory experiences like Rabih Alameddine’s The Angel of

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History (2017), Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2018). Nostalgia is also increasingly used as a literary tool to understand radicalism, as in the case of Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Jonas Hassen Khemiri’s Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger (2006). This list could of course be expanded, as today’s writers use our longing for yesterday to explore the present and reimagine the future. And, alongside these literary nostalgias, critics and scholars will continue to develop new theoretical models and conceptualizations of nostalgia’s role in literature, thus contributing to the wider field of nostalgia studies and offering valuable insight into contemporary issues in the study of literature. Notes 1

2

3 4

The following literary review does not attempt to be exhaustive, and the focus will be predominantly on collections and monographs written in English. Also worth noting is Randall Stevenson’s enlightening discussion of the transition from modernist British nostalgia into postmodern fiction, ‘Not What It Used to Be: Nostalgia and the Legacies of Modernism’ (2011). For an extended discussion on nostalgia and the iterative form, see Salmose (2012: 202–​203). See also ‘ “A Past That Has Never Been Present”: The Literary Experience of Childhood and Nostalgia’ (Salmose 2018a: 341).

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Bible: King James Version (1997) University of Michigan, 18 February. Available online at: https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​k/​kjv/​. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Byatt, A.S. (1990) Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto & Windus. Brontë, Emily (1848) Wuthering Heights. New York: Harper & Brothers. Clewell, Tammy (ed) (2013) Modernism and Nostalgia: Bodies, Locations, Aesthetics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Colley, Ann C. (1998) Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Coulmas, Florian (2003) Writing Systems: An Introduction to Their Linguistic Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dames, Nicholas (2001) Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction. 1810–​1870. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, Fred (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. London: Free Press. de Grazia, Margreta (2001) ‘Hamlet Before Its Time’. Modern Language Quarterly, 62 (4): 355–​375. Doane, Janice (2013) Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. London: Routledge. Durkheim, Émile (2002) Suicide: A Study in Sociology. London: Routledge. Eliot, T.S. (1985) ‘Ulysses, Order, and Myth’, in Bernard Benstock (ed) Critical Essays on Joyce. Boston, MA: G.K. Hall & Co, pp 25–​27. Faber, Michael (2011) The Crimson Petal and the White. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. Faulkner, William (2011) Requiem for a Nun. New York: Vintage Books. Fitzgerald, F. Scott (2003) The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner’s. Forster, E.M. (1910) Howard’s End. London: Edward Arnold. Fowles, John (1969) The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Jonathan Cape. Hamid, Mohsin (2008) The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Boston: Harvest Books. Hemmings, Robert (2008) Modern Nostalgia: Siegfried Sassoon, Trauma and the Second World War. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Homer (2007) The Odyssey of Homer. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. Homer (2015) Iliad. New York: HarperCollins. Hutcheon, Linda and Mario J. Valdés (1998–​2000) ‘Irony, Nostalgia and the Postmodern: A Dialogue’. Poligrafías: Revista de literatura comparada, 3: 18–​41. Available online at: http://​ru.ffyl.unam.mx/h ​ andle/1​ 0391/1​ 080. Illbruck, Helmut (2012) Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. New York: Verso.Jemisin, N.K. (2018) The Broken Earth Trilogy: The Fifth Season, the Obelisk Gate, the Stone Sky. London: Orbit Books.

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Joyce, Simon (2007) Victorians in the Rearview Mirror. Athens: Ohio University Press. Kaplan, Cora (2007) Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Khemiri, Jonas Hassen (2011) Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. King, Stephen (1983) ‘The Body’, in Different Seasons. New York: Signet, pp 293–​436. King, Stephen (1986) It. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Ladino, Jennifer K. (2012) Reclaiming Nostalgia: Longing for Nature in American Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Lawrence, D.H. (2002) The Lost Girl. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liu, James (1962) The Art of Chinese Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Lodge, David (1988) Nice Work. London: Secker & Warburg. Lorcin, Patricia M.E. (2013) ‘Imperial Nostalgia; Colonial Nostalgia: Differences of Theory, Similarities of Practice?’ Historical Reflection /​ Réflexions Historiques, 39 (3): 97–​111. Martel, Yann (2001) Life of Pi. New York: Vintage Books. McCarthy, Cormac (2006) The Road. New York: Knopf/​Doubleday Publishing Group. Nabokov, Vladimir (1983) Lectures on Literature (edited by Fredson Bowers). London: Picador. Ong, Walter J. (2002) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge. Ovid (1939) Tristia and Ex Ponto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pound, Ezra (1967) Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound. London: Faber & Faber. Prior, Moody E. (1948) ‘The Thought of Hamlet and the Modern Temper’. ELH, 15 (4): 261–​285. Proust, Marcel (2005) Swann’s Way. London: Vintage Books. Pynchon, Thomas (2010) Inherent Vice. London: Vintage Books. Pynchon, Thomas (2014) Bleeding Edge. London: Vintage Books.Ramsey-​ Kurz, Helga (2011) Projections of Paradise: Ideal Elsewheres in Postcolonial Migrant Literature. New York: Brill. Rosaldo, Renato (1989) ‘Imperialist Nostalgia’. Representations, 26 (Special Issue: Memory and Counter-​Memory): 107–​122. Rudaitytė, Regina (ed) (2018) History, Memory and Nostalgia in Literature and Culture. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Salmose, Niklas (2012) ‘Towards a Poetics of Nostalgia: The Nostalgic Experience in Modern Fiction’. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Salmose, Niklas (2014) ‘Reading Nostalgia: Textual Memory in The Great Gatsby’. F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, 12 (1): 67–​87.

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Salmose, Niklas (2018a) ‘A Past that Has Never Been Present: The Literary Experience of Childhood and Nostalgia’. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, 8: 332–​351. Salmose, Niklas (2018b) ‘Art About Nostalgia or Nostalgic Art?’, in Niklas Salmose and Eric Sandberg (eds) Once Upon a Time: Nostalgic Narratives in Transition. Stockholm: Trolltrumma Academia, pp 127–​139. Salmose, Niklas (2019) Contemporary Nostalgia. Bern: MDPI. Salmose, Niklas and Eric Sandberg (eds) (2018) Once Upon A Time: Nostalgic Narratives in Transition. Stockholm: Trolltrumma Academia Santesso, Aaron (2006) A Careful Longing: The Poetics and Problems of Nostalgia. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Savage, Catharine H. (1964) ‘Nostalgia in Alain-​Fournier and Proust’. The French Review, 38 (2): 167–​172. Schultz, Matthew (2018) ‘Molly Bloom’s Nostalgic Rever ie: A Phenomenology of Modernist Longing’. Irish Studies Review, 26 (4): 472–​487. Shakespeare, William (1978) ‘Q30’, in S.C. Campbell (ed) Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London: Bell & Hyman, p 42. Shakespeare, William (2002) ‘Hamlet’, in Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (eds) The Tragedy of Hamlet Prince of Denmark. London: Folger Shakespeare Library. Available online at: www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/​ download/​pdf/​Ham.pdf. Shamsie, Kamila (2018) Home Fire. London: Bloomsbury. Smith, Kimberly K. (2000) ‘Mere Nostalgia: Notes on a Progressive Paratheory’. Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 3 (4): 505–​527. Steiner, George (1971) In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture. London: Faber & Faber. Stevenson, Randall (2011) ‘Not What It Used to Be: Nostalgia and the Legacies of Modernism’, in David James (ed) The Legacies of Modernism: Historicising Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp 23–​39. Stewart, Susan (1984) On Longing: Narrative of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sullivan, Erin (2010) ‘Historical Keyword: Nostalgia’. The Lancet, 376 (9741): 585. The Epic of Gilgamesh (1999) London: Penguin Books. Wagner, Tamara S. (2004) Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel 1740–​1890. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Walder, Dennis (2012) Postcolonial Nostalgias: Writing, Representation and Memory. London: Routledge. Waugh, Evelyn (1945/​2000) Brideshead Revisited. London: Penguin Books. Weber, Max (1992) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Routledge.

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West, Rebecca (1993) Return of the Soldier. London: Virago Modern Classics. Woolf, Virginia (1984) ‘Modern Fiction’, in Andrew McNeille (ed) The Essays of Virginia Woolf (vol 4 –​1925 to 1928). London: Hogarth Press, pp 157–​164. Woolf, Virginia (2006) To the Lighthouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Xiang, Shuchen (2015) ‘The Irretrievability of the Past: Nostalgia in Chinese Literature from Tang-​Song Poetry to Ming-​Qing San-​Wen’. International Communication of Chinese Culture, 2: 205–​222. Yotsuna, Ōtomo (1965) ‘The Waving Wistarias’. The Man’yōshū: The Nippon Gakujutsu Shinkokai Translation of One Thousand Poems. New York: Columbia University Press, p 185.

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Architecture and Nostalgia: The End of History, the End of the Future and the Prospect of Nostalgia Fernando Quesada and Andrés Carretero

Introduction The sentimental feeling for the past (space or time) has some unique features in architecture. One can feel nostalgia for particular spatial experiences of the past, or for some kind of ambiance, if they are missing. Alternatively, space may provoke spatiotemporal travels in our minds that shake our sensorium and challenge the linear sequence of time. Due to its material condition, architecture can firmly connect us with the present, or it can disrupt our feeling of being in the here and now. Furthermore, the feeling of longing may also tie in to how architecture is practised, not just how it is experienced. Architects feel nostalgia in specific ways and, more specifically, in a way that is closely related to the status of labour in societal praxis. During modernity, we have witnessed different forms of architectural nostalgia: architects have experienced nostalgia both for the past and for the future. History and technology have both fuelled these temporal movements. Nonetheless, in a discipline that aspires to eternity, as architecture traditionally has done, nostalgia is a usual suspect closely related to another mood, cultural decadence: A society that generates a lot of bad movies need not be decadent; a society that makes the same movies over and over again might be.

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A society run by the cruel and arrogant might not be decadent; a society where even the wise and good can’t legislate might be. A crime-​r idden society isn’t necessarily decadent; a peaceable, aging, childless society beset by flares of nihilistic violence looks closer to our definition. (Douthat 2020a) If it were not for the mention of cinematography, and if we substituted ‘novels’ for ‘movies’, this quote could have been written in the late 19th century instead of just a few months ago. The quote talks about a kind of decadence engendered by phenomena like the exhausting effect of the tyranny of novelty, the lack of moral leadership, and a nihilism characteristic of bleak individuals who have left their youth far behind them. The text as a whole exudes nostalgia for a form of society that is the opposite of the one it describes: that is, energetic, young, fresh and dynamic. The eternal return of nostalgia and the question of memory is inseparable from the agonistic ethos of history, from the open dispute over the narrative of an accelerated present that has serious difficulties in perceiving, and elaborating, the plasticity –​the falsifiability –​of its own historicity. And there is no interest in considering that issue because it demands mediation and, therefore, a suspension of time, which can lead to the resurgence of conflicts that have only seemingly been put to rest (Otero 2018). Unpacking the question of memory demands eschewing forms of nostalgia, or thinking from the perspective of nostalgia in a productive way in order to extract a raw material that is not yet dead, that is still pending elaboration. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson (1984) dedicated an entire section to the relationships between postmodernity and the past, in which he argued, faced with the eclipse of history, in favour of historicity and against historicism, by emphasizing the primacy of the latter’s exchange value over the former’s use value (Jameson 1984: 64–​71). He also pointed to the imposition of the spectacularizing spatial logic over historical time, in a society ‘whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles’ (Jameson 1984: 66); a reflection that has different connotations today, more than 30 years since its original formulation, and following the dissipation of the accelerated end of history announced by Francis Fukuyama and then refuted (Fukuyama 1992). History has not ended. It continues on its course, but its course keeps getting darker and darker, as evidenced by the overwhelming triumph of dystopian fiction, the loss of the future, a whole genre on the rise. Jameson took the opportunity to draw attention to pastiche and the ‘nostalgia mode’ (Jameson 1984: 66), which translates in the field of architecture into an abuse of historicism through the use of architectural styles from the past in contemporary architecture, a

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pop aestheticization of bygone forms, which, contradictorily, entails a ‘loss of the radical past’ (Jameson 1984: 70). In our day, although the causes are different, given the rise of digital technologies in architectural design and its consequent structural discontinuity with the formal catalogue of the past –​now obsolete, but incredibly meaningful for architects and theoreticians of postmodernism like Aldo Rossi (1966), Robert Venturi (1966) or Manfredo Tafuri (1968) –​ the results are still very similar, in terms of the forgetfulness or loss of the past, or in its inclusion in a neohistoricist game. This disconnection from the past, apparently irreconcilable, makes it hard to instrumentalize the use value of history, but it also impedes the deployment of an anti-​nostalgic memory as a retroactive fiction directed at a renovative practice in the field of architecture. If this functional approach to memory seeks the revitalization of the not yet dead forms of the radical past, it must necessarily engage in ‘the resurrection of the dead of anonymous and silenced generations, the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our collective future’ (Jameson 1984: 66). From this perspective, practising memory in architecture means engaging with the radical past without the pretension of recovering it –​since its loss is irreparable –​or of replacing ‘old futures with new pasts’, as recently written by the historian Christopher Clark, quoting an aporetic phrase that underscores the possible identitarian and nationalist tendencies, and the populist danger, implicit in these exercises using forms of temporality (Clark 2019). In what follows, we will travel through time and space trying to unpack the problematic relation between architecture, culture and nostalgia within the realm of modernity since the Renaissance. However, we will do it looking backwards, since the current state of nostalgia must be our fundamental starting point.

