ABSTRACT
Reviewing the then newly opened Museum of Liverpool, Rowan Moore commented, ‘To judge by the lively opening day crowds, having their memories prompted by this or that nostalgic nugget, the museum’s aim of connecting the city with its past is powerful and important’ (Moore, 2011). Museum exhibitions can produce powerful nostalgic responses and it is recognised that nostalgia can be a key motivation for museum attendance (Devine, 2013). Yet nostalgia—perhaps linked to its roots in pathology—has historically been viewed as a debased mode of remembering: one that is uncritical, emotional, and which falsifies the past in an urge to idealise that which went before, enabling it to act as a refuge from the difficulties of the present (see Hewison, 1987; Chase and Shaw, 1989; Lowenthal, 1989). As Keightley and Pickering point out, nostalgia has been set in a binary. Positioned in opposition to progress and the future, it has been understood as ‘a determinate backwards-looking stance’ (Keightley and Pickering, 2006: 920) premised on a longing for the past. If understood in this way, nostalgia becomes a site of tension for museums. It has the power to attract audiences but also potentially frames the past in particular, even troubling, ways. Goulding’s appraisal of themed, ‘living’ heritage museums may be taken as illustration because while she acknowledges that ‘they appear to provide a stimulus for nostalgia’, she also comments that they sanitise the past by offering ‘a glimpse into history, but it is a history cleansed of disease, poverty, and exploitation’ (Goulding, 2001: 566). Similarly, Simon Reynolds has criticised what he has seen as the overly cohesive representation of the history of music in museums, where he contends, ‘the rock museum … presents music with the battle lines erased, everything wrapped up in a warm blanket of acceptance and appreciation’ (Reynolds, 2011: 7).
