32 NOSTALGIA

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

Nostalgia designates a domain of historical practice that is often said to be antithetical to histori­ography’s production of historical meaning. Whereas this latter mode is typically predicated upon the exercise of reason, narrative figuration, historical distance, and a focus on shared expe­rience, nostalgia designates a mode that prioritizes affect, imagery, intimacy with and absorption in the past, and autobiographical experience.

When detractors describe reenactors as “nostalgic,” what they are usually doing is casting doubt upon a core premise of historical reenactment: “that history can be managed,” that “it can be framed, reproduced, brought closer, and it can be made part of our human experience again, in a reassuring way” (Agnew and Lamb, 2009, p. 1). This is because nostalgia has historically been used to label an individual’s memory as untrustworthy when it has been worked upon by the twin desires of home-yearning and escapism. To describe a reenactment as nostalgic, then, is to insinuate that the reenactor is not in control of her production but is controlled by it. Here, reenactment is not considered a rational act, but an obsession with recreating the past brought on by a refusal to accept loss—hence, the reason why Civil War reenactment is arguably the best-known example of historical reenactment.

This case against nostalgia is basically a case against desire. For what supposedly makes the nostalgic naive is that she does not know that desire not only always misses its mark, but also invents objects and counterfactuals that seem like the real thing. Cliches like “you can’t go home again,” “there’s no place like home,” and “nostalgia isn’t what it used to be” speak to this long­standing Western belief that the desire for the lost object can become so intense as to invent an object that never existed in the first place. In an extreme version of this belief, Susan Stewart has written that nostalgia has no object at all. In this account, nostalgic longing for a pure context of lived experience at a place of origin does not retrieve the everyday past so much as give it a new narrative order to make it manageable and approachable (Stewart, 1984, p. 23).

This case against nostalgia was originally a medical one. Indeed, “nostalgia” was first coined in 1688 by a Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer to name a new disease category—a special type of deadly melancholy triggered by displacement from home. Initially conceptual­ized as a “pathology of travel,” it was defined in terms of a preexisting framework that explained which forms of motion and emotion were conducive to health and illness, and that physicians relied on to explain why travel made some individuals ill and not others (Goodman, 2010; Revill and Wigley, 2000). In Enlightenment medical writings of the long 18th century, vic­tims of nostalgia were said to withdraw from the fear and loathing of their exile, becoming so absorbed in spiraling fixations on cherished images of the absent home that they grew insensible to other objects, refuse to leave bed, and finally, immobilized, starve to death, their last words almost always, “I want to go home! I want to go home!” (Hofer, 1688).

What scholars have failed to recognize about nostalgia’s medical formation is its role in processes of racialization. In the 18th and 19th centuries, nostalgia was primarily diagnosed in European ethnics who were displaced from home by compulsory service, and who were said to sadden and die due to a natal weakness to forced mobility. Swiss mercenaries were particularly legendary, and supposedly they could be overwhelmed by nostalgia simply by overhearing a native folk song called the ranz-des-vaches. The Swiss soldier, “[i]f chance he hears the song so sweet, so wild,” the poet Samuel Rogers following Rousseau wrote in 1792, “His heart would spring to hear it when a child, / Melts at the long-lost scenes that round him rise, / And sinks a martyr to repentant sighs” (quoted in Starobinski, 1966, p. 93). By drawing upon geography, economics, and stadial history, physicians more broadly claimed that this flawed attachment to home was not idiosyncratic, but rather a trait of certain populations. Even as those who died from nostalgia were almost always migrants coerced into building empires—as soldiers, sailors, servants, and slaves—their deaths were ascribed to their ethnic flaw. In the Americas, nostalgia was introduced into slave medicine and racialized, resulting in a new version of the concept that assigned to black bodies a different man­ner of dying—suicide—and a different cause of death—weakness to forced immobility, i.e., captiv­ity. Nostalgia was supposed to cause recently enslaved Africans to drown themselves in rivers and wells, go on hunger strikes, and jump overboard to their deaths, all so their souls could fly back to Africa. In the New World, nostalgia thus designated two different narratives of reenactment: the ethnic laborer who dies from wanting to return home, and the black slave who wants to die to return home. It is this history that has made nostalgia an important site of contestation at the intersection of the politics of home and the politics of foreignness.

It was in a different form, however, that nostalgia assumed prominence. Following its derecog­nition in medicine in the 1950s and its entrance into mass culture in the late-1960s, nostalgia has become an increasingly popular historical emotion: a bittersweet, sentimental retrospect for lost times and places. In the 1970s, films like American Graffiti (1973) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974), bands like the New York Dolls and The Cramps, avid readers of Nostalgia Press reprints of 1940s comic strips like Flash Gordon, and collectors of memorabilia at “nostalgia conven­tions” all helped create what Time magazine already by 1971 called a “nostalgia craze.” Engaging performatively and sometimes reflectively with the newfound phenomenon of nostalgia, these cut-ups and collages of period styles galvanized new subcultures like glam and mod, rockabilly and New Wave. By the 1980s, major labels and Hollywood studios hit on a formula for nos­talgia through works set in the 1950s and early 1960s that both anticipated and retreated from the turmoil of 1968 and after (Dwyer, 2015). In Kathleen Stewart’s words, nostalgia “rises to importance as a cultural practice as culture becomes more and more diffuse, more and more a ‘structure of feeling’” (Stewart, 1988, p. 227).