Nostalgia, decadence, progress and neoliberalism Today, in all fields of knowledge, nostalgia is considered a characteristically modern feeling, which was consolidated at the end of the 18th century along with the modern notion of historicity (Boym 2001). The nostalgic sentiment developed in parallel with the Romantic worldview and the acceptance that history follows a linear movement, an unstoppable vector in a single, irreversible and definitive direction, fed by a long process of secularization dating back to Renaissance humanism, which advanced on an ideological level with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, colonial expansion and the Napoleonic wars, ultimately entering into practical and everyday

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spheres with the Industrial Revolution and its long corollaries, which lasted until the end of the Second World War. That is most likely why Svetlana Boym asserts that nostalgia is the back-​side of progress, its antonym. In that sense, since the beginning of modernity and through to today, progress and nostalgia have been connected by an unbreakable link (Boym 2001: 13). This status as two sides of the same coin explains why, when trust in progress declines, the nostalgic vector acts as a counterweight. Such seems to be the case today, as argued by authors as varied and influential as Zygmunt Bauman or Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi. Why bring memory and nostalgia into play, then, if the aim is not to replace the old futures, the old utopias, with other pasts? Zygmunt Bauman’s posthumous book is called Retrotopia, a neologism that conceptualizes the dominant tendency in the ‘era of nostalgia’, the negation of the negation of utopia, a return to idealized pasts which, even if they are lost or abandoned, refuse to die or disappear: a regression into the Hobbesian trap, tribalism, inequality and the maternal bosom, a romanticized state, pre-​polis, that is neither agonistic nor conflictive (Bauman 2017). The author illustrates these ideas with a 180-​degree turn presumably taken by Walter Benjamin’s (1968) ‘Angel of History’ –​‘This Used to Be the Future’, as the Pet Shop Boys once sang. Fear of the future thus justifies taking refuge in the past and would explain the current ‘retrotopian phase in utopia’s history’ (Bauman 2017: 9), which embraces a liberal critique of the increasingly widespread policies of historical memory by considering them primarily as discretionary and partisan tools, seemingly without recognizing their ability to expand, include and produce new, and dissenting, consensuses on disputed historical accounts. For his part, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi described how this process of the erosion of trust in progress is tied to what he called ‘the slow cancellation of the future’, exercised progressively since the late 1970s by the neoliberalism ushered in by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan (Berardi 2011). A frenzy of novelty and perpetual movement has definitively buried that trust in a better future, leading to a permanent montage of days gone by (Fisher 2014: 16). The feeling elicited by this phenomenon is that of arriving too late in a very confusing experience of time characterized above all by anxiety (Fisher 2014: 18–​19). In recent years, which some trace back to the 11 September 2001 attacks in the US and others to the Great Recession of 2008, this historical awareness of a loss of confidence in progress which Bauman described has settled in definitively. Yet, this prevalence of nostalgia over progress is, in itself, an ongoing living process that has much deeper roots, which can be traced back earlier in time, as ‘Bifo’ points out. One good example can be found in the ideas of Ross Douthat, the well-​educated and influential

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conservative journalist whom we quoted in the opening of this chapter, who believes that the beginning of our decline was marked by Apollo. Obviously, he is referring not to the Greek god, but to the lunar mission of 1969 (Douthat 2020b). As a good Catholic and a good American, Douthat is in his element moving indiscriminately between faith in the Virgin and faith in machines (Lilla 2020). However, far from offering a simple fatalistic narrative of the present, what Douthat describes is an ageing, worn-​out and decadent society, weighed down by nostalgia, which nevertheless remains active and operative, in a somewhat precarious –​but paradoxical and surprisingly stable –​state of sustainability. It is, therefore, not a decline that heralds an end, a change or an eclipse, but a virtually static condition that resonates with the end of history predicted by Francis Fukuyama in 1992. Douthat asks a rhetorical question: But what if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we –​or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim –​really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver? (Douthat 2020a) This is a typically nostalgic situation, which, Douthat continues, is leading us not towards revolution, transhumanism or extinction but, rather, towards growing old with a certain condescending calm, definitively detached from the past and no longer optimistic about the future. He would consider our current society prosperous in material and technological aspects but poor in intellectual, institutional and cultural terms –​an ‘Alexandrian’ society according to the grand narrative of decline outlined by Jacques Barzun (Barzun 2000). The past is in the past, it has been cancelled, and history no longer offers us its traditional teachings to shepherd the present towards a better, more prosperous and peaceful future. However, the nostalgia implicit in this decadent society does not have a spatial condition, as it did in its original sense. Therefore, it cannot be cured by travelling somewhere else –​ not even to the non-​place of utopia. It has a purely temporal condition and can be short-​circuited only by drastic shifts in time, to the Garden of Eden or Arcadia. This form of contemporary nostalgia, which might be confused with melancholy, is not just any form of melancholy, but objectified melancholy (Galli 2013: 15).

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Nostalgia and presentism in postmodern architecture Drawing on L.P. Hartley’s classic notion, David Lowenthal stated that ‘the past is a foreign country’ in the title of his now classic 1985 book about the loss of learning lessons from the past to direct the future –​a loss, in his view, brought about by Promethean modernity. For Lowenthal, faith in the past as a guide ‘rested on three assumptions: that the past was knowable and the future ordained; that change was gradual, cyclical, or inconsequential; and that human nature was the same in all times and places’ (Lowenthal 1985/​2015: 81). But precisely for this reason, because of this feeling of loss, nostalgia sets in, demanding a pre-​cooked, edited and comfortable past, which, as Lowenthal had detected, was characteristic of the 1980s. The situation was analogous to Victorian culture, which took more interest in the ‘atmosphere’ of the past than in its details or its true vestiges, to such an extent that in the mid-​1980s Lowenthal wrote: ‘we are likewise all-​ embracing: almost anything old, olde, or old-​fashioned may be desirable’ (Lowenthal 1985/​2015: 82). In 1980, a fundamental date for our purposes, the first Venice Architecture Biennale was held under the direction of the architect Paolo Portoghesi with the significant title La Presenza del Pasato (‘The Presence of the Past’). The event definitively legitimized postmodern historicist architecture as a paradoxical new avant-​garde, not only internationally but globally (Szacka 2016). One of the members of the scientific committee, the historian Kenneth Frampton, stormed out of a preparatory meeting with a loud slam of the door and resigned from his role in the organization, due to a profound disagreement with the event’s guiding principle (Avermaete et al 2019). Just three years later, in 1983, he published an article of fundamental importance for the architecture that would follow immediately after, postulating ‘six points for an architecture of resistance’ under the motto of a ‘new regionalism’ (Frampton 1983). Frampton’s reasons for his resignation from the biennale are particularly relevant, as he expressed them in a letter to one of the members of the committee Portoghesi had put together, the influential architect Robert Stern. In the resignation letter, dated 13 May 1980, Frampton outlined three reasons: 1. This Biennale seems to represent the triumph of Post-​Modernism –​however loosely this may be defined and God knows it is a very inclusive concept. 2. I have written a text which is categorically critical of this position and I had until recently intended to submit this text for the catalogue. 3. I have come to the conclusion that this would be an absurdity; that however negative my text, it would be still absorbed within and by the demagogic policy which while apparently open seems to characterize

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the direction of this year’s Biennale. (Letter reprinted in Avermaete et al 2019: 6) Frampton perceived the historicist postmodern architecture promoted by the large-​scale exhibition as the culmination of a tendency that had begun in the late 1950s, a tendency dominated by a nostalgia not so much for the past but for the immediate future of architecture. In the late, and to some extent disconcerting, works by the so-​called masters of modern architecture, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum (1959), Le Corbusier’s chapel in Ronchamp (1958) or Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin (1968), the dogma they had previously instituted was broadly surpassed by another, based on a powerful personal poetics, and the sense of community and generational belonging elicited by their earlier teachings and by so-​called modern architecture (which fell into a deep crisis, paving the way for the nostalgia for premodern architecture) was definitively lost: ‘The only period of recent history of architectural design when nostalgia can be considered a, if not the, central issue, is to be found somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s, a relative brief interlude for discipline otherwise apparently oblivious to such matters’ (Galli 2013: 19). As this quotation shows, one of the most widespread platitudes among architects and historians of 20th-​century architecture has been and continues to be that modern architecture was radically anti-​nostalgic; whereas, in the transformations of its discourse and formal language after the Second World War, which led to architectural postmodernism, the trump card of nostalgia was played for history and the classical language. However, although the statement may be partially true, a more careful and detailed analysis of this phenomenon can also offer a different and nearly opposite conclusion.

Anti-​nostalgia and modernity Modern architecture drew indistinctly and alternatively on utopia and nostalgia, and therein lies its anti-​historicism: in its voluntary dislocation from the present. Postmodern architecture, on the other hand, was presentist, the great ally of the shift that took place in the 1970s, a practice perfectly suited to the dominant production model of the times: neoliberal capitalism. In that sense, it is surprising that, even today, legions of architecture historians and critics continue upholding the worn-​out precept that the Modern Movement was Promethean tout court, and they condemn its anti-​historicism, advocating, in contrast, for a commitment to the present as a guarantee of ideological progressive politics. This was the trap that Frampton, as mentioned earlier,

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very astutely perceived when he vacated his position as advisor and critic for the 1980 Architecture Biennale. Manfredo Tafuri painted a very accurate portrait of this phenomenon, of the inherently nostalgic component of modern architecture, in the first chapter of his 1968 book Theories and History of Architecture. It is a phenomenon that has remained with us since Tafuri’s keen analysis and is best summed up in his own words: From the moment Brunelleschi institutionalised a linguistic code and a symbolic system based on a superhistorical comparison with the great example of antiquity, to the time when Alberti, feeling dissatisfied with mythical historicism, began to explore rationally the structure of that code and its syntactical and emblematical values: in this period, the first great attempt of modern history to actualise historical values as a translation of mythical time into present time, of archaic meanings into revolutionary messages, of ancient ‘words’ into civil actions, burnt itself out. (Tafuri 1968/​1980: 14) For Tafuri, all modern architecture, which he describes as beginning with Brunelleschi, is embedded in this phenomenon of de-​historization, which, in his analysis, continues until what he calls the threshold of the contemporary world. The role of nostalgia in this phenomenon is fundamental, but it is neither unidirectional nor easy to describe. Filippo Brunelleschi’s and Leon Battista Alberti’s respective operations are thus entirely different, although they both draw on the past. Brunelleschi used fragments of classical language, and Alberti relied on an erudite and philological reconstruction. In Tafuri’s view, Brunelleschi researched and used ‘quotations and allusions’ tied to classical authority with the aim of constructing a new material reality, whereas Alberti worked toward recovering the lost meanings of those fragments with the aim of figuring out a reality that he considered unsatisfactory, not constructing a new reality but a new science: what we call history. Brunelleschi’s architecture, which Tafuri describes as autonomous objects, sought to break the narrative unity of the medieval city by generating a clear break that would enter into a dialectical relationship with that narrative continuity. There was not an iota of utopia in this operation, because the aim was not to impose a new absolute model –​that of perspective –​on the rest of the existing city, on stratified medieval space but, rather, to introduce an intense rivalry between the two that could be viewed neither as a pure continuity nor as a substitution. That is where Tafuri interprets a historic rupture, which, paradoxically, is born from an operation brimming with nostalgia, for the classical architectural language in this case, and which he qualifies as the first avant-​garde.

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Contrasting with this characterization of Brunelleschi’s use of the past, Tafuri describes Alberti’s work in a very different vein. In his De re aedificatoria (1443–​1452) or in his limited built work, Alberti did not connect his philological reconstructions dialectically with medieval reality; rather, he posited his work in ethical terms, seeking to highlight the contrast between the two worlds (the antique or Gothic and the modern or classical) and explicitly asserting the superiority of the classical world over the medieval –​ in other words, introducing the modern idea of evolutionary historicity for the first time. However, this exhibition of different options without any dialectic, this battle of languages, led to a side effect that had an enormous impact on the architectural culture that followed immediately after: the interest in linguistic experimentation in what Tafuri calls ‘bricolage’ and, with it, the immediate relativity of the superiority of the classical language over any other. Now that, as with postmodern historicist architecture, the collective imaginary of the near future has once again turned reactionary, can we imagine something beyond the dichotomy of the regressive past versus the progressive future? Tafuri used the term ‘bricolage’ in a negative way, implicitly relating the linguistic experimentalism of post-​Brunelleschian architecture with the architectural neo-​avant-​garde that was on the rise as he was writing his book (1968), which witnessed an array of revivals of fin-​ de-​siècle avant-​gardes, such as the neo-​liberty in Italy, the neo-​picturesque in England or a new institutional and corporate classicism in the United States, along with historical revisions of the Modern Movement. In Tafuri’s terms, post-​Brunelleschian bricolage offered a rear-​view mirror image of these postmodern revivals, which we might rightly label as ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’ neo-​avant-​gardes. The fact that utopian projections are sometimes turned toward the past is something Tafuri also remarked in Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (1973/​1976). Its second chapter, ‘Form as a Regressive Utopia’, warns about the ideological and formal constrictions of architecture and its inability, or difficulty, to breathe life into new utopian imaginations without falling out of step with time, without disconnecting the utopian potential of the old forms from the technological development of the new ones –​that is, from progress (Tafuri 1973/​1976: 41–​50). It seems, therefore, that nostalgia has accompanied the entirety of modern architecture in one way or another. According to Svetlana Boym, there are two modes of nostalgia in modernity. ‘Restorative nostalgia’ aims to fill the void left by history and reconstruct the lost past in the name of common causes produced artificially by a sense of alienation from the present. By eliminating the causes of that loss, the aim is to restore a state that no longer exists. ‘Reflective nostalgia’ focuses on the process of remembrance, experiencing delight at the patina

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of time, and its goal is to build different places and times that delve into the distance with respect to the past, such that, paradoxically, it constructs an autonomous present (Boym 2001: 41–​57). The Renaissance as a movement did not practise restorative nostalgia in the least. The classical culture visible in the ruins was still understood as a magister, as a pedagogical tool to erect a completely new architecture, clearly different from what came before and, in all respects, absolute, independent and complete in and of itself. Although in Boym’s view nostalgia did not take place prior to 19th-​century Romanticism, we would venture the hypothesis that, although both Brunelleschi and Alberti combined the two forms of nostalgia Boym outlines, reflexive nostalgia would have been Brunelleschi’s predilection, in keeping with Tafuri’s analysis, whereas restorative nostalgia would correspond not so much to Alberti himself as to his Mannerist, Baroque and even Neoclassical counterparts. From this standpoint, we might argue that Alberti’s followers unwillingly initiated so-​called ‘heritageization’, since, by playing out Brunelleschi’s historical dialectic, post-​Brunelleschian architecture resuscitated the narrative capacities of classical language, a move that is inherent in the process of ‘heritageization’ –​that is, it is a practical way of promoting architectural nostalgia in its own terms.

