ABSTRACT
Nostalgia is diversely understood and interpreted, both in its relationship to the present and in its political implications. In this chapter, I survey these understandings and interpretations before focusing on the sexual politics of certain critical engagements with nostalgia. The ubiquitous association of the culture of approximately the last forty years, in the West, with the rise of memory (see, for example, Huyssen 1995; Darian-Smith and Hamilton 1994) has established this characterization of culture as almost a ‘fact’ of history. Pre-eminent amongst the many examples from culture offered to substantiate these claims are those categorized as ‘nostalgic’. Nostalgia, then, has become a key term in discussions of the varieties of remembrance commonly practised and represented in contemporary Western culture. But such characterizations of culture risk overgeneralization and homogenization and are hostages to (historical) fortune. In this case, it may be that, even if the rise of nostalgia is accepted, this cultural trend may already have peaked and, in Britain at least, the nostalgia wave may already be in retreat. John Major’s advocation of an education based on ‘grammar, spelling, tables’ (Major 1993) and the Tory party’s invocations of a Britain characterized by warm beer and cricket on the village green have been superseded more recently by Tony Blair’s endless calls for ‘modernization’ (seen by many as a euphemism for the erosion of the provisions of the welfare state and workers’ rights). Yet nostalgia continues to cohabit with this modernizing thrust, counterpointing visions of a better future with images of a longed-for past. Nevertheless, nostalgia continues to engage critical attention and has been described by Svetlana Boym as ‘a symptom of our age, a historical emotion’ (Boym 2001: p. xvi). Boym regards nostalgia as the alter ego of progress (ibid.), arguing that its rise can be understood as a side-effect
of the teleology of progress (ibid. 10). Boym is not alone in aligning nostalgia with progress. The rise of nostalgia is more usually understood not as the inevitable underside of progress but in relation to a diminution of belief in progress. Norman Denzin’s association of the nostalgia of the present with a postmodern anxiety which ‘looks fearfully into the future’ (Denzin 1991: 79) captures what has become a critical commonplace, while deploying a frequently found association between nostalgia and vision which will be considered later in this chapter. One of the earliest commentators on the ‘nostalgia boom’ was Fred Davis, who predicted that what he called ‘a politics of nostalgia’ (Davis 1979: 141) was ‘likely to assume a more prominent . . . place on the US political scene than it has until now’ (ibid.). Davis based this prediction on nostalgia’s close relation to the perceived threat to identity posed by rapid social change (see also Lowenthal 1985: 13) and on the popular media’s increasing suffusion, even then, by nostalgia. Davis, again deploying a metaphor associated with vision, and like Boym, seeing nostalgia as a bridge between the social world and the inner life of psychology and the emotions, described nostalgia as ‘one of the . . . more readily accessible psychological lenses’ (Davis 1979: 31) employed in the construction and reconstruction of identity in changing times and a response to threats to continuity of identity (Davis 1977: 418-19).
