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physical displacement. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos (return home) and algia (longing), is an important dimension of the production of Afro-Caribbean identity and community. Nostalgia, once portrayed as a private, pathological, physical illness characteristic of those forced from their homes or unable to return to them (i.e., soldiers, slaves and refugees), evolved to be considered a normal
5 Nostalgia: the Tudorbethan semi and the detritus of Empire Why are you, or perhaps your neighbours, living in an imitation Tudor house with stained wooden slats shoved on the front door to make it look like what is called a half-timbered house? Those slats have nothing to do with the construction of the house. They are just applied as ornaments. The house does not look like a real half-timbered house and it never can. It has been built in quite a different way from a real Tudor house. Why do we live in this sort of half-baked pageant, always hiding our ideas
This book examines the impact that nostalgia has had on the Labour Party’s political development since 1951. In contrast to existing studies that have emphasised the role played by modernity, it argues that nostalgia has defined Labour’s identity and determined the party’s trajectory over time. It outlines how Labour, at both an elite and a grassroots level, has been and remains heavily influenced by a nostalgic commitment to an era of heroic male industrial working-class struggle. This commitment has hindered policy discussion, determined the form that the modernisation process has taken and shaped internal conflict and cohesion. More broadly, Labour’s emotional attachment to the past has made it difficult for the party to adjust to the socioeconomic changes that have taken place in Britain. In short, nostalgia has frequently left the party out of touch with the modern world. In this way, this book offers an assessment of Labour’s failures to adapt to the changing nature and demands of post-war Britain.
modernity leads to a greater focus on the past is thus a widely held standpoint. Modernity creates alienation, unrest, and anxiety that need to be compensated for or balanced by narratives from the country of the past. The reaction to modernity is said to be nostalgia as people react to having modernity imposed on them by recalling a lost time, the “wild strawberries” of their youth. And relics of the past that get in the way of modernity are moved to temporal reserves, to archives, libraries, or museums, where they are allowed to survive. Or is it the other way round
8 The future of nostalgia: revindicating Spanish actors and acting in and through Cine de barrio Duncan Wheeler In the list of the most-watched films on Spanish television in 2011, only two from the top hundred emerged from within the national cinema industry: Fuga de cerebros/Brain Drain (Fernando González Molina, 2009) and Agora (Alejandro Amenábar, 2009). If we carry on down the list, the next five most popular domestic films were all over forty years old and broadcast as part of the Cine de barrio [neighbourhood cinema] slot: La ciudad no es para mí
This chapter analyses the complex connections between varieties of contemporary Irish republicanism and the notion of ‘radical nostalgia’, a term adopted from Glazer's ( 2005 ) important work on commemoration of the Spanish Civil War. The first section is devoted to examining the relationship between nostalgia and radical (or revolutionary) politics, and some of the characteristic ways in which socialist and/or radical nationalist movements have utilised nostalgia as a means to mobilise support. In the (alleged) context of the ‘unfinished
13 Character, community and critical nostalgia: Love and Summer Heidi Hansson William Trevor’s novel Love and Summer (2009) is a lyrical, evocative story of the emotional turbulence that lies underneath the surface of everyday life in a small Irish town in the 1950s. Initially, the reader is told that ‘Nothing happened in Rathmoye, its people said’, only to be informed immediately afterwards that the fact that ‘nothing happened was an exaggeration too’ (3).1 The tension between the inner turmoil of the characters and a paralysed environment where nothing seems
This book studies the persistence of imperial memory, nostalgia and culture in contemporary Britain. Focusing on imperial nostalgia as a structure of feeling, it attempts to understand the role it plays in forming and articulating a politics of nationalist reaction, and how it has been mobilised by political actors in promoting emergent right-wing movements. Historicising nostalgia as an inherent part of imperial culture, it argues that the fantasies developed in late Victorian Britain in order to give ideological coherence to the imperial project are to a large extent the same fantasies at play in the current sovereigntist turn. Focusing on the events following the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 and controversies over freedom of speech and education, it traces how ongoing public debates over histories of slavery and colonialism are put to work within the ‘culture wars’; more broadly, it interrogates the imperial genealogies of contemporary approaches to class, gender, race, nationality and sovereignty.
Ishiguro remarked in 2000 that nostalgia, in its purest form as ‘a profound emotion’, is ‘to the emotions what idealism is to the intellect’ – a way of ‘longing for a better world’ (Ishiguro, 2000a ). Ishiguro's preoccupation with nostalgia, the aching sense of desire and longing for home or the past, in many ways matches his concerns with memory. Christopher Banks's return to Shanghai in When We Were Orphans ( 2000 ) was not so much about rooting out evil as it was to retrieve lost objects, people and moments from his past. Banks
1 1 Nostalgia, invisible clothes and hidden motivations I first met the Emberá dressed in full traditional attire. Emerging from the rainforest of Panama with their painted bodies, decorated with beads and adornments, reminiscent of pictures from old anthropology texts, icons of quintessential indigeneity. At first sight I was filled with exhilarating enthusiasm; this gaze brought to mind myriad questions. Had these people turned their back on the enticing temptations of modernity? I wondered . . . were they resisting what I had failed to resist, the lure of