A craving for the future However, if we accept the premise that nostalgia is a modern feeling, rooted in literary Romanticism, we must also recognize that 19th-​century architecture was anything but nostalgic, despite its appearances. In that sense, the 19th century did not cry out for a regressive architecture, but for a prospective and a clearly modern one (Giedion 1928/​1995). The idea of architecture as an expression of the zeitgeist was a typical thesis of the 19th century and totally accepted by so-​called modern architecture, which considered, on the whole, that 19th-​century architecture had failed to live up to its time –​a period full of constant, accelerated novelties that led to a hunger for modernity, which the architecture of the time never managed to satiate because, systematically, it arrived too late –​just as ‘Bifo’ describes it in the case of our contemporary period. Peter Collins articulated a fascinating dismantling of modern architecture’s historical break with 19th-​century architecture, in order to demonstrate the continuity of a series of ‘ideals’ that were entirely determined by the acquisition of historical awareness and the cultural evolutionism that gave rise to the Modern Movement, a supposedly anti-​ nostalgic cultural form:

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It may unhesitatingly be asserted that the demand for a new architecture arose almost entirely from the fact that architectural historians were dominated by one notion, and one notion only; namely, that a modern building was essentially a collection of potential antiquarian fragments which one day would be discovered, and studied by future historians with a view to determining the social history of the Victorian age. (Collins 1965: 131–​132) In other words, the architecture of 19th-​century eclecticism was marked by a very intense historical awareness based on a complete belief in evolutionary progress and the importance of posterity, on a solid idea of the future as a product that could be controlled from the times preceding it. Nothing could be further from the restorative nostalgia typically invoked to describe this period in architectural culture. According to Collins, in the 19th century there was a permanent controversy between revivalists, with their cultural awareness of the legacy of the past, and anti-​revivalists, with their evolutionary and scientific awareness (Collins 1965: 133). In practice, architects shifted between the two camps using partial solutions, and what is now known as the culture of architectural eclecticism was actually a dialectical historical process drawing on both larger tendencies, materialized in a multitude of formal revivals. This complex scenario, in the mid-​19th century, saw the emergence of a figure like John Ruskin, who promoted a modern form of art and architecture derived from nature and with a fundamental ethical basis. According to broad-​brush historiography, Ruskin’s mission was ‘to rescue it [architecture] from this quagmire’ to save it from the 19th-​century stylistic battle (Denslagen 2009: 90). However, Ruskin’s real achievement was that of incorporating into architecture, for the first time, a systematic critique of its social function (Frampton 1980/​1985: 42–​43). Ruskin was the first to make an integrated attempt to break with the anxious, modern presentism characteristic of the 19th century by incorporating a radically anti-​capitalist vector into his model. Ruskin’s criticism, based on a combination of the condemnation of industrialism and the defence of non-​alienating manual work, delivered the coup de grâce for restorative nostalgia and updated the reflective nostalgia that lies at the foundations of modern architecture (Ruskin 1849). Nikolaus Pevsner, the German historian who emigrated to the United Kingdom, was responsible for determining the historiographic canon of this narrative, drawing an evolutionary path from the 19th-​century stylistic anxiety, marked by decadence, exhaustion and moral nihilism, to modern architecture, which was meant to have finally reconciled cultural revivalism

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with material anti-​revivalism through initiatives such as the Deutscher Werkbund or the Bauhaus. In 1936 Pevsner published a fundamental book, Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius (1936/​ 1960), a hugely influential publication that placed at the centre of the debate not John Ruskin, but the man who had been his student at Oxford: William Morris. The canonically anti-​nostalgic modern ideology that Pevsner defended was based on three elements: William Morris’s ideas, Victorian-​era engineering and the Art Nouveau movement (Faulkner 2006: 50). However, Pevsner was not acritical with regard to his hero, William Morris. Whereas, on the one hand, he claimed that Morris was the absolute pioneer of functional modern design, stating that ‘we owe it to him that an ordinary man’s dwelling-​house has once more become a worthy object of the architect’s thought, and a chair, a wallpaper, or base a worthy object of the artist’s imagination’ (Pevsner 1936/​1960: 22–​23), on the other hand, he pointed out that Morris was a nostalgic restorer in upholding manual work in opposition to industrial work: ‘Morris’s Socialism is far from correct according to the standards established in the later 19th century: there is more in it of [Thomas] More than of Marx’ (Pevsner 1936/​1960: 24). Pevsner based his portrayal of Morris on the 35 lectures he gave, centred on artistic and social issues, between 1877 and 1894 (Pevsner 1936/​1960: 22). But in his canonical history of modern architecture, which was the first and foundational volume on the subject, Pevsner failed to analyse one of Morris’s most fundamental works, the novel News from Nowhere (1891/​1922). Doing so now might lead us to a form of reflective nostalgia that could update Pevsner’s thesis, making Morris not so much a prophet of the 20th century but of our own –​the 21st –​since the novel refutes the apparent restorative nature of Morris’s ideology, which Pevsner criticized, and opens the door to a different interpretation. Pevsner’s criticism of Morris (too much [Thomas] More and too little Marx) served to establish the evolutionist thesis of modern architecture, but in return it overlooked the disruptive capabilities of Morris’s reflective nostalgia.

News from Nowhere William Morris’s News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest is the story of a communist ecotopia, of an objectively better future in which a state of balance has been reached between culture and nature, the countryside and the city, work and leisure (Morris 1891/​1992). Morris published the text by instalments in the socialist newspaper Commonweal in 1890, and the following year it appeared as a complete book. The novel was a response to another work, Looking Backward (1888) by Edward Bellamy, which Morris had reviewed (Leopold 2016: 21). In Bellamy’s novel, the future described

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for Boston in the year 2000 is, like Morris’s ‘Nowhere’, a socialist society, but in Bellamy’s case it is a technocratic state socialism that contains presages of many of our current habits, devices and control mechanisms, with some unsettling aspects (Bellamy 1888). Contrasting with this technified state socialism, Morris proposed a completely different eco-​communism. The protagonist and narrator, Socialist League militant William Guest, wakes up on a June morning after having attended a meeting at the League headquarters the night before in the cold of winter. Thus begins the novel, in Kelmscott House, Hammersmith, which was Morris’s home and serves, in his fiction, as headquarters for the League. Upon waking and going to the river, William immediately notices that the waters of the Thames are cleaner than normal; there are salmon, and people are even swimming and rowing boats along the river’s meanders. William’s first impression is that he has arrived in the place dreamed of by the League, with pure socialist air and socialist water (Pinkeney 2010: 96). The pollution is gone, the river is clean and the air is breathable again: ‘Though there was a bridge across the stream of houses on its Banks, how all was changed from last night! The soap-​works with their smoke-​vomiting chimneys were gone; the engineer’s work gone; the lead-​works gone; and no sound of riveting and hammering came down the west wind from Thorneycroft’s’ (Morris 1891/​1992: 8). From here, William begins a journey through ‘Nowhere’, first by taking a carriage from Hammersmith. As he travels, accompanied by a group of young people, William discovers the city and its way of life, with the Parliament building converted into a fertilizer warehouse, children running in the streets or tending to customers in shops –​where products are not purchased –​or Trafalgar Square transformed into a huge fruit orchard. The nation-​state, industrial work and disciplinary institutions like schools and prisons have disappeared, and the entire population, highly decentralized, lives under a regime of self-​organization and direct democracy. This first carriage ride takes William to the British Museum, which is inhabited by an old man who tells him about the shift from industrial market capitalism to eco-​communism, which forms the central part of the book, providing a description of the history of the revolution, the civil war and ‘Nowhere’s’ transition that takes up a considerable number of pages. Despite its appearances, ‘Nowhere’ is not a place without a past, accessed by magical means; it is a historical construction built through struggle, suffering and determination. In the final third of the novel, William returns to Hammersmith and sets off on a new journey, this time by boat upriver to Kelmscott Manor, Oxfordshire where Morris had also lived. The novel ends with William’s gradual estrangement from ‘Nowhere’. When he perceives that his fellow travellers on the ship can no longer see or hear him as he

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reaches his destination, he realizes that he is leaving ‘Nowhere’ and returning to his own time, the time of endless class struggles. Despite what it might seem, the disruption of time and the role of history and the past was not the main plot of Morris’s work, or its main contribution, nor is that our concern today in the context of contemporary architecture. What Morris anticipated was not so much a form of design, a style or an ethics, but the centrality of the adaptive relationship between human beings and the environment and its material, psychological and spiritual effects (Williams 1973: 272–​279). With his detailed account of revolution, civil war and social reorganization as an inevitable historical process toward achieving an ‘epoch of rest’, Morris put at the centre of the debate not so much the activity of design, architecture, but the agency of the environment and human beings within that historical process (Hale 2010: 117). Pevsner’s critique of Morris was determined by the historian’s marked cultural evolutionism and, in more general terms, the ideology of modern architecture. The pioneering role Pevsner assigned to Morris, whom he considered a forerunner of Walter Gropius without his more problematic aspects, was based on formal traits and Morris’s works, as well as on a limited portion of his ideas, specifically those associated with the high moral content of his aesthetics. Pevsner transferred this moral superiority onto the Modern Movement in an exercise in retrotopic anachronism, since Morris’s ethics –​ those of the craftsman and the medieval guild –​were derived from his radical critique not so much of the machine but of the socioeconomic order of industrial capitalism, of which the machine was the most eloquent symbol. By effecting this transfer of moral values, Pevsner forever fixed the ideological canon of the Modern Movement as a horizon even more unattainable than ‘Nowhere’. That is the canon of anti-​nostalgic modern architecture, which later historiography engaged in debating, deconstructing and reversing, as did its strongest opponent, Manfredo Tafuri, in his own time.

Conclusion: Towards a nostalgia-​free ecotopia The role of history and the past for an anti-​nostalgic Modern Movement could only be problematic –​and when postmodernism landed the final coup de grâce the effect was paradoxical and unintentional. Far from restoring to history and the past their role as magister, architectural history simply disappeared, and the end presaged by Francis Fukuyama came to pass. Today, the role played by ecology in our relationship with nature can be seen as similar to that of modern architecture in relation to historical architecture and, more generally, to the past. In parallel to how the practice of architecture has broken free from history, ecology has become entirely independent of landscape architecture and

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gardening, even espousing completely opposite principles. Whereas landscape and garden architecture have traditionally fallen under the influence of aesthetics, ecology has been associated with biology and has cut ties with the aesthetic tradition in nature. The love of the landscape has been replaced by ecological theories about self-​regulated systems with hardly any room for human agency. This surprising shift from a time-​based nostalgia, typically modern in nature and aptly described by Svetlana Boym, toward the original spatial nostalgia provides a fitting description of our present moment and the main challenge we are facing. That is where the lessons of William Morris deserve a second look, since his main foresight dealt with the centrality of the environmental factor. As we read it today, News from Nowhere seems not so much a restorative nostalgic utopia but a critical and constructive approach that puts memory without nostalgia into practice. In light of this return, of memory and history, there is the chance of a misinterpretation that we will not delve into here but simply state: the ideology of the ‘generation’, which usually defines the shared tendencies of a group whose condition of belonging is superficially defined by chronological correspondence and common contextual conditions. It follows, in this case, that the question of memory without nostalgia might be articulated as a kind of mandate of our contemporaries, a need that must be addressed by each generation, thus triggering a collective historical effort. Following years and years of eco-​systemic crisis, however, we can see the fragility of demands, the weakness of individual and collective imagination –​the urgency, in short, of interconnecting a nuanced chain of emotional equivalences between generations. In other words, redirecting the conflict and reconstructing the possibility of intergenerational empathy, which has been profoundly weakened by structural inequality. This effort requires exercising memory, searching for and finding peers, equals, where it is assumed that there are none. In the old-​fashioned or the extemporaneous, in the anachronistic, among the not yet dead. Conjuring our spectres and making room for them. Beginning a conversation, as Jacques Derrida suggested in Specters of Marx: ‘And this being-​with specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations’ (Derrida 1994: xviii). What is the origin of the question of memory that articulates the nostalgic drive? And how do we formulate it? The timeliness of the question of memory comes from its problematics, characterized by the ability to resist forgetting, by the imposition of history or an established narrative, which always has its weak points, its failures, its lacks of consensus or wilful omissions. This timeliness operates as a driver for knowledge and a remedy against presentism, and as a motor for action –​ a reminder and a call for intervention and praxis to address what still needs to be done. The problematic of memory has enough capacity to

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build a counter-​narrative, a different hegemonic narrative –​hence the discomfort, the sense of uncertainty it awakens, since past events are never entirely in the past. It must find a place beyond the binary logic of friend/​enemy in its current role as a critical tool, in its potential to crack open the recent past, to become a technique of the present and unfurl the lost futures, as Mark Fisher (2014) calls them, that are still within reach and still possible. The need for this question, the sense of its pertinence, is closely tied to its form. The form of the question of memory without nostalgia is affected, induced and to some extent conditioned by the shape of material culture, its social organization and its visibility in the public sphere –​in other words, by the predominance of space, or spatiality, in the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson 1984), as well as by the political agency of the old institutionality of architecture, understood not only as an ideological device or a formal mediation of the political unconscious, but also as a historical and mnemonic testimonial, a material vestige of the spirit, or the spectre, of human production’s recent past. Architecture is a text of culture and barbarism. From this standpoint, that of architecture’s formal ambition, the question of memory must be understood as a destructive character, in the sense that Walter Benjamin gave to the term: a negativity which, nonetheless, allows for reopening other forms of elaboration that were once considered dead ends (Benjamin 1931–​1934/​1999). A dialectic, destructive and constructive at the same time, and therefore curative or reconstructive, which incorporates the new. In the problematic of memory, of memory without nostalgia, there is the ability to energize historicity by developing intervention strategies focused on the near future. Thus, architecture is one of the exceptional symbolic modes in which technique gives material form to the memories of the recent past and projects them into the future, from anachronism to anticipation. Implementing a policy of anti-​nostalgic historical memory from an architectural novus entails a commitment not to old forms, but to their future potentials as triggers for alternative architectures and alternative ways of life, making way for the radical practice of the new in the old. Desacralizing and desecrating (Agamben 2005). As opposed to synthesizing, juxtaposing. Between the paralysing permanence of what is extinct and the openness of what is yet to come. Note This chapter is part of the research project The New Loss of the Centre. Critical Practices or the Live Arts and Architecture in the Anthropocene. Ref: PID2019-​105045GB-​I00, funded by Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación MICINN.

