ABSTRACT
The Australian poet Judith Wright remarked some time ago that ‘if we reject outright the literature of nostalgia, we fail to understand something important about ourselves’; we fail to realise how we can make ‘our loss into a gain’.2 Grasping this sense of the potential of nostalgia is not easy-least of all, perhaps, in the contexts of large-scale historical change, such as those that characterise the loss or overthrow of empires. What I have been suggesting in this book is that we need to think about the nature of nostalgia in various embodiments or forms, with a view to approaching it as a process with the potential to reconnect the individual in a critical or refl ective way to his or her past, and to a community. Further, I have been arguing that this process is especially signifi cant for-although not exclusive to-people whose experiences derive from the massive uprootings generated by colonialism and its aftermaths.
