IMNN International Conference 2018:
PROGRAM & BOOK OF ABSTRACTS
Communicative Forms and Practices of Nostalgia: Conceptual, Critical and Historical Perspectives
Södertörn University Stockholm, Sweden 8-9 November 2018
https://medianostalgia.org/conference-2018/
Organized by
Emmanuelle Fantin Ekaterina Kalinina Manuel Menke Katharina Niemeyer
Book of abstracts: Thanks to Julia Waldbauer (Augsburg University)
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DAY 1: Panel I: 9:45 - 10:30 (Chair: André Habib) The Changing Notion of Nostalgia in the Discourse of European Identity Temenuga Trifonova ...... 7 Media and nostalgia through the lens of postclassical narratologies. A theoretical approach Sébastien Fevry ...... 10 Feeling nostalgic in the digital age: Revisiting conceptualizations of nostalgia as an emotion Manuel Menke ...... 12
Panel II: 10:45 - 12:30 (Chair: Katharina Niemeyer) (Not) to tell nostalgia of the immigrant. The case of digital portraits of the The French National Museum of History of Immigration Emmanuelle Fantin ...... 14 Visualizing the 1980s ‘Deviant’ Athenian Youth On Facebook: Nostalgia and Spatial Questions Panagiotis Zestanakis ...... 16 "No intenso agora": Footages from 1968, a case of nostalgia and archive effect Talitha Ferraz & Gabriel F. Marinho ...... 17 ‘Communism never happened’ - Romanian Retro-aesthetics and the “nice” side of communism Caterina Preda ...... 18
Panel III: 13:30 - 15:30 (Chair: Ekaterina Kalinina) Rebuilding Village Gates and Sacred Swings: The Cultural Politics of Hani Ethnic ‘Home’ and Nostalgic Discourse Practice in China Yingchun Xu ...... 20 Nostalgic returns: on the phrasing, targets, and forms of nostalgia in Turkey Josh Carney ...... 22 U.S. Television and the Forgotten War: Nostalgia Production and Institutionalized Forgetting Danielle Seid ...... 24 Mediatized White Nostalgia: Racist Representations of the Past in Swedish Digital Media Samuel Merrill ...... 26 Consuming colonial nostalgia: An investigation of audiences' engagement with Gurinder Chadha's film Viceroy's House (2017) Emily Keightley, Clelia Clini & Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh ...... 28
Panel IV: 15:45 - 17:30 (Chair: TBA) Yugonostalgic communities – new Yugoslav politics? Milica Popović ...... 29 Postsoviet nostalgia in contemporary Russia: the phenomenon of the mediatisation and the materialization of the late soviet past Roman Abramov ...... 32 Yura, we are sorry: Internet memes as a means of remediating post-Soviet nostalgia Mykola Makhortykh ...... 35 “Mapping “Displaced Nostalgia” in Romania: the Past in the Representation of Generations Born After 1989 Alexandra Bardan & Natalia Vasilendiuc ...... 36
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DAY 2 PANEL V: 9:00 - 10:45 (Chair: Berber Hagedoorn) A Strange Kind of Cinephilia built by Video on Demand Services: Yearning For What Exactly? Martin Bonnard ...... 37 In search of the time and the space: nostalgia and utopia in Westworld Ana P. G. Ribeiro1 & Bruno Souza Leal2 ...... 39 Nostalgia in TV Series Antonella Mascio ...... 41 Still Blissing Out: It, Stranger Things, and the Politics of Trumpian Entertainment Greg Burris ...... 43