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References Agamben, Giorgio (2005) Profanazioni. Rome: Nottetempo. Avermaete, Tom, Veronique Patteeuw, Lea-​Catherine Szacka and Hans Teerds (2019) ‘Revisiting Critical Regionalism’. Oase: Journal of Architecture, 103: 1–​11. Barzun, Jacques (2000) From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life. New York: HarperCollins. Bauman, Zygmunt (2017) Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bellamy, Edward (1888) Looking Backward 2000–​1887. Boston: Ticknor and Co. Benjamin, Walter (1931–​1934/​1999) ‘The Destructive Character’, in Howard Eiland, Michael W. Jennings and Gary Smith (eds) Selected Writings (Volume 2, Part 2). Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, pp 541–​542. Benjamin, Walter (1968) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Hannah Arendt (ed) Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp 253–​264. Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ (2011) After the Future. Chico, California: AK Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Clark, Christopher (2019) ‘El populismo reemplaza viejos futuros con nuevos pasados’. La Vanguardia, 9 October. Collins, Peter (1965) Changing Ideals in Modern Architecture 1750–​1950. Montreal: McGill-​Queens University Press. Denslagen, Wim (2009) Romantic Modernism: Nostalgia in the World of Conservation. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Derrida, Jacques (1994) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. London: Routledge. Douthat, Ross (2020a) ‘The Age of Decadence’. The New York Times, 7 February. Available online at: www.nytimes.com/​2020/​02/​07/​opinion/​ sunday/​western-​society-​decadence.html. Douthat, Ross (2020b) The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. New York: Simon & Schuster. Faulkner, Peter (2006) ‘Pevsner’s Morris’. The Journal of William Morris Studies, 17 (1): 49–​72. Fisher, Mark (2014) Ghosts of My Life. Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Alresford: Zero Books. Frampton, Kenneth (1980/​1985) Modern Architecture: A Critical History. London: Thames and Hudson. Frampton, Kenneth (1983) ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in Hal Foster (ed) The Anti-​Aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, pp 16–​31.

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Fukuyama, Francis (1992) The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Galli, Giovanni (2013) ‘Nostalgia, Architecture, Ruins and Their Preservation’. Change Over Time: An International Journal of Conservation and the Built Environment, 3 (1): 12–​28. Giedion, Sigfried (1928/​1995) Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete. Santa Monica: The Getty Center. Hale, Piers J. (2010) ‘William Morris, Human Nature and the Biology of Utopia’, in Philippa Bennett and Rosie Miles (eds) William Morris in the Twenty-​First Century. New York: Peter Lang, pp 107–​127. Jameson, Fredric (1984) ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. New Left Review, 146 (July–​August): 59–​92. Leopold, David (2016) ‘William Morris, News from Nowhere and the Function of Utopia’. The Journal of William Morris Studies, 23 (1): 18–​42. Lilla, Mark (2020) ‘Ross Douthat Has a Vision of America. It’s Grim’. The New York Times, 8 March. Available online at: www.nytimes.com/​2020/​ 02/​25/​books/​review/​the-​decadent-​society-​ross-​douthat.html. Lowenthal, David (1985/​2015) The Past is a Foreign Country –​Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morris, William (1891/​1922) News from Nowhere, Or an Epoch of Rest, in May Morris (ed) The Collected Works of William Morris (vol 16, reprint). London: Routledge/​Thoemmes Press. Otero, Marina (2018) ‘Memory and Oblivion’. E-​flux architecture, 18 October. Pevsner, Nikolaus (1936/​1960) Pioneers of the Modern Movement: From William Morris to Walter Gropius. London: Penguin Books. Pinkeney, Tony (2010) ‘Versions of Ecotopia in News from Nowhere’, in Philippa Bennett and Rosie Miles (eds) William Morris in the Twenty-​First Century. New York: Peter Lang, pp 93–​106. Rossi, Aldo (1966) L’Archittetura della città. Padua: Marsilio. Ruskin, John (1849) The Seven Lamps of Architecture. London: Smith, Elder & Co. Szacka, Lea-​Catherine (2016) Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. Venice: Marsilio. Tafuri, Manfredo (1968/​1 970) Theories and History of Architecture. New York: Harper & Row. Tafuri, Manfredo (1973/​1976) Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Venturi, Robert (1966) Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. New York: The Museum of Modern Art Press. Williams, Raymond (1973) The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus.

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Postscript: On Nostalgia of the Future and the Future of Nostalgia – Some Scattered Concluding Observations Michael Hviid Jacobsen

All emotions have a past. All emotions have a present. All emotions have a future. This goes for emotions such as love, hate, indignation, despair, contempt, happiness, stress, depression, trust, anger, embarrassment, melancholy, hope, pride, shame, guilt, self-​blame, anxiety, pain, fear, desire, loneliness, shyness, sadness, laziness, boredom, nostalgia and so on. All these emotions, and many more, have been there all along as part of human and social life, no matter whether we have been able to (or been interested to) name, analytically separate, study or understand them. True, the emotive epithets (and in some cases medical diagnoses) of ‘depression’, ‘melancholy’, ‘stress’, ‘loneliness’ or ‘nostalgia’ for that matter certainly did not exist in ordinary language during the Bronze Age or in medieval times –​as was also the case with most of the other emotions mentioned here –​but as labels for something that people might occasionally feel, depression, stress, melancholy, loneliness, nostalgia and so on have a much more extended history than their academic wording, definition and scrutiny might indicate. In this way, emotions –​despite changes and transformations in how, where, why, when and towards whom we feel what –​are an ever-​present aspect of our human being-​in-​the-​world. A world without emotions is therefore pure science fiction –​no society, no culture and no relationship can function or acquire meaning unless emotions are a part of it. A world entirely without emotions is thus impossible to imagine. The same goes for a world without nostalgia. It is utterly unimaginable, indeed

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pure science fiction, requiring nothing less than a gadget or technological device that would successfully be able to delete or render obsolete all human memories, recollections or longings. There is good reason to suspect that even if it was indeed possible to completely eradicate everything associated with memories of or longings for the past from its individual and collective storage in the hearts and minds of people as well as in historical artefacts, it would not be regarded as desirable, since the emotional importance attached to memory, remembrance, recollection and longing are all an integral part of human and cultural life. Nostalgia is perhaps not a constant in human life –​as its social meaning, expression and embedding has changed quite considerably throughout history –​but it is nevertheless something that has probably been there all along since time immemorial. In this book, we have embarked upon a voyage taking us into many different corners of nostalgia not only as an emotion that has expressed itself in individual and social life but also as a topic of growing intellectual and academic interest. We have seen how nostalgia has attracted the attention and captured the imagination of scholars and researchers working within a number of different social science and humanities disciplines –​ and increasingly so. Throughout the chapters of the book, we have seen many illustrative examples and much solid evidence testifying to the fact that nostalgia is indeed alive and kicking in the new millennium. Within the social sciences and humanities, but also within the world they study, the social world, nostalgia is very much present in the emotions felt and expressed, in the thoughts that are entertained and in the actions carried out by individuals and collectivities alike. Nostalgia is there –​sometimes visibly, other times detectable merely between the lines –​as a longing for a time that has already passed, or even for an imagined time that never actually was. No matter the specific reasons for feeling nostalgic or the ways in which this feeling is being expressed, mobilized, provoked, manipulated and exploited by various social and cultural forces, nostalgia is nowadays indeed difficult to ignore. As this book has provided plenty of testimony, there are no signs that nostalgia is about to disappear in the near or distant future. On the contrary, as this book’s chapters have shown, there is ample evidence to suggest that nostalgia is alive and kicking ‘outside’ in the real world as well as ‘inside’ the world of academia. As Roland Robertson observed already, back in the early 1990s: ‘There is now a definite demand for and certainly a large supply of nostalgia’ (Robertson 1992: 159). Nothing indicates that this development should have come to a halt –​perhaps rather the contrary. The actual amount of nostalgia (as an emotional experience) in the world is obviously difficult to measure –​perhaps it is stable, perhaps it is rising, perhaps it is decreasing. Any such attempts at quantifying emotions, to my knowledge, have never taken science very much further. What has taken science further, however, has been

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the attempt to try to qualitatively uncover and understand the multifarious mechanisms and processes –​individual and collective (historical/​cultural/​ social) –​that drive certain emotional energies forward and the expression that these emotions take on in particular contexts and circumstances. *** This book has provided a profusion of insights on and inroads into the topic of nostalgia from a variety of scientific branches and traditions from the social sciences and humanities. Within all of the disciplines covered in this volume –​philosophy, history, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, media studies, marketing research, literature and, finally, architecture –​nostalgia is and remains a topic of some controversy. It is seemingly an emotion than in and by itself evokes strong emotional responses. Within each discipline or field of thought and practice there are thus, as mentioned also in the Introduction, ‘nostophiles’ and ‘nostophobics’, those who either love and embrace nostalgia or those who instead regard it with ill-​concealed suspicion and sometimes even downright hostility. The chapters of the book have, each in their way, shown how our understanding and appreciation of nostalgia does not stand still. It has changed –​and continues to change –​as a reflection of wider social and cultural currents that contribute to continuing debates over the content, meaning, purpose and viability/​ desirability of nostalgia. However, what characterizes many internal debates over nostalgia within the social sciences and humanities is not isolated from what is taking place outside the realm of academia and its intellectual ivory towers. There is seemingly a constant push and pull between forces fostering and embracing nostalgic tendencies, on the one hand, and forces rejecting or fighting them, on the other, either trying to reconnect us with the past or trying to rip the present away from the grip of the past. This perpetual push and pull between what are at times called ‘progressive’ and ‘regressive’ forces, respectively, is obviously not limited to discussions about nostalgia, but it seems as if this topic in many respects magnifies and intensifies other existing disagreements. According to, among others, Anthony Giddens (1994), the coming of modern (and perhaps even more so, late-​modern) society inaugurated a determination to thoroughly bring about a ‘detraditionalization’ of the social world (aided and abetted, not least, by modernizing processes of globalization and individualization). The modern mind is determined to destroy (perhaps even obsessed with destroying) tradition, Giddens insists, and through processes of ‘time-​space distanciation’ and its disembedding of social practices and relationships, through ‘abstract systems and symbols’ (such as experts and money), as well as through ‘individual and institutional reflexivity’, modernity

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is an all-​out showdown with traditional society. Moreover, modern society is also a globalizing society, uprooting traditional practices and localized ways of life (Giddens 1990). Nostalgia can be described as one of the first victims and collateral casualties –​but perhaps also as a natural outcome –​of this relentless detraditionalization and globalization frenzy. Giddens, however, by now more than a quarter of a century ago, also observed how there might develop a counter-​cultural opposition to this detraditionalization process inaugurated by ‘reflexive/​radicalized modernity’ in which we increasingly question and dismantle the traditions, routines and institutions of the past. Giddens noted that there might be a certain backlash to the modernizing ambition, demanding a return to traditional ways, and he stated: ‘In a period of ethnic revivalism and resurgent nationalism in various areas of the world, the edge between dialogue and potential violence is plain to see’ (Giddens 1994: 105). It was Giddens’ contention, a view corroborated by many other scholars, that when people feel deprived of the solid anchors and symbols that previously provided meaning in their lives, the preparedness for resorting to violence or the urge to seek shelter in the practices and memories of the (imagined or real) past is likely to follow. Post-​traditional society is thus one in which forces of modernization and forces of retraditionalization seem to wage war on each other, and sometimes nostalgia is caught in the middle and taken hostage in this conflict. However, nostalgia is not necessarily a traditionalistic, reactionary or anti-​ modern emotion. True, it can be used for any such past-​oriented or past-​ worshipping purposes (and for the mobilization of the politics of discontent against change) as can, in principle, most other emotions. But nostalgia is in and of itself not traditionalistic, reactionary or anti-​modern. It also needs to be stressed that nostalgia is far from merely a radical right-​wing phenomenon, although social science research often seems to associate it only with one particular pole of the political spectrum. Assigning nostalgia exclusively to specific political or ideological stances is simply to misunderstand and misrepresent the emotion. For example, many prominent socialists, even utopian and dystopian thinkers such as Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, William Morris and George Orwell, speculated about the importance of the past for their social experiments or dystopian imaginings. In Owen’s case, this was evident in his practical attempts to implement the community of ‘New Harmony’ back in the early 19th century –​a small-​scale community-​ style utopia that in many ways harked back to more pre-​industrial and traditional ways of life. In Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937/​1986), it is clear that the coming of the age of the ‘machine’ –​an age inaugurating a mechanization of every single aspect of life –​marks a radical break away from the tranquillity and naturalness of previous traditional society. Despite his deep-​seated socialist sympathies, Orwell nevertheless explicitly lamented this

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loss of connection to the natural and traditional world evident, for example, in the destruction of the taste senses brought about by the industrialized production of consumer goods, and he stated: ‘In a healthy world there would be no demand for tinned food, aspirins, gramophones, gas-​piper chairs, machine guns, newspapers, telephones, motor-​cars, etc., etc.’ (Orwell 1937/​1986: 190). In his words, the ‘machine’ has corrupted everything and replaced everything natural with the artificial. Moreover, the recent rise of Ostalgie (‘East nostalgia’) in many former Soviet republics, demanding a return to the planned economy, state ownership of the production apparatus and a way of life as dictated by the Communist Party (Dankert Hiepe and Münnich 2013; Lee 2011), also bears witness to the fact that nostalgia is far from exclusively a right-​wing (or far-​right) phenomenon. There is thus, perhaps particularly in contemporary society, a growing socialist romanticism of the not-​so-​distant-​past that may serve as a potent source for critique of capitalist consumerism (Giesler 2018). Therefore, far from being wedded to any political faction, nostalgia can be promoted as well as perverted by any political agenda or ideology. *** In and by itself, nostalgia is fundamentally a benign and normal emotional state that does not discriminate between the sympathies, convictions or predilections of its followers. In principle, anyone, no matter the colour of their political badge (or their gender, skin colour, weight, occupation and so on), can be moved, persuaded, enticed or mobilized by nostalgic sentiments and arguments, because nostalgia –​it seems –​strikes a chord with the near-​ to-​universal human urge to connect and reconnect, in one way or other, with the past. As mentioned earlier, equating nostalgia primarily with a reactionary political agenda amounts not only to neglecting the possible generative and transformative functions of nostalgia on a personal as well as societal level, but also runs the risk of missing out on nostalgia’s multifaceted subjective meaning-​making potentials. This existential dimension of nostalgia, for lack of a better label, as much as its political potential, simply cannot be overstated, and psychological research, as was also shown in Chapter 5 of this book, has revealed that the emotion of nostalgia can foster personal well-​being, self-​esteem and other positive outcomes for the individual. But also on a communal or collective (perhaps even global) level –​even though particularly political science and sociology seem to focus mainly on the more negative potentials –​nostalgia contains much promise. For example, the nostalgia for a pristine or unspoiled ‘natural past’ can, perhaps particularly in our time and age, serve as an important motive for rethinking current growth and production paradigms and for developing more ecological and

