Suchergebnisse

Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals t

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.

AbstractSearching for common themes, this afterword questions the meaning and experience of nostalgia in Asia today. The collected essays show the important roles that conflict, trauma, and the need to create a new modernity shape, and are shaped by notions of nostalgia through much of Asia. Perhaps more so than in Europe, nostalgia in Asia seems very national. The case studies in this collection are excellent examples of how nostalgic longings are deployed to enhance national power, as well as a demonstration of the enduring influence of the nation-state over individual imagination across the region.

The reviewed books nicely expose several factors behind democratic "degeneration," but they do not question the assumption that democracy is a matter for nation-states only. This is problematic because states' ability to perform their traditional functions has been progressively eroded. The internet revolution, in particular, has accelerated social communication, economic transactions, and the process of unbounding with profound implications for democratic performance. Rather than cultivating nostalgia for the "glorious years" of democracy, we must think hard how to make democracy triumph in the digital era.

The essay presents a reading of three war-related texts: Friedrich Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, Heinrich von Kleist's The Battle of Hermann, and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Written against the background of the Revolutionary Wars and the Prussian Wars of Liberation, respectively, the plays by Schiller and Kleist engage in the discursive construction of an emphatic sense of heimat (home), either by way of creating the new sentiment of homesickness (originally called nostalgia) or by advocating the complete destruction of the very home territory you are trying to defend. Gravity's Rainbow, in turn, decodes the Second World War as a massive exercise in technology transfer. It effectively presents a deconstruction of heimat in an age in which the imperative to merge technologies supersedes all national agendas.

Globalmente las esferas sociales y culturales atraviesan una crisis que involucra una multiplicidad de variables. Ante la inestabilidad social, y la modificación continua de las herramientas para la producción de contenidos de las diversas áreas culturales, se observa una mirada nostálgica sobre la realización y cierta tendencia al revisionismo histórico. En el diseño y comunicación audiovisual, la inestabilidad discursiva y formal dan lugar a una búsqueda artística hacia lo analógico y estudios sobre la importancia del archivo audiovisual y el found footage; axiomáticamente se entiende éste criterio como un accionar seguro sobre lo conocido, y un intento de comprender de manera objetiva el pasado.

Globalmente las esferas sociales y culturales atraviesan una crisis que involucra una multiplicidad de variables. Ante la inestabilidad social, y la modificación continua de las herramientas para la producción de contenidos de las diversas áreas culturales, se observa una mirada nostálgica sobre la realización y cierta tendencia al revisionismo histórico. En el diseño y comunicación audiovisual, la inestabilidad discursiva y formal dan lugar a una búsqueda artística hacia lo analógico y estudios sobre la importancia del archivo audiovisual y el found footage; axiomáticamente se entiende éste criterio como un accionar seguro sobre lo conocido, y un intento de comprender de manera objetiva el pasado.