Contemporary Nostalgia
Contemporary Nostalgia

Author: Niklas Salmose

Publisher: MDPI

Published: 2019-09-23

Total Pages: 2

ISBN-13: 3039215566

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Some of the most pressing contemporary issues (ecological crisis, migration and integration, fragmented worldviews, social media, fake news, extremist politics and terrorism) can be understood more profoundly through how they interact with both individual and collective forces of nostalgia. Nostalgia is politics, but these politics are also interwoven with media and culture. Notwithstanding how nostalgia is used or contextualized in terms of politics and social practices, commodification or personal development, its power is primarily situated within its efficacy as a governing, influential human emotion. The vast and luminous contributions to this special issue on contemporary nostalgia are all investigating the role different aesthetic media formats (film, music, literature, computer games) plays in nostalgic negotiations with style, history, migration, love, nationalism, diaspora, irony, modernity, colonial and postcolonial discourses, and adoption. Mutually, these essays stand out as important, original, critical contributions to the expanding field of nostalgia studies and offer a valued insight on our world.

Afro-Nostalgia
Afro-Nostalgia

Author: Badia Ahad-Legardy

Publisher: University of Illinois Press

Published: 2021-04-12

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0252052552

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As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories. Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments. Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.

Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia
Reinventing Childhood Nostalgia

Author: Elisabeth Wesseling

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-09-11

Total Pages: 558

ISBN-13: 1317068467

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While Romantic-era concepts of childhood nostalgia have been understood as the desire to retrieve the ephemeral mindset of the child, this collection proposes that the emergence of digital media has altered this reflective gesture towards the past. No longer is childhood nostalgia reliant on individual memory. Rather, it is associated through contemporary convergence culture with the commodities of one's youth as they are recycled from one media platform to another. Essays in the volume's first section identify recurrent patterns in the recycling, adaptation, and remediation of children's toys and media, providing context for section two's exploration of childhood nostalgia in memorial practices. In these essays, the contributors suggest that childhood toys and media play a role in the construction of s the imagined communities (Benedict Anderson) that define nations and nationalism. Eschewing the dichotomy between restorative and reflexive nostalgia, the essays in section three address the ethics of nostalgia in terms of child agency and depictions of childhood. In a departure from the notion that childhood nostalgia is the exclusive prerogative of narrative fiction, section four looks for its traces in the child sciences. Pushing against nostalgia's persistent associations with wishful thinking, false memories, and distortion, this collection suggests nostalgia is never categorically good or bad in itself, but owes its benefits or defects to the ways in which it is brought to bear on the representation of children and childhood.

Nostalgia for the Modern
Nostalgia for the Modern

Author: Esra Özyürek

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2006-08-30

Total Pages: 246

ISBN-13: 9780822338956

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An ethnographic analysis of the ways that, during the 1990s, Turkish citizens began to express nostalgia for the secularist and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.

Was It Yesterday?
Was It Yesterday?

Author: Matthew Leggatt

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2021-06-01

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 1438483503

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Bringing together prominent transatlantic film and media scholars, Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in twenty-first century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history. Considering such films and television shows as La La Land, Westworld, Stranger Things, and American Hustle, the contributors demonstrate how audiences have spent more time over the last decade living in various pasts.

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel
Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel

Author: John J. Su

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2005-11-24

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 1139448536

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Images of loss and yearning played a crucial role in literary texts written in the later part of the twentieth century. Despite deep cultural differences, novelists from Africa, the Caribbean, Great Britain, and the United States share a sense that the economic, social, and political forces associated with late modernity have evoked widespread nostalgia within the communities in which they write. In this original and wide-ranging study, John J. Su explores the relationship between nostalgia and ethics in novels across the English-speaking world. He challenges the tendency in literary studies to characterise memory as positive and nostalgia as necessarily negative. Instead, this book argues that nostalgic fantasies are crucial to the ethical visions presented by topical novels. From Jean Rhys to Wole Soyinka and from V. S. Naipaul to Toni Morrison, Su identifies nostalgia as a central concern in the twentieth-century novel.

The Hours Have Lost Their Clock
The Hours Have Lost Their Clock

Author: Grafton Tanner

Publisher: Watkins Media Limited

Published: 2021-10-12

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 1913462544

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The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgia’s ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.

Mediated Nostalgia
Mediated Nostalgia

Author: Ryan Lizardi

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 0739196227

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Considering the current rash of film remakes, vintage video game downloads, and box sets of bygone television shows, media today is obsessed with nostalgia. Instead of presenting a past that functions as an adaptive mirror with which we can compare our contemporary situation, the past is instead presented as an individualized version that transfixes us as uncritical citizens of our own culture. Mediated Nostalgia: Individual Memory and Contemporary Mass Media argues that the cultural implication of a cross-media eternal return to nostalgia is an increasing reliance on defining who we are as people and societies by what media we consumed as children. The unblinking eye toward the past knows no progress, or at the very least, does not employ the past to compare and adaptively engage with the present or future. Examining film, literature, television, and video games, Ryan Lizardi tackles the idea of why that strong sense of nostalgia is such a popular tactic for the media industry, and why it is problematic.

The Promise of Nostalgia
The Promise of Nostalgia

Author: Nicola Sayers

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-09-30

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9781032175867

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The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production.

Anthropology and Nostalgia
Anthropology and Nostalgia

Author: Olivia Angé

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2014-10-01

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 1782384545

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Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.