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climate-​friendly solutions. What could be called ‘eco-​nostalgia’, not all that different from the notions of ‘eco-​grief ’, ‘sustainable nostalgia’ or the so-​called ‘solastalgia’ (see, for example, Albrecht et al 2007; Davies 2010; Wilson et al 2019; Angé and Berliner 2020), is indeed an emotion that is now widespread, on the rise and increasingly potent in its appeal to people (perhaps particularly young people) for making this world not only a better but also a more liveable and sustainable place. The same goes for other contemporary expressions of nostalgia focusing on other types of social and political issues (justice, equality, liberty, community and so on) –​each in their (admittedly normative) way, they point out what is missing in our current world, which sometimes can only be discovered in, retrieved from and reanimated through the living memory of the past. In this way, the future of nostalgia in many ways looks brighter –​and more needed –​than ever before. It is thus my contention –​a view shared and substantiated by many of the contributors to this volume –​that nostalgia is not necessarily, and indeed not be exclusively, a regressive or past-​oriented emotion, although the past in some shape or form is always part and parcel of the nostalgic experience. True, most often nostalgia is not about a ‘forward to the future’ but, rather, a ‘rewind to the past’; but in the longing for or the lamenting of that which once was but is no more, the nostalgic experience seeks to impact the present and the future. Several chapters discussed this potential future-​oriented dimension of nostalgia. For example, Chapter 1 on nostalgia and philosophy showed the interlocking between the temporal dimensions of past, present and future in the human mind and argued that the future is never entirely disconnected from the past or the present. In addition, Chapter 5 on nostalgia and psychology showed nostalgia’s future-​oriented function in raising feelings of optimism, inspiration and creativity (see also FioRito and Routledge 2020). Finally, in Chapter 10 on architecture and nostalgia we saw how architecture is, as the authors contended, a form of expression ‘in which technique gives material form to the memories of the recent past and projects them into the future, from anachronism to anticipation’, and how architecture (even seemingly nostalgic architecture) thus makes ‘way for the radical practice of the new in the old’. There is thus –​despite an almost ingrained resistance to acknowledging such a view –​an unmistakable aspect of future-​orientation in nostalgia, because nostalgia is mostly not about actually taking us back in time, but rather about raising and retaining a sense of hope and optimism in times of trouble, for example by trying to shape the present or by contemplating or anticipating the possible futures awaiting ahead. Nostalgia, therefore, does hardly ever really take us back in time (in fact only momentarily and mentally), but rather makes us capable of dealing with and understanding our lives and ourselves in the present, in the ‘here-​and-​now’ –​at the intersection of past

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and future. This is the meaning, or one of the meanings, of the notion of ‘the nostalgia of the future’. *** Many social researchers and scholars –​too many to mention individually –​ have in recent years suggested that we currently live in a time of crisis (perhaps even an endemic crisis), evident in how we now have to confront many contemporary societal challenges such as the financial crisis, the ecological crisis, the immigration crisis, the political legitimation crisis, the crisis of community and international collaboration, the COVID-​19 health crisis, perhaps even a crisis in the world order and so on. Obviously, all societies experience crises every now and then, but there seems to be widespread agreement that we are currently experiencing a time of deep-​ seated trouble with the potential for polarization and confrontation. In the Introduction to this book it was suggested that we are now also living in an ‘age of nostalgia’ (for example, Bauman 2017). It has thus been observed that ‘as much as we’re living in an age of anything, and not just floating pointlessly through the unpunctuated infinity of time, we’re living in an age of nostalgia’ (Lyne 2016). Although the reasons for this are indeed multiple, it makes sense to suggest that there might be a close link between living in a time of crisis and living in a time of nostalgia. Nostalgia is now a powerful social and political force to be reckoned with, not least because it is being used (and apparently also abused) by so many different parties and for so many different purposes. Perhaps this development has taken place at the expense of nostalgia’s perpetual counterpart –​utopia. Utopian ideas have always been a thorn in the side of the powers of the status quo –​almost as a knife pressed against the throat of what currently is, in order to bring about what could or should be (Bauman 1976). Utopia, which for such a long time in human history has constituted a harbinger of hope and served as a guiding star for noble ideals of progress, invention and growth as well as for the prospect of human betterment has now seemingly been overtaken by the rise of so-​called ‘retrotopia’, which looks towards the past instead of towards the future. As Zygmunt Bauman –​in a book celebrating the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516/​1997) –​stated on some of the main causes and consequences of this recent rise of retrotopia: ‘[R]‌etrotopias’ are currently emerging; visions located in the lost/ ​stolen/​abandoned but undead past, instead of being tied to the not-​yet-​ unborn and so inexistent future … [F]rom investing public hopes of improvement in the uncertain and ever-​too-​obviously un-​trustworthy future, to re-​reinvesting them in the vaguely remembered past, valued

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for its assumed stability and so trustworthiness. With such a U-​turn happening, the future is transformed from the natural habitat of hopes and rightful expectations into the site of nightmares. (Bauman 2017: 5–​6) Throughout his writings in general and his work on retrotopia in particular, it remained Bauman’s conviction that the politics of the past was a poor substitute for dealing with or providing solutions for the problems of the present as compared to utopian alternatives (without his ever specifying their actual means or ends). Although Bauman was acutely aware that utopian ideas and ideals may themselves lead stray and cause immense damage if forced into being (that is, in totalitarian social experiments), he nevertheless argued that utopia was a critical corrective to the present state of affairs and represented a ceaseless search for the boundaries of the possible. In his view, retrotopian (read: nostalgic) solutions were unable to provide the same hope for a better future than those of its utopian counterpart, and even though utopia is far from dead and buried, Bauman nevertheless expressed a concern that retrotopia (and its agenda of taking us ‘back to’ the past) was gaining ground as a viable, and among many even preferable, response to the problems confronted by contemporary liquid-​modern society –​at the expense of utopian ideas. This situation, in which nostalgia/​retrotopia becomes the favourite solution to contemporary feelings of uncertainty and unease and a general lack of transparency, is perhaps being exacerbated by the recent coronavirus crisis that has shaken the very foundations beneath our feet –​as individuals, societies and globally. For example, as was poignantly observed during the so-​called ‘first wave’ of the COVID-​19 scare in spring 2020: The past is the new normal as lockdown forces people to find meaning and connections using old memories of feel, look and taste. The future looks fragile. The present is lonely and adrift. Only the halcyon days of the past make sense in the time of isolation, shortages, conflict and deprivation. (Yadav and Chatterjee 2020) There is good reason to suspect that this situation –​in which ‘only the halcyon days of the past make sense’ –​has been further reinforced with the coming of the current ‘second wave’ of the pandemic (here in the early months of 2021, at the time of writing this Postscript) and the prospect of a possible ‘third wave’ and ‘fourth wave’ of the virus waiting just around the corner. *** This Postscript was written during the so-​called ‘second wave’ of the COVID-​19 pandemic in the winter of 2020–​21. This was a time when the

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world had (after the first lockdown in spring 2020) once again come to a halt with new lockdowns, social distancing measures, empty streets, closed bars and curfews. The ‘mood of the world’, as Heinz Bude (2018) would call it, is currently characterized by a mixture of emotional fatigue and distress, on the one hand, and an anticipatory excitement and expectation on the other, while we await the grand reopening of social and public life sometime in the near future. Perhaps the first and second waves of the pandemic have also produced a new ‘nostalgia wave’ not unlike the previous waves that, at certain historical intervals, seem to flood society (see, for example, Davis 1977). At least, there seems to be some general agreement that our coronavirus and post-​ coronavirus times are inaugurating a renewed interest in practices that are somehow regarded or interpreted as ‘nostalgic’ (see, for example, Campoamor 2020; CEPR 2020; M. Johnson 2020; N. Johnson 2020; Mukherjee 2020). Numerous media stories –​too many to mention here –​have thus reported how the pursuits and pastimes of the ‘old days’ have seemingly suddenly popped up, been dusted off and been found useful again. Traditions and time for immersion have become the new black. It is as if the unfolding coronavirus events have drawn our attention away from the far and distant problems of the world and towards the home and homely activities. Moreover, the distressing demands of the so-​called ‘high-​speed society’ (Rosa and Scheuerman 2009) have, at least momentarily, been substituted with more simple and slow living. Knitting, pickling, jamming, baking, card and board games, jigsaw puzzles, listening to old vinyl records and playing with Märklin model trains, going for long, purposeless walks, watching old black-​and-​white movies, joining in collective singing sessions from balconies and so on –​all of this, according to media stories from around the world, has apparently experienced a revival during our current coronavirus times. Added to this, attending to the garden or fixing and repairing all those annoying minor or major ‘projects’ in one’s private home suddenly started to make sense –​and we now finally found the time to do it: painting, repairing, refurbishing, redecorating, reorganizing, cleaning and so on. Since the arrival of the coronavirus, gardens and houses (inside and outside) have probably never looked better. During this time, everything came down from the attic or was brought up from the basement in order to find a new utility in our distressed lives characterized equally by boredom, inactivity and deprivation of the possibility of pursuing what we would normally do: going out for drinks and dining, meeting up with friends, going shopping, participating in leisure and sports activities and so on. The old stuff suddenly seemed useful and authentic in a world that is seen as dangerous, unaccommodating and practically closed off. This new nostalgic mood thus strikes a chord with what Hartmut Rosa has recently called ‘resonance’, as opposed to the alienating

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experiences of technologically, socially and existentially speeded-​up lives. Perhaps these things of the past have brought a feeling of resonance to our lives, a reconnection with something lost or forgotten on the way forward (Rosa 2019). Obviously, as a nostalgia researcher, one is left to wonder whether all of this is really due to a sudden collective fit and frenzy of nostalgia. Do we suddenly start to pickle, bake slow-​r ising artisan bread or initiate perpetually postponed DIY-​projects simply because the feeling of nostalgia overwhelms us? The question is not easily answered. Perhaps there is some sense of nostalgia in all this –​perhaps nostalgia had nothing to do with it at all. We should always be cautious not to resort automatically to nostalgia as the explanation because or whenever something from the past starts to make sense in the present. It is true that we suddenly found the time to contemplate and consider things in life that under normal circumstances we would push to one side. It is also true that the coronavirus times –​full of saved-​up anxiety, surplus time and restlessness –​have probably provided a golden opportunity to look into every nook and cranny for comfort and for things to do. But was it due to nostalgia that we suddenly went overboard with knitting, pickling, crocheting and so on? Hardly so; and I suspect it was, rather, due to a lack of choice and to plain and simple boredom. Even though we may naturally always find some security and comfort in pursuing the well-​known ‘ways of yore’, most people do not retreat or resort to nostalgia whenever their everyday lives are challenged or the world seems frightening. Indeed, the dividing line between nostalgia, sentimentalism, survival strategy and plain and simple boredom can sometimes be difficult to draw; many times it is blurred, but nostalgia should not serve as the default answer to everything that is somehow related to the past. When the current ‘corona crisis’ is finally over, and eventually it will be, we are all likely to return to ‘normal’, to the way things were before the world was locked down and social distancing measures dictated our behaviour, and the many seemingly ‘nostalgic practices’ that made life meaningful and tolerable during the lockdown days will quickly be stored away –​perhaps waiting in the corridors to be found useful and meaningful again sometime in the future. *** However, on a more general scale, it seems that when people are confronted with challenges, worries and crises they –​much like the moth, as the adolescent Karl Marx once observed –​seek the warmth and comfort of the domestic lamp (today also because, due to restrictions, there simply is really nowhere to travel). Crises and challenges create a demand for solutions, and

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sometimes these solutions are sought in the practices or promises of the past. The same goes for the constant struggle between utopia and retrotopia. It is apparently always safer and more convenient to retreat to the fortifications of the already well-​known past than to explore the risky possibilities of the –​ for all practical intents and purposes –​unknowable future. However, as we have seen throughout the chapters of this volume, nostalgia is not necessarily only looking backwards towards what has already been, some time in the known, remembered or imagined past. It is therefore not only a retrospective, reactionary or regressive emotion, turning people away from the problems or hardships of the present. Nostalgia can also be a regenerative force that in different ways triggers attempts to anticipate, shape or even colonize the future. The aforementioned notion ‘nostalgia for the future’ –​used in many different artistic, poetic and social science contexts –​thus shows us that nostalgia consists of memories, imagination, hopes, dreams and aspirations reaching from the present, back to the past and then pointing into the future. I thus propose that the opposition often drawn between nostalgia and utopia is false. Associating nostalgia only with what once was, with the murky and stagnant atmosphere of the long-​since-​ forgotten past, would make nostalgia almost irrelevant to our present time and current concerns. However, the past is never completely forgotten –​it is always embedded within the present, whether we like it or not, and whether we activate it or not. It is quite difficult to forget, deny or repress that which we already know. On the other hand, associating utopia exclusively with the new, the unknown or the future-​oriented also neglects the fact that the future is always embedded within the present. Unless utopia is the expression of pure science fiction, a figment merely of the imagination, it is also always embedded in something already known, something that to some extent has existed sometime before or something that exists now. Many utopias only make sense to us exactly because we can glimpse in them something that apparently could be (or could be again) –​and this is often based on our memory and knowledge of our past and present. There is therefore something utopian even in nostalgia. As Susan Stewart once suggested: ‘Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns towards a future-​past’ (Stewart 1984: 23). Nostalgia and utopia are not each other’s arch-​enemies or deadly foes. They are both the purposive products of an imagination that seeks to adjust to its time and find meaning in what is going on. Just as the quest for nostalgia can cause suffering and pain, so can utopia (as history has shown us so many times). Just as utopia may lead the way to a better or happier life, so can nostalgia. Just as utopia cannot disappear entirely, leaving merely a void where it used to be, the same goes for nostalgia. Nothing ever disappears

