ABSTRACT
Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. Although a longing and reverence for the past has always been a part of human society and culture, at some times more intense than at others, only recently has it become the object of commercial exploitation. Economic forces, abetted by public policy, have propelled the past into the market-place and massively broadened its social impact. This phenomenon has been the subject of critical scrutiny by range of commentators, notably Patrick Wright in On Living in an Old Country (1985) and Robert Hewison in The Heritage Industry (1987). They have shown the instrumental use of the past for commercial and political objectives and stressed the conser vatism inherent in heritage as defined by a small circle of entre preneurs, conservationists and partrons of the arts. They have also pointed out that heritage constructs a mythological national unity and homogenity that excludes or marginalizes minorities. As Patrick Wright has written, ‘The nation is not seen as a heterogenous society that makes its own history as it moves forward, however chaotically, in the future. Instead, it is portrayed as an already achieved and timeless historical identity which demands only appropriate reverence and protection in the present.’1
