ABSTRACT
Nostalgia is commonly understood as a ‘longing for what is lacking in a changed present’ (Pickering and Keightley 2006: 920). In this chapter, I investigate the forms and functions of nostalgic discourse by studying how it operates among a group of Spanish seniors who migrated to France in the 1960s and continue to live there today. While conducting ethnographic fieldwork at a day centre for such Spaniards near Paris, I observed a weekly language course in which seniors practiced rudimentary reading and writing skills. For one of their assignments, they were asked to write about the pueblos that they had left behind in Spain. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of the chronotope, I perform discourse analysis on their texts and the conversations that it provoked to show how nostalgia operates among individuals who share a common history: not only can it bind them together into forms of community, but it may become the object of oppositional stances that signal distinctions within those communities. Ultimately, I argue that recollections of loss may enable new forms of attachment in the present.