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completely (always leaving traces, marks and dust on the shoulders of the present), but merely changes its content, shape and direction. *** What does the future hold in store for nostalgia? Obviously, an answer to this question must necessarily remain purely subjective speculation, as there are no crystal ball and no coffee grounds in which to read the future or catch glimpses of the not-​yet. We live in a society (a so-​called ‘diagnostic society’) that increasingly pins labels of emotional distress onto people (depression, stress and so on). However, it is most unlikely (yet not impossible) that nostalgia should return to its original status as a medical condition or psychological disorder, although we have in recent years seen how other normal human emotions have increasingly become medicalized and pathologized –​just think of the recent diagnosis of ‘prolonged grief disorder’ or ‘complicated grief ’. Perhaps, sometime in the future, people may come to suffer from and be diagnosed with ‘complicated nostalgia’ or ‘prolonged nostalgia disorder’, but this, I think, is not in the offing. What is more likely is that nostalgia in some perverted shape or form will increasingly be used and abused for purposes of political mobilization, particularly if we are unable to work our way through the current time of crisis. Nostalgia will always appeal to people whenever the future looks uncertain and scary, and this is not likely to change. Finally, I think it is safe to say that there are no signs and no tendencies indicating that nostalgia is about to disappear from the face of the earth, Instead, as we have seen throughout this volume, nostalgia has experienced nothing less than a revival within social practice and political discourse within the past few decades –​and it is now a force to be reckoned with whenever one is appealing to consumers, voters or the public in general. Advertisers and marketing gurus already know this (and their ‘nostalgic products’ and ‘nostalgic experiences’ sell big time), politicians and decision makers have known this for centuries (and many elections have been won on this specific account), and perhaps people in general increasingly are also beginning to recognize that nostalgia may serve as a viable way for relieving stress and distress and for experiencing a connection with what once was. The power of nostalgia, it seems, rests in its ability to do two different things at the very same time: on the one hand, to pour oil on troubled waters whenever people feel that they are living in times of uncertainty and insecurity and, on the other hand, to stir sentiments, inspire the imagination and instigate action. In this way, nostalgia is far from merely a passive or stagnant sentiment; rather, it has the ability to change the world and the way we live. Even though nostalgia is rooted and often looks

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backwards to the past, it is nevertheless an emotion that may also sensitize us to the present and the future. As this book has shown, nostalgia is currently very much a hot topic within the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. It is quite likely that this situation mirrors what is going on outside the world of academia where nostalgia is also thriving and enjoying a successful time. The question thus remains not if but when the next nostalgia fatigue will set in, when the present preoccupation with the past will run out of fuel and be overtaken by a desire to anticipate and more actively to shape the future. We cannot know. But it is certain to happen at some point in time –​just as a new nostalgia wave will once again rise and flood the landscape. No matter what happens in the future, nostalgia is here to stay. Even though the way we conceive of nostalgia has changed quite considerably since the first coining of the notion back in 1688, nostalgia is destined to remain an important part of the human emotional repertoire. Therefore, we need to study and pay attention to the way nostalgia is experienced, expressed, used, interpreted and imbued with meaning, because it provides us with a lot of information about our time and place in history. No matter whether nostalgia is castigated or celebrated, ridiculed or relished, it seems as if there is a continuous need –​individually as well as collectively –​for connecting with the past. There is thus absolutely no need to denigrate nostalgia or to describe it in any derogatory manner. Even the seemingly most hard-​nosed nostophobics or anti-​nostalgics –​often those who claim that their eyes are firmly fixed towards the future and not looking back at all –​can find themselves enticed or struck unexpectedly by this peculiar feeling, perhaps trying to shrug it off or deny its impact. But, no matter how hard they may try, they need to recognize that the world is not divided between those who feel nostalgic and those who do not, between those for whom nostalgia matters and those who live gladly without it. True, some are more nostalgic than others, but this goes for most other human emotions as well: hysteria, happiness, stress, envy, trust, boredom, grief and so on. We might say that some people are seemingly more emotional than others, and that the depth and duration of the emotions they feel vary for a number of different reasons. But, rather than being divided between those who feel nostalgic and those who do not, the world may in fact be divided between those who admit that nostalgia is part of their lives and who live peacefully with it, and those who spend a lot of valuable time trying to convince themselves and others that it is not. In the end, nostalgia is there –​the question remains what we do with it. And here this book must necessarily come to an end, as we have been concerned with showing the presence, reality and spreading of nostalgia and not with telling the reader whether

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their sense of nostalgia (or apparent lack of it) is warranted or not. Science must necessarily stop at the doorstep of value-​judgements and prescriptive pronouncements, leaving this ambition to other professions –​or simply allowing people to think freely for themselves. After all, the is and the ought should not be confused, to the detriment of either position. As has been shown throughout this book, there is no doubt that nostalgia is a part of the social world, but whether it ought to be, how and why are perhaps not questions best answered by social scientists. References Albrecht, Glenn et al (2007) ‘Solastalgia: The Distress Caused by Environmental Change’. Australasian Psychiatry, 15 (1): 95–​98. Angé, Olivia and David Berliner (eds) (2020) Ecological Nostalgias –​Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Bauman, Zygmunt (1976) Socialism –​The Active Utopia. London: Hutchinson. Bauman, Zygmunt (2017) Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bude, Heinz (2018) The Mood of the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Campoamor, Danielle (2020) ‘Why We Reach for Nostalgia in Times of Crisis’. The New York Times, 28 July. Available online at: www.nytimes. com/​2020/​07/​28/​smarter-​living/​coronavirus-​nostalgia.html CEPR (2020) ‘Did the COVID-​19 Pandemic Trigger Nostalgia? Evidence of Music Consumption on Spotify’. Centre for Economic Policy Research, 15 September. Available online at: https://​cepr.org/​content/​ did-​covid-​19-​pandemic-​trigger-​nostalgia-​evidence-​music-​consumption-​ spotify-​0 Dankert, Susan, Theresa Hiepe and Imke Münnich (2013) Ostalgie in Gesellschaft und Literatur. Berlin: Science Factory. Davies, Jeremy (2010) ‘Sustainable Nostalgia’. Memory Studies, 3 (3): 262–​268. Davis, Fred (1977) ‘Nostalgia, Identity and the Current Nostalgia Wave’. Journal of Popular Culture, 11 (2): 414–​424. FioRito, Taylor A. and Clay Routledge (2020) ‘Is Nostalgia a Past or Future-​Oriented Experience? Affective, Behavioral, Social Cognitive and Neuroscientific Evidence’. Frontiers in Psychology, 3 June. Available online at: www.frontiersin.org/​articles/​10.3389/​fpsyg.2020.01133/​full Giddens, Anthony (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens, Anthony (1994) ‘Living in a Post-​Traditional Society’, in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash: Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, pp 56–​109. Giesler, Markus (2018) ‘The Nostalgia for Socialism in the Age of Consumerism’. The Conversation, 24 May. Available online at: https://​theconversation.com/​ the-​nostalgia-​for-​socialism-​in-​the-​age-​of-​consumerism-​96872

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Johnson, Matt (2020) ‘The Psychology of Nostalgia During Covid-​19’. Psychology Today, 26 May. Available online at: www.psychologytoday.com/​intl/​blog/​ mind-b​ rain-a​ nd-​value/​202005/​the-​psychology-​nostalgia-​during-​covid-​19 Johnson, Nicole (2020) ‘The Sur pr ising Way Nostalg ia Can Help Us Cope with the Pandemic’. National Geographic, 21 July. Available online at: www.nationalgeographic.com/ ​ s cience/ ​ a rticle/​ surprising-​role-​of-​nostalgia-​during-​coronavirus-​pandemic Lee, Moonyoung (2011) ‘Nostalgia as a Feature of “Glocalization”: Use of the Past in Post-​Soviet Russia’. Post-​Soviet Affairs, 27 (2): 158–​177. Lyne, Charlie (2016) ‘How Nostalgia Took Over the World (and Why That’s No Bad Thing)’. The Guardian, 9 July. Available online at: www.theguardian.com/​ film/​2016/​jul/​09/​the-​ghostbusters-​reboot-​and-​nostalgia-​in-​pop-​culture More, Thomas (1516/​1997) Utopia. London: Dover Press. Mukherjee, Anuparna (2020) ‘Viral Nostalgia and the Case of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. EPW Engage, 7 November. Available online at: www.epw.in/​ engage/​article/​viral-​nostalgia-​and-​case-​coronavirus-​pandemic O r we l l , G e o r g e ( 1 9 3 7 / ​1 9 8 6 ) T h e R o a d t o W i g a n P i e r . Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Robertson, Roland (1992) Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture. London: Sage Publications. Rosa, Hartmut (2019) Resonance: A Sociology of the Relationship to the World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Rosa, Hartmut and William E. Scheuerman (eds) (2009) High-​Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power and Modernity. Philadelphia: Penn State University Press. Stewart, Susan (1984) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Wilson, Kevin G., Justin L. Hart and Bettina Zengel (2019) ‘A Longing for the Natural Past: Unexplored Benefits and Impacts of a Nostalgic Approach Towards Restoration in Ecology’. Restoration Ecology, 27 (5): 949–​954. Yadav, Medha D. and Priyadararshini Chatterjee (2020) ‘The Age of Nostalgia Amid Coronavirus Lockdown’. The New Indian Express, 26 April. Available online at: www.newindianexpress.com/​magazine/​2020/​ apr/​26/​the-​age-​of-​nostalgia-​amid-​coronavirus-​lockdown-​2134334.html

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Index Note: As ‘nostalgia’ is the major subject of the book, index entries under this heading have been kept to a minimum, and readers are advised to search for more specific terms. 11 September 2001 attacks  214 A Abeyta, Andrew  115, 117 ‘accelerated obsolescence’  33, 44, 48 Aden, Roger  94 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi  201, 203 advertising  see marketing, and nostalgia Agacinski, Sylviane  200 ‘age of nostalgia’  17–​22, 58, 104, 214, 235 AHD (‘authorised heritage discourse’)  141–​142 Alberti, Leon Battista  218–​219, 220 Alemeddine, Rabih  205–​206 alienation  33, 43, 45, 90 ‘allochronism’  131 Allport, Gordon  111 America First policy  179 analeptic nostalgic narratives  203 analogue technostalgia  159–​161 Anders, Günther  33, 46, 47, 48–​49 Angé, Olivia  130, 133, 134, 140, 155 Angel of History, The (Alemeddine)  205–​206 Ankersmit, Frank  53, 54, 55 anomie  192, 193 anthropology, and nostalgia  23, 24, 25, 129–​131, 143–​145, 155 colonialism, totalitarianism, apartheid  135–​139 heritage and agency  141–​143 liquid anthropology  44 social dimensions  139–​141 social theory as nostalgic practice  131–​135 anti-​anthropocentric age  46 anti-​nostalgia  217–​220, 225–​226, 241 see also ‘nostophobics’ anxiety  116, 121 apartheid  135, 136–​137, 138 Appadurai, Arjun  132 Applbaum, Kalman  179–​180

approach motivation  120 Arcadia  204, 215 archaeology  134 see also heritage architecture, and nostalgia  23, 26, 211–​215, 224–​226, 234 anti-​nostalgia and modernity  217–​220 and the future  220–​224 postmodern architecture  216–​217 archival material, and nostalgia media programming  161 Arendt, Hannah  33, 42 ‘armchair nostalgia’  132 Arndt, Jamie  113–​114, 116–​117 art-​deco cafés  177 Assman, Aleida  62 Atia, Nadia  10 attachment anxiety/​attachment avoidance  116 Atwood, Margaret  193 Augustine (St Augustine)  32, 38, 39–​40, 71, 75–​77, 84 Austin, Linda Marilyn  200 ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (AHD)  141–​142 authoritarian regimes  135, 136 avoidance motivation  116, 120 B Bactho, Krystine  97 Baker, Stacey Menzel  173 Bakhtin, Mikhail  133 Ball, John  134 Ballard, J.G.  201, 202 Barnes, Julian  14 Barrie, J.M.  199 Barthes, Roland  191 Barzun, Jacques  215 Baschiera, Stefano  157, 159 Batcho, Krystine I.  14