PANEL VI: 11:00 - 13:00 (Chair: Manuel Menke) “Analogue Renaissance”: Strategies of Technostalgia with Kodak’s new Super 8 film camera Tim van der Heijden ...... 44 The Color of Nostalgia : Kodachrome after the digital-turn André Habib ...... 46 “Haters Gonna Hate”: Nostalgia in Popular Music Claire Coleman ...... 47 Analog and retro aesthetics in the digital era of music videos and the role of nostalgia. Irene Martinez Luna ...... 49 Mediating Nostalgia in A/V Narratives of Historical News Events Berber Hagedoorn ...... 52
PANEL VII: 14:00 - 15:45 (Chair: Emmanuelle Fantin) Evoking a shared past by enforcing nostalgia? On the role of media in nursing homes Christa Lykke Christensen ...... 55 The role of nostalgia in care home design for people with dementia Silvia Maria Gramegna & Alessandro Biamonti ...... 56 Nostalgia of the future - 10 000 postcards for 2042 Katharina Niemeyer & Magali Uhl ...... 58 Nostalgia and the invention of the traditions in the rituals and performativities of the feminine in the drag culture Vinícius Ferreira & Patrícia D’Abreu ...... 61
List of presenters (order by surname) ...... 62
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Day 1 – November 8
08:45 – 09:00 Coffee and snacks
09:00 - 09:15 Welcome
09:15 - 10:30 Conceptualizing nostalgia: (Chair: A. Habib) Colliding old and new approaches Temenuga Trifonova The changing notion of nostalgia in the discourse of European identity
Sébastien Fevry Media and nostalgia through the lens of postclassical narratologies. A theoretical approach
Manuel Menke Feeling nostalgic in the digital age: Revisiting conceptualizations of nostalgia as an emotion
10:30 – 10:45 Coffee break
10:45 - 12:30 Narrating identities in (non-)institutional contexts: (Chair: K. Niemeyer) Theoretical, visual and textual engagements with nostalgia Emmanuelle Fantin (Not) to tell nostalgia of the immigrant. The case of digital portraits
of the The French National Museum of History of Immigration
Panagiotis Zestanakis Visualizing the 1980s ‘deviant’ Athenian youth on Facebook: Nostalgia and spatial questions
Talitha Ferraz & “No intenso agora”: Footages from 1968, a case of nostalgia and Gabriel F. Marinho archive effect
Caterina Preda ‘Communism never happened’: Romanian retro-aesthetics and the “nice” side of communism
12:30 – 13:30 Lunch
13:30 - 15:30 The Hydra of political nostalgia: (Chair: E. Kalinina) Nationalism, Racism, Colonialism Yingchun Xu Rebuilding village gates and sacred swings: The cultural politics of Hani Ethnic ‘Home’ and nostalgic discourse practice in China
Josh Carney Nostalgic returns: on the phrasing, targets, and forms of nostalgia in Turkey
Danielle Seid U.S. television and the forgotten war: Nostalgia production and institutionalized forgetting
Samuel Merrill Mediatized white nostalgia: Racist representations of the past in Swedish digital media Emily Keightley, Consuming colonial nostalgia: An investigation of audiences' Clelia Clini & engagement with Gurinder Chadha's film Viceroy's House (2017) Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh
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15:30 – 15:45 Coffee break
15:45 - 17:30 Struggling for identity: (Chair: tba) Communist pasts in nostalgic presents
Milica Popović Yugonostalgic communities – new Yugoslav politics?
