ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with scholarship on nostalgia, postmodernity and decoloniality in reading the film 1917 as illustrative of the various forms of nostalgia permeating Brexit. It suggests that the film contains, firstly, a simple rhetorical nostalgia; secondly, a pastoral anti-modern nostalgia; and finally, a ‘postmodern’ nostalgia for a heroic and expansive modernity embodied in the empire. Brexiteer imperial nostalgia was offered not just as a memory of racial privilege and global power but also as a model for a future ‘Global Britain’. It is ultimately a nostalgia for a time when communal futures still seemed to offer new and exciting possibilities. In the contemporary ‘stalled present’ of postmodern societies this nostalgia for the future compensated in affective ways, not just for a loss of privilege or security but also for the fear that present political futures might not have anything to offer that is remotely as momentous or as heroic as that which unfolds in 1917.