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Bauman, Zygmunt  13, 19, 44, 47, 91, 103–​104, 193, 214, 235–​236 Beecher, Henry Ward  82 ‘being-​in-​the-​world’  39 Beiser, Morton  121 Belk, Russell W.  172 Bellamy, Edward  222–​223 Benjamin, Walter  214, 226 Beowolf  196 Berdahl, Daphne  140 Bererdi, Franco ‘Bifo’  214 Berger, Thomas  200–​201 Bergson, Henri  38–​39 Berliner, David  130, 137, 155 Beyond-​Man (Übermensch)  42, 47 Bible, The  194 Bissell, William  137, 138 Bleeding Edge (Pynchon)  197, 198 Blists Hill museum, England  176 Bloch, Ernst  2 Bloch, Maurice  130 Blumer, Herbert  94 ‘Body, The’ (King)  204 Bonnett, Alastair  155 Bourdon, Jérôme  161 Bovassi, Giulia  46 Boym, Svetlana  16, 17, 45, 54, 72–​73, 92–​93, 151, 198–​199, 200, 214, 219, 225 Bradbury, Jill  182 branding  see marketing, and nostalgia Brazil  133 Brexit  4, 5, 56, 104–​105 ‘bricolage’  219 Brideshead Revisited (Waugh)  200, 202, 203 Brief Recognition of New England’s Errand into the Wilderness, A. (Danforth)  81–​82 Brodsky, Joseph  199 Broken Earth (Jemisin)  205 Brontë, Emily  203 Brown, Stephen  175–​176, 178 Brunelleschi, Filippo  218–​219, 220 Brunk, Katja H.  178–​179, 181 Bryant, Rebecca  137 Bude, Heinz  237 ‘bureaucratic nostalgia’  130, 142, 144 Burke, Edmund  25, 71, 78–​80, 84 Butler, Robert  98 Byatt, A.S.  200 C Caldwell, Melissa L.  135, 140 Callaghan, Jessica  84 Campbell, Gary  142 Caoduro, Elena  157, 159 Carnegie, Elizabeth  177 Castelnuovo-​Tedesco, Pietro  112 cave allegory (Plato)  32, 34–​36, 37, 49 Chakrabarty, Dipesh  53

charitable giving  118 Chatterjee, Priyadararshini  236 Chicago School sociologists  91, 101–​102 Chinese literature  194 Christianity  75–​77, 134 Christian right-​wing politics, United States  25, 71, 73, 82–​84, 84–​85 ‘chronotope’  133 Cicero  76 City of God (Augustine)  75–​77 Clark, Christopher  213 Clewell, Tammy  200 climate change  20 collective memory  97–​98 collective nostalgia  4, 15, 91, 92, 103, 173, 233–​234 in consumer culture  172, 178–​179 Colley, Ann C.  199–​200 Collins, Peter  220–​221 colonialism  12, 129, 130, 131, 135, 136–​137, 138, 139, 201, 213 Confucius  60 Connor, Walter Robert  75 conservation programmes  134 conservative political and social views  4–​5, 12, 19 Christian right-​wing politics, United States  25, 71, 73, 82–​84, 84–​85 New Conservatism  56 consumerism  48, 103 consumers  see marketing, and nostalgia continuity  54 coronavirus  see COVID-​19 pandemic ‘counterfactual consumption’  182 counter-​nostalgia  201 Cova, Bernard  181–​182 COVID-​19 pandemic  20, 151–​152, 162, 236–​238 Crete  132, 134 Crimson Petal and the White, The (Faber)  200 crises  6, 20, 152, 235, 238–​239 see also COVID-​19 pandemic Cross, Gary  178 ‘cultural nostalgia’  174, 204 cultural studies  155 Czikszentmihalyi, Mihaly  95–​96 D Dames, Nicholas  199–​200 Danforth, Samuel  81–​82 Dante  8 ‘Dasein’ (being-​there/​existence)  32 Davies, Jeremy  10 Davis, Fred  15, 17, 21, 54, 58, 72, 73, 91–​93, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103, 111, 172, 181, 196, 201–​202 De Giosa, Pierpaolo  142 de Grazia, Margreta  196

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De Montaigne, Michel  114–​115 Deleuze, Gilles  43 Derrida, Jacques  33, 44, 47, 225 ‘Deserted Village, The’ (Goldsmith)  204 detraditionalization  232 development, human  110–​111 ‘dialectics’  40 diasporas  111, 199 see also migrants/​migration digital technostalgia  159–​161, 181–​182 ‘disclosure’  35 Discourses on Livy (Machiavelli)  70–​71, 78 Doane, Janice  200–​201 Doctorow, E.L.  197 Dodman, Thomas  57 Douglas, Mary  136, 140 Douglas, Stephen  82 Douglass, Frederick  82 Douthat, Ross  211–​212, 214–​215 Drewett, Michael  179 Dudden, Arthur P.  58 Durkheim, Émile  90, 97, 192, 193 Dwyer, Michael  58 ‘dysynchrony’  43–​44 Dzenovska, Dace  133 E eclecticism  26 ecology  224–​225, 233–​234 ecocriticism  201 ecological grief  6, 234 ‘eco-​nostalgia’  234 Edwards, Sarah  179 Elias, Norbert  21 Eliot, T.S.  193 emancipatory nostalgia  152 emotions  7, 55, 229 ‘emotion research’ and ‘emotion theory’  23 ‘emotionology’  16–​17 history of  63–​64 nostalgia as a bittersweet emotion  13, 91, 105, 174 ‘sociology of ’  23, 105–​106 Empire of the Sun (Ballard)  202 ‘end of history’ thesis  212, 215, 224 Engels, Friedrich  103 English constitution  78–​80 Enlightenment, the  213 environmental nostalgia  152, 234 Epic of Gilgamesh, The  194 Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea) (Ovid)  195 ERT (Event Reflection Task)  116–​119 ‘estrangement’  33 ‘ethnographic nostalgia’  130–​131 European Journal of Media Studies  156 European Union  137

Event Reflection Task (ERT)  116–​119 ‘excorporation’  98 existential function of nostalgia  116 Experiences in Close Relationships -​Revised scale  116 F Faber, Michael  200 Fabian, Johannes  131 false consciousness  97 ‘false history’  17 Falwell, Jerry  84–​85 Fantin, Emmanuelle  156 Faulkner, William  197 Fea, John  84 Fevry, Sébastien  157 ‘first order nostalgia’  see ‘simple nostalgia’ Fisher, Mark  226 Fiske, John  98 Fitzgerald, F. Scott  202, 203, 204 flashbacks/​flashforwards, in literature  204 folklorists  133 food consumption  140–​141 Forster, E.M.  200 Foucault, Michel  32, 37, 47 ‘Founders chic,’ United States  73 ‘founding fathers’  of sociology  90 United States  81–​82 Fourier, Charles  232 Fowles, John  200 Frampton, Kenneth  216–​217, 217–​218 Frankfurt School of Critical Theory  90 French Lieutenant’s Woman, The (Fowles)  200 French Revolution  57, 78–​80, 84, 213 Fritzsche, Peter  57, 60, 63 Fukuyama, Francis  212, 215, 224 full regulatory model of nostalgia  119–​121 future, the  and architecture  220–​224 consumers’ relationship with  182, 183 fear of  214 future-​oriented function of nostalgia  116 of nostalgia  240–​242 nostalgia for  16, 234, 239 G Gable, Eric  177 Galli, Giovanni  217 Gallie, Walter Bryce  11 Gao, Ding-​Guo  120 garden architecture  225 Garden of Eden myth  194, 215 Geahchan, Dominique  9 gender representation in literature  200–​201 ‘generation,’ ideology of  225 Germany  Ostalgie  136, 181, 233

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INDEX

post-​reunification consumer culture  178–​179 Giddens, Anthony  231–​232 globalization  5, 103, 232 ‘globals’  5 gnoseology  37 Godfrey, Richard  179 Golden Age  60, 156, 175, 204 Golden Age political thinking  70–​73, 84–​85 American context  71, 81–​84, 84–​85 Burke and his critics  71, 78–​80, 84 Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli  71, 74–​78, 84 Goldsmith, Oliver  204 Gosh, Amitav  201 Grainge, Paul  158–​159 Gray, Thomas  204 Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald)  202, 203, 204 Great Recession of 2008  214 Greek Cypriots  137 Greek philosophy  8, 16, 25, 31–​32, 33–​36, 49 Greenburg, Dan  201 Gropius, Walter  224 Guggenheim Museum  217 Gunesekera, Romesh  201 Gutterman, David  83 H Halbwachs, Maurice  57, 63, 97 Hamid, Moshin  203, 206 Hamlet (Shakespeare)  196 Han, Byung-​Chul  33, 43–​44 Handler, Richard  177 Hann, Chris  136 Harper, Ralph  26 Hartley, L.P.  72 Hartog, François  62 ‘hauntologists’  17 Havlena, William J.  173, 174 Heidegger, Martin  32, 36, 38–​39, 48 help-​seeking behaviour  119 Hemmings, Robert  200 Hepper, Erica  112 heritage  133–​134, 137–​138, 141–​143 ‘heritage debate’  55, 59 heritage tourism  176–​177 Hermes: Journal of Communication: Nostalgia 8  156 Hewison, Robert  55, 59 ‘historical’ nostalgia  174, 204 history, and nostalgia  23, 24–​25, 52, 64–​65 chronology  56–​61 ‘end of history’ thesis  212, 215, 224 historicization of  57, 62–​64 rejection of nostalgia in  53–​56 History of Rome (Livy)  70 Hochschild, Arlie R.  6, 84

Hofer, Johannes  7–​9, 16, 17, 37, 45, 56, 57, 58, 72, 110, 154, 193 Holak, Susan L.  173, 174 Holbrook, Morris B.  173, 174, 183 Home Fire (Shamsie)  206 ‘home,’ return to  32, 47, 93, 194, 195 Home to Harlem (McKay)  201 Homer  8, 16, 154, 195 homesickness (Heimweh)  7–​9, 16, 17, 37, 56, 57, 62, 63, 72, 110, 112, 153–​154, 193 Howard’s End (Forster)  200 Hudson, Bradford T.  177 Hungary  136 Husserl, Edmund  32, 38, 39 Hutcheon, Linda  197 Hutton, Patrick  63 I identity  32–​33, 37, 40–​44, 50, 92, 99 Iliad (Homer)  195 imperialist nostalgia  130, 131 In Search of Lost Time (Proust)  196–​197, 203, 204 indigenous societies  141, 142 individual nostalgia  173, 174 individualization  103 Industrial Revolution  90, 214 Inglehart, Ronald  58 Inherent Vice (Pynchon)  197–​198 institutional nostalgia  161–​162 International Media and Nostalgia Network  155 interpersonal nostalgia  173, 174 ‘interpreted nostalgia’  21, 92 ‘interpretive nostalgia’  15, 91 Irving, John  201 It (King)  203 Italy  133–134 Iyer, Aarti  121–​122 J Jacob’s Room (Woolf)  196 Jameson, Fredric  16, 158, 197, 212–​213 Jankélévitch, Vladimir  44–​45 Japan  literature  194 natsukashi concept  61 Jemisin, N.K.  205 jeremiad tradition, New England  71, 81–​82, 84 Jetten, Jolanda  121–​122 Jordt, Ingrid  179–​180 Joyce, James  196 Joyce, Simon  200 Judt, Tony  53 Juhl, Jacob  115, 118, 119 K Kádár, János  136 Kammen, Michael  53

247

INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

Kant, Immanuel  57, 172 Kaplan, Cora  200 Keightley, Emily  15, 155 Kennedy, John F.  183 Kennedy, Patricia F.  173 Khemiri, Jonas Hassen  206 Kierkegaard, Søren  2 King, Stephen  203, 204 Kleiner, Jack  112 knowledge  39–​40 extraction of from memory  38 reminiscence theory of  34, 37 Knowles, Kim  156 Koselleck, Reinhart  53, 57, 62 L laboratory-​based nostalgia inductions  122–​123 Ladino, Jennifer K.  201 Lamentations (Tristia) (Ovid)  195 landscape architecture  224–​225 Landwehr, Achim  57 Lang, Luciana  133 language  193 Lasch, Christopher  54, 55, 56 Latvia  133 Le Confessioni (The Confessions) (St Augustine)  23, 38, 39–​40 Le Corbusier  217 Le Hégarat, Thibault  156 Le Temps des Médias journal  156 Leardi, Jeannette  14 Lebow, Richard Ned  75 Lems, Annika  155 Les Lieux de Mémoire (Nora)  54–​55 Lessing, Doris  201 Letters from the Black Sea (Epistulae ex Ponto) (Ovid)  195 Levinás, Emmanuel  40 Li Bai  194 Life of Pi (Martel)  203 life review  98–​99 Lilley, Simon  179 Lincoln, Abraham  82 Lipovetsky, Gilles  33, 44, 48 liquid anthropology  44 ‘liquid modernity’  103 literary iteration technique  204 literature, and nostalgia  8, 14, 25–​26, 191–​192, 205–​206 history of  192–​198 poetics of  202–​205 study of  198–​202 Liu, James  194 Lively, Penelope  201 Livy  70, 76, 77 Lizardi, Ryan  156, 161 ‘locals’  5

Lodge, David  200 Logemann, Jan  177 loneliness  113–​115, 119, 120 Looking Backward (Bellamy)  222–​223 Lorcin, Patricia M.E.  201 loss  11, 13, 15, 151 Lowenthal, David  18–​19, 53, 59, 73, 216 Lübbe, Hermann  58 Lyne, Charlie  235 M Machiavelli, Niccolò  25, 70–​71, 78 Macpherson, James  204 MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’)  18, 84, 85, 104 Magaudda, Paolo  157 Maier, Charles S.  54, 55 maieutics, nostalgia as  31–​32, 33–​40, 49 Malaysia  141 Marcel, Gabriel  47 Marcoux, Jean Sébastien  180 marketing, and nostalgia  18, 25, 97, 171–​173, 183–​184, 240 branding and advertising  18, 25, 172, 175–​178 collective nostalgia in consumer culture  172, 178–​179 consumer research trends  172, 179–​182 individual consumer behaviour  173–​175 Markus, Hazel R.  100 Mars trilogy (Robinson)  205 Martel, Yann  203 Martin, Alexander  110–​111 Marx, Karl  90, 103, 238 ‘master narrative,’ nostalgia as  17 Mather, Increase  81 Matt, Susan J.  57, 63 Mauss, Marcel  131, 132 McCann, Willis  110 McCarthy, Cormac  205 McCracken, Grant  172 McKay, Claude  201 Mead, George Herbert  97–​98 meaning  91, 94–​96 media/​media studies and nostalgia  25, 92, 102–​103, 151–​152, 162–​163, 237 institutional media nostalgia and nostalgia programming  161–​162 media nostalgia  152, 158, 161, 162 media philosophy  153–​155 media-​induced nostalgia  158, 162 mediated nostalgia  152, 157–​158, 158–​159 recent research  155–​157 technostalgias  159–​161 typology of  157–​161 medical approach to nostalgia  7–​11, 17, 45, 56–​57, 62, 72, 240 Medien & Zeit journal  156

