ABSTRACT
In 2016 Netflix released an eight-part TV programme, Stranger Things, which is described by one reviewer as ‘a spooky shot of 80s nostalgia straight to your heart’. At the end of the decade, in 1981, Fredric Jameson’s famous critique of the ‘nostalgia mode’ was first published. By the mid-1980s, there was already a journalistic backlash against the so-called nostalgia wave. Michael Kammen examines newspapers of the time and points out that around 1985 ‘warnings started to flash’ about nostalgia. Despite the long-standing and ongoing observations of a nostalgia boom in American culture, there has been a consistent tendency to perceive this boom as something new. Indeed, in the 1990s, Hutcheon contrasted the ‘nostalgic’ 1990s with the ‘ironic’ 1980s, forgetting that, as Kammen points out, 1985 was a peak year for media commentary on the nostalgia wave. Svetlana Boym, a well-known recent theorist of nostalgia, argues that: ‘The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia.
