The Reclamation of Nostalgia

Abstract

Our discussion of the ways in which personal and public memory interact and inform each other can be usefully extended by exploring the case of nostalgia. The close interweaving of individual and collective processes of remembering is central to nostalgia. What it involves may be deeply felt by particular people at particular times, but the meanings it is given are dependent on a broader social narrative about past and present, change and discontinuity, temporal distance and difference, innovation and estrangement from what innovation has brought to any given contemporary period. Individuals who feel and express nostalgia act as witnesses to what has over the course of time been junked, cast peremptorily aside and rendered seemingly unreachable from the present, but rather than speaking independently, they express feelings about the effects of this as members of a specific generation or social group who feel temporally displaced, strangers in a new world that seems radically disconnected from an earlier one. So in discussing nostalgia, we have to consider the public and personal as interdependent and closely influencing each other even if we do make certain relatively clear distinctions between them. That is how we approach this particular form of remembering here, but our main purpose goes beyond this in arguing for and supporting the reclamation of nostalgia from a consistently negative view of it as a modern malaise.