248

INDEX

Mehrvarz, Mani  157 memory  14–​15, 37, 38, 39–​40, 41, 54–​55, 91, 96–​99, 174, 212 in architecture  213 memory studies  63 memory without nostalgia  26, 225–​226 Memory Studies journal  155 Michelet, Jules  55 midwife metaphor  33–​34 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig  217 migrants/​migration  99, 102, 111, 120–​121 and literature  199, 201, 205–​206 Milne, A.A.  205 Milton, John  8 miniature, the  198 Minniti, Sergio  157 Modern Movement  217, 219, 220–​221, 224 modernity  12, 55, 59–​60, 192–​193, 231–​232 modern architecture  211, 217–​218, 218–​219, 220–​221 modernist literature  196, 200 Montecore: The Silence of the Tiger (Khemiri)  206 monumentalization  134 More, Thomas  235 Morris, William  222–​224, 225, 232 motivational nostalgia  152 mourning  9 MSPSS (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support)  120 Muliaee, Maryam  157 Muñiz, Albert M.  175 museums  176, 182 see also heritage music  113, 141 N Nabokov, Vladimir  199 Nadkarni, Maya  136 Naipul, V.S.  201 Napoleonic wars  213 narcissism  9 nationalism  12, 136 Native American societies  141 nature theme in American literature  201 navy nostalgia  138–​139 negative affect, as a trigger of nostalgia  113–​115 neoliberalism  214 neo-​Marxism  97 Netflix  161, 162 ‘New Americana’ retro-​future  182 New Conservatism  56 new man  33, 48 New National Gallery, Berlin, Germany  217 Newman, David  122 News from Nowhere: Or an Epoch of Rest (Morris)  222–​224

Nguyen, Viet Thanh  206 NI (Nostalgia Inventory)  114, 118 Nice Work (Lodge)  200 Nichols, Mary  74 Niemeyer, Katharina  157 Nietzsche, Friedrich  42, 43 nihilism  35, 48, 50 Nisbet, Robert  92 Nora, Pierre  54–​55, 63 nostalgia  ‘age of nostalgia’  17–​22, 58, 104, 214, 235 as a bittersweet emotion  13, 91, 105, 174 commodification of  97 conceptual history  62 as a cultural form  159 different cultural perceptions of  61 full regulatory model  119–​121 functions of  115–​119 for the future  16, 234, 239 future of  240–​242 Greek etymology of  8, 93, 154, 193, 195 introduction and overview  1–​3 lay conceptions of  112–​113 literal meaning of  8 negative perspectives on  11–​13, 52, 53–​56, 72, 112 ‘normalization’ of  11–​17 ‘nostophiles’ versus ‘nostophobics’  3–​7, 231 Oxford English Dictionary definition  53, 57–​58 as pathology  7–​11, 17, 45, 56–​57, 62, 72, 240 positive perspectives on  72, 112–​113 as a social science and humanities research topic  21–​22 therapeutic benefits of  122–​123 triggers of  113–​115 universal nature of  6–​7 Nostalgia Inventory (NI)  114, 118 ‘nostalgia mode’  16, 158, 159, 212 ‘nostalgia mood’  16, 158–​159 ‘nostalgia of the future’  26 nostalgia wave  17, 18, 19–​20, 58, 62, 73, 91–​92, 237 nostalgics  2, 3–​4, 10, 23 see also ‘nostophiles’ ‘nostalgizing’  120, 157 ‘nostophiles’  23 versus ‘nostophobics’  3–​7, 231 see also nostalgics ‘nostophobics’  3, 4, 23, 241 versus ‘nostophiles’  3–​7, 231 Novalis  41 Nurius, Paula  100 O Obama, Barack  18 objects  95–​96, 100, 113, 118

249

INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

Occidentalism  180 Ochonicky, Adam  161 odours  94–​95, 113 Odyssey, The (Homer)  8, 154, 195 O’Guinn, Thomas C.  175 Olympic Games  162 Omar, Saleh  201 Ondatjee, Michael  201 Ong, Walter J.  193 Orientalism  180 Orr, Raymond  134 ‘Orthodox Alliance’  83 Orwell, George  232–​233 Ostalgie  136, 181, 233 Ovid  195 Owen, Robert  232 Oxford English Dictionary definition of nostalgia  53, 57–​58 P Pace, Stafano  181–​182 Paine, Thomas  80 paradise theme in literature  195, 201 Parikka, Jussi  152 parrhesia (disclosure)  46–​47 past, the  1–​3, 15 commodification of  55 historical perspectives on  54 pathological approach to nostalgia  7–​11, 17, 45, 56–​57, 62, 72, 240 Peasant’s Revolt, 1381  134 PEGUDA movement, Germany  105 Peleponnesian War, The (Thucydides)  74–​75 Pericles  74–​75 ‘periodization’  179 personal nostalgia  122, 173 Peter Pan (Barrie)  199 Pevsner, Nikolaus  221–​222, 224 ‘phatic communion’  139 philosophy, and nostalgia  24, 31–​33, 49–​50, 234 nostalgia as maieutics  31–​32, 33–​40, 49 postmodern liquid paradigm  33, 44–​49, 50 temporality and identity in  32–​33, 38–​44, 50 physical objects  see objects Pickering, Michael  15, 155 Pires, Ema  141 Plato  32, 34–​36, 37, 49 Pocock, J.G.A.  79 Poletta, Francesca  84 politics/​political theory, and nostalgia  3–​5, 12, 18, 19, 24, 25, 70–​73, 84–​85, 240 AHD (‘authorised heritage discourse’)  142 American context  71, 81–​84, 84–​85 Burke and his critics  71, 78–​80, 84 political nostalgia  152 ‘politics of nostalgia’  55–​56

Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli  71, 74–​78, 84 popular culture  157 populism  4, 84, 139 see also Trump, Donald Portoghesi, Paolo  216 Possession (Byatt)  200 possible selves  100–​101 post-​apocalyptic literature  205 postcolonial nostalgia  201 posthumanity  205 postmodernism/​postmodernity  16, 26, 212, 213 postmodern architecture  216–​217 postmodern liquid paradigm  33, 44–​49, 50 postmodern literature  197 and the rise of ‘retrotopia’  103–​105 post-​Soviet nostalgia  133, 135, 136, 139, 181, 233 post-​traditional society  232 Pound, Ezra  192, 193 prejudice  111 present, the, nostalgia for  16 preservation  43 ‘private nostalgia’  15, 91, 92, 100 programmed nostalgia  161–​162 progress  58, 60, 214–​215 ‘Progress of Poesy, The’  204 Progressive Era  101–​102 ‘progressive’ nostalgias  142 Promethean ideal  47 prosocial behaviour  118–​119 Proust, Marcel  14, 196–​197, 203, 204 psychology, and nostalgia  9–​10, 22–​24, 25, 60, 106, 110–​112, 121–​123, 155, 234 full regulatory model  119–​121 functions of nostalgia  115–​119, 121 lay conceptions of nostalgia  112–​113 triggers of  113–​115 Public Sociology  106 Pynchon, Thomas  197–​198 Q queer nostalgia  157 R racist regimes  135 radicalism, and literature  206 Radio Canada  161 Ragtime (Doctorow)  197 Ramsey-​Kurz, Helga  201 ‘reactionary’ nostalgias  142 Reagan, Ronald  214 Reed, Ishmael  201 Reed, Ralph  83 reflective nostalgia  16, 93, 198–​199, 219–​220 reflexive nostalgia  15, 91, 92, 220 relationship pessimism  115, 119

250

INDEX

Reluctant Fundamentalist, The (Hamid)  203, 206 reminiscence theory of knowledge  34, 37 Renaissance, the  26, 213, 220 Republic (Plato)  32, 34–​36, 37 Requiem for a Nun (Faulkner)  197 ‘resonance’  237 restorative nostalgia  16, 93, 198–​199, 219, 220 retro cultures  18, 156, 160 and marketing  175–​178 ‘New Americana’ retro-​future  182 ‘retrotopia’  19, 91, 193, 201, 214, 235–​236 rise of  103–​105 return, as a theme in philosophy  38, 47 see also ‘home,’ return to; ‘womb,’ return to Return of the Soldier, The (West)  205 Ricoeur, Paul  47 Ridgers, Daniel T.  59 Rights of Man, The (Paine)  80 right-​wing political views  4–​5, 56 Christian right-​wing politics, United States  25, 71, 73, 82–​84, 84–​85 Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu  99 Ritzer, George  90 Riverside Museum, Glasgow, Scotland  177 Road, The (McCarthy)  205 Road to Wigan Pier, The (Orwell)  232–​233 Robertson, Roland  89, 230 Robinson, Kim Stanley  205 Rochberg-​Halton, Eugene  95–​96 Romanticism  57, 213, 220 Ronchamp chapel  217 ‘rooting’ (enracinement)  33, 41, 42, 43, 50 Rosa, Hartmut  59, 237–​238 Rosaldo, Renato  130, 201 Rossi, Aldo  213 Routledge, Clay  113–​114, 115, 116–​117 Rudaityė, Regina  201 ruin symbol in literature  205 rural life, longing for  135 Rushdie, Salman  201 Ruskin, John  221, 222 Russia  136 S Sallust  76, 77 Salmose, Niklas  200, 201, 202, 203 salvage anthropology  25, 130 Samuel, Raphael  59 Sandberg, Eric  201 Santesso, Aaron  204 Scanlan, Sean  155 Schindler, Robert M.  173, 174 Schlesinger Jr., Arthur  56 Schober, Elisabeth  138 Schrey, Dominik  156 Search of Lost Time, The (Proust)  14

Sebald, W.G.  201 ‘Second Chicago School’  91 ‘second order nostalgia’  see ‘reflexive nostalgia’ secularization  33 sediments  38 Seehusen, Johnny  115 self, the  91, 92, 99–​101, 116 self-​disclosure  116–​117 Sennett, Richard  52 Sense of an Ending, The (Barnes)  14 sentimentalism  10 Severino, Emanuele  35–​36 Shakespeare, William  196 Shamsie, Kamila  206 Shevchenko, Olga  136 Silver, Ira  100 Simmel, Georg  90 ‘simple nostalgia’  15, 91, 92 ‘simulated’ nostalgia  174 skeuomorphs  160 slavery  82 smells  94–​95, 113 Smith, Kimberley K.  200 Smith, Laurajane  141, 142 SNS (Southampton Nostalgia Scale)  118 social connectedness  116–​117, 119 social evolutionists  130 social exclusion, anticipated  114–​115, 119 see also loneliness, as a trigger of nostalgia social function of nostalgia  116 social goal striving  117–​118, 119 social interactions  116–​117 social media  151, 152, 163 see also media/​media studies and nostalgia social self-​efficacy  117, 119 social structure  91, 97, 101–​103 social support  120–​121 social theory, as nostalgic practice  131–​135 sociology, and nostalgia  23, 24, 25, 89–​91, 105–​106, 155 Fred Davis  15, 17, 21, 54, 58, 72, 73, 91–​93, 94, 99, 100, 102, 103, 111, 172, 181, 196, 201–​202 meaning  94–​96 memory  96–​99 ‘retrotopia’  103–​105 the self  99–​101 social structure  101–​103 ‘sociology of emotions’  23, 105–​106 Socrates  31–​32, 33–​34 Sodom and Gomorrah (Proust)  196 ‘solastalgia’  201, 234 ‘solid modernity’  103 ‘Southampton Loneliness Scale’  114 Southampton Nostalgia Scale (SNS)  118 souvenir, the  198

251

INTIMATIONS OF NOSTALGIA

spaces, idealized  204–​205 spoken language  193 St Augustine  see Augustine Stade, George  201 Starobinski, Jean  7, 58, 62, 63 Steiner, George  195 Stephan, Elena  118–​119, 120 Stern, Barbara  176 Stern, Robert  216 Sterne, Laurence  193 Stewart, Kathleen  132–​133, 134 Stewart, Susan  172, 198, 239 structural nostalgia  132, 133, 134 Subic Bay, Philippines  138 subversive archaism  142 ‘survivalists’  130 sustainable nostalgia  152, 234 Sutton, David E.  140 symbolic interactionism  91, 94, 99 Sympathizer, The (Nguyen)  206 synaesthesia  137, 140, 143 T Tafuri, Manfredo  213, 218–​219 Tea Party Movement  4, 179 ‘temporalization’  32, 38–​39 textual contamination  133 textual corruption  133 textual nostalgia  203 Thatcher, Margaret  214 Theodosius  76 Theodossopoulos, Dimitrios  130–​131 Thiranagama, Sharika  142 ‘third order nostalgia’  see ‘interpreted nostalgia’ Thomas, William I.  102 Thucydides  71, 74–​75 time/​temporality  32–​33, 38–​44, 49, 50, 53, 58, 94 history of  62–​63 To the Lighthouse (Woolf)  197 Toffler, Alvin  58, 59 Tönnies, Ferdinand  90 Tosh, John  53 tradition  231–​232 Traversa, Guido  37–​38 Tristia (Lamentations) (Ovid)  195 Trump, Donald  4, 5, 18, 56, 71, 73, 81, 84, 85, 104, 179 truth  32, 34, 35 Turkish Cypriots  137 Turner, Bryan S.  15, 90 U Übermensch (Beyond-​Man)  42, 47 UCLA Loneliness Scale  114, 120 Ulysses (Joyce)  196

United States  Christian right-​wing politics  25, 71, 73, 82–​84, 84–​85 consumer collective nostalgia  179 founding generation  81–​82 ‘uprooting’  33, 41, 42, 43, 45, 50 urtext  133 Utopia (More)  235 utopianism  103–​104, 235 V van Tilburg, Wijnand  120 Vannini, Phillip  94–​95 Venice Architecture Biennale 1980  216–​217, 218 Venturi, Robert  213 Verplanken, Bas  121 ‘vicarious nostalgia’  174 Victorian literature and culture  199–​200, 216 vintage cultures  18, 156 Virgil  8 ‘virtual nostalgia’  174 virtual reality  181–​182 Visegrad Group  5 W Wagner, Tamara S.  200 Walder, Dennis  201 Waskul, Dennis  94–​95 Waugh, Evelyn  200, 202, 203 Weber, Max  90, 192, 193 Weil, Simone  33, 36, 41, 42, 43 Werbner, Richard  137 West, Rebecca  205 Wilk, Richard R.  140 Wilson, Janelle L.  94–​95, 96 Wilson, Juliette  179 ‘without World’  33 Wollstonecraft, Mary  80 ‘womb,’ return to  32, 47 Wong, Paul T.  98 Woolf, Virginia  192–​193, 196, 197 Works of Ossian, The (Macpherson)  204 Wright, Frank Lloyd  217 written language  193 Wuthering Heights (Brontë)  203 Y Yadav, Mehda D.  236 Yapp, Lauren  135 Yotsuna, Ōtomo  194 ‘Yugonostalgia’  136 Z Zanzibar  137–​138 Zhou, Ling  179 Zhou, Xinyue  118, 120 Znaniecki, Florian  102

252