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder

The scholars who sought to explain this mushrooming phenomenon made use of much of what once made it pathological, especially nostalgia’s status as an anti-social, solipsistic, narcis­sistic, delusional, and naive form of behavior. What they found in the concept was a readymade resource for explaining the persistence and perpetuation of large-scale structural violence in the affective conditions of everyday life. For if the nostalgic is utterly captivated by her object of longing, and if she is convinced of its reality and does not know that it is fantasy, then she is duped and is oblivious to the external processes that she is a part of and that help form her fantasy.

In the postmodernism debates, participants focused on nostalgia’s problematic relation to narrative. For Fredric Jameson, nostalgia is an epigone of historical consciousness and a symp­tom of the waning of affect in late capitalism, with its privatization of collective experience and commodification of the past. In contrast to “that older longing once called nostalgia,” the “nostalgia film” constitutes “a depersonalized visual curiosity and a ‘return of the repressed’ of the twenties and thirties ‘without affect’” (Jameson, 1991, p. xvii). In other words, films like Body Heat (1981) or Something Wild (1986) work in a compensatory mode, using recycled images to create the feel of the past because the feeling of belonging to a historical continuum is no longer available. For Slavoj Zizek, Jameson is, like all nostalgics, oblivious to his own nostalgia. Because historicism addresses historicity minus the Real, it needs “the nostalgic image... to fill out the blind spot,” since the Real is opposed to narrative and identity (Zizek, 1993, p. 81). Nostalgia functions to “conceal the antimony between eye and gaze—i.e. the traumatic impact of the gaze qua object—by means of its power of fascination,” providing historians and moviegoers alike with an illusion of “seeing ourselves seeing” and helping to create continuity with and ironic distance from the naive other of the past (Zizek, 1992, p. 72).

Anthropologists who sought to reckon with their discipline’s roles in colonial and imperial ventures found nostalgia similarly useful, as exemplified by Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques (1958). Drawing from his fieldwork among the Ilongot in the Philippines, Renato Rosaldo simi­larly noted that colonial officials displayed a peculiar combination of love, sadness, and disavowal when they returned to a culture years later and saw how much it had changed.

More recently, scholars have identified sites where nostalgia aids resistance to structural vio­lence. Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative forms of nostalgia is jus­tifiably well known (2001, p. xviii). In distinguishing between violent and liberatory types of nostalgia, Boym rallies attention around what Susan Stewart called nostalgia’s “utopian face”: the fact that it is always directed toward a future-past, a what-could-have-been. Against imperialist nostalgia, Jennifer Wenzel writes that “[a]nti-imperialist nostalgia” consists of a

longing for what never was, yet a longing that is fully cognizant that its object of desire is one of the “ways it could have gone” but did not. This cognizance involves a confrontation with the forces that obstructed that lost future, a confrontation that has the potential to “immunize”. one from or mobilize resistance to similar forces in the present.

(2006, p. 16)

Figure 32.1 Kane’s snow globe, one of the most brilliant encapsulations of nostalgia. Source: Citizen Kane, dir. Orson Welles, 119 min., 1941.

For geographer Alisdair Bonnett, “melancholic ideas and practices” like nostalgia “are not just reactive responses to change but can also be forms of action and activism.” If Bonnett is intent on showing that nostalgia is as common to the left as to the right, the problem that philosopher Barbara Cassin sets out to solve is how to rework the relationship between nostalgia and the native land or patriotism “in order to make of nostalgia a completely different adventure, one that would lead us to the threshold of a much broader and more welcoming way of thinking, to a vision of the world freed from all belonging” (2016, p. 8). Philosophers and psychologists have sought to recuperate nostalgia by highlighting its role as a buffer against the shocks of dislocation, the “modern” condition of spiritual homelessness, and other varieties of alienation (Sedikides et al., 2008).

Given reenactment studies’ relation to history’s affective turn, it is surprising that so little attention has been paid to the role of nostalgia in reenactment (Agnew, 2007, p. 309). Part of the trouble so far has been that scholars continue to use the term to moralize, rather than analyze its conceptual and institutional histories. Many scholars and artists, like Jeremy Deller in The Battle of Orgreave (2001), are ambivalent about nostalgia’s worth; yet if reenactment studies is to open up new horizons of affective history, it is vital that they turn away from using this popular historical emotion as a label and consider instead how it is made and how it works (Figure 32.1).

Further reading

Bonnett, A., 2016; Malpas, J., 2011; Frow, J., 1991; Hutcheon, L., and Valdes, M., 1991; Schroeder, J. D. S., 2018; Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Arndt, J., and Routledge, C., 2008.