ABSTRACT
Life under Corona lockdown has often been disorientating, both spatially and temporally; with a heightened awareness of global connections set within extremely local experience; an event that feels both sudden and inexorably slow. In some ways, the temporal dissonance is perhaps resonant with what Shepherd (2020) has described as a ‘slow catastrophe.’ Furthermore, the experience has made explicit the political tensions between the common rhetoric of being ‘all in this together’ on national and even global scales, and the operation of gross inequalities and existential precarity of quotidian lives. The Corona experience, therefore, has brought into question some fundamental elements of heritage and the relationship between past, present, and future, prompting a re-thinking of nostalgia that is exemplified by calls for a ‘new normal’ to be sought. While many of these questions and cherished possibilities have appeared to be novel—challenges and everyday experiences that were supposedly undreamt of just a matter of months ago—I cannot help thinking that we have been here before.
In William Morris's socialist-science fiction novel, News from Nowhere (1890), the narrator William Guest wakes up from a deep sleep and finds himself in a post-catastrophe ‘future world’ of Nowhere; a pastoral Utopia in which the system of industrial capitalism, private property, and global empire is but a distant (bad) memory. No longer alienated from the environment, this future society has learnt to live in symbiosis with nature and the rhythm of the seasons, and has come to realise their communality and deep attachment to place. Drawing from a belief that utopian thinking has the potential to transcend lived reality and prompt change by reconceptualising the current order, this chapter explores the potential role of heritage as a form of radical nostalgia that can help to build transformative politics. As I journey on my daily ‘lockdown walk,’ the chapter reflects upon heritage as a productive, critical, and purposeful dream of the future.
