ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 explores historically predominant conceptualisations of the relationship between nostalgia, memory and utopia. It focuses on two competing threads in twentieth-century utopian thought. The first consists of the view (arising out of modern ideas about progress) that utopia is, or should be, forward-looking and that, as such, both nostalgia and memory must therefore be inherently anti-utopian. The second conceptualisation is not forward-looking but backward-looking. It resonates with powerful nostalgia either for earlier societies or for an imagined sense of belonging or prelapsarian unity. The utopian, in this view, is aligned with memory; whether on a personal, historical or metaphysical level, utopia is something we have to re-find or re-remember. The goal of the chapter is to highlight just how prominent these two divergent, but each insufficient, conceptions of the relationship between nostalgia and utopia, and more broadly past and future, or memory and hope, have been.