Roman Abramov Postsoviet nostalgia in contemporary Russia: The phenomenon of the mediatization and the materialization of the late soviet past
Mykola Makhortykh Yura, we are sorry: Internet memes as a means of remediating post- Soviet nostalgia
Alexandra Bardan & Mapping “displaced nostalgia” in Romania: The past in the Natalia Vasilendiuc representation of generations born after 1989
Day 2 – November 9
08:45 – 09:00 Coffee and snacks
09:00 - 10:45 Nostalgia cultural industries: (Chair: B. Hagedoorn) TV series and the consumption of longing Martin Bonnard A strange kind of cinephilia built by video on demand services: Yearning for what exactly? Ana P. G. Ribeiro & In search of the time and the space: Nostalgia and utopia in Westworld Bruno Souza Leal
Antonella Mascio Nostalgia in TV series
Greg Burris Still blissing out: It, Stranger Things, and the politics of Trumpian entertainment
10:45 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 – 13.00 Film, Music, Radio: (Chair: M. Menke) The diversity of media(ted) nostalgia Tim van der Heijden “Analogue Renaissance”: Strategies of technostalgia with Kodak’s new Super 8 film camera
André Habib The color of nostalgia: Kodachrome after the digital-turn
Claire Coleman “Haters gonna hate”: Nostalgia in popular music Irene Martinez Luna Analog and retro aesthetics in the digital era of music videos and the role of nostalgia
Berber Hagedoorn Mediating nostalgia in A/V narratives of historical news events
13:00 – 14:00 Lunch
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14:00 - 15:45 Remembering the self and the others: (Chair: E. Fantin) The (unexpected) potentials of nostalgia Christa L. Christensen Evoking a shared past by enforcing nostalgia? On the role of media in nursing homes
Silvia Maria Gramegna & The role of nostalgia in care home design for people with dementia Alessandro Biamonti
Katharina Niemeyer & Nostalgia of the future - 10 000 postcards for 2042 Magali Uhl
Vinícius Ferreira & Nostalgia and the invention of the traditions in the rituals and Patrícia D’Abreu performativities of the feminine in the drag culture
15:45 – 16:00 Rounding up
16:15 – 18:00 IMNN-Meeting
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The Changing Notion of Nostalgia in the Discourse of European Identity
Temenuga Trifonova
York University Toronto, Canada
The notion of nostalgia figures prominently in the discourse of European identity and cinema. Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, among others, have recently argued that since any attempt to create a sense of a shared European identity based on primordial or traditional notions of national identity has failed, the only way to construct a European identity is to replace the notion of ‘collective memory’ with that of ‘collective remembrance’ to account for the fact that different European nations have experienced Europe’s traumatic past in different ways (e.g. the communist legacy shared by ex-communist Eastern European nations vs the trauma of the Holocaust shared by Western Europeans). Bottici and Challand ask us to consider the possibility of a “political identity without a collective memory…[i.e.] sharing a feeling of belonging to a given polity without needing to share a narrative of the past” (45),1 thus raising several questions I intend to consider in my paper: Is it possible to have an identity without memory? Can nostalgia be unmoored from specific, real objects of loss? Is nostalgia an inherently politically regressive emotion? What types of readings emphasize its regressive aspects and what types of readings attempt to reclaim its progressive potential, and to what end?
Academic scholarship has consistently distinguished regressive from progressive forms of nostalgia. Jameson, Appadurai, Elsaesser and Braidotti, among others, have emphasized the regressive aspects of nostalgia. Jameson famously argued that one of the effects of the politics of globalization has been a “nostalgia for the present” - nostalgia without memory. Appadurai, too, claims that part of the rise of imagination as a social practice is the rise of ‘ersatz’ or ‘imagined’ nostalgia under the influence of mass advertising, for “in creating experiences of losses that never took place advertisements create...nostalgia for things that never were” (77).2 For Elsaesser, the post-national condition Europe has allegedly entered is marked not by a wholesale embrace of globalization but by the explosion of nationalism and nostalgia and an obsessive turn “inward towards the past, towards commemorization, and collective nostalgia” (21).3 Feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti celebrates nomadism as a resistance to the nostalgia for fixed identities or homelands: “The nomad does not stand for homelessness, or compulsive displacement; it is rather a figuration for the kinds of subject who has relinquished all idea, desire, or nostalgia for fixity. This figuration expresses the desire for an identity made of transitions, successive shifts,
1 Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity (New York: Cambridge UP, 2013). 2 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996). 3 Thomas Elsaesser, “European Cinema into the Twenty-First Century: Enlarging the Context” in The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning and Globalization, ed. Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina (London: I.B.Tauris, 2015), 17 – 32.
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and coordinated changes, without and against an essential unity” (qtd in Rodono 188).4
In her now classic study of the history of nostalgia Svetlana Boym considers nostalgia not as an inherently political emotion but as the product of various processes of secularization: “To feel at home is to know that things are in their places and so are you; it is a state of mind that doesn’t depend on an actual location. The object of longing, then, is not really a place called home but this sense of intimacy with the world” (251). She distinguishes between ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective’ nostalgia: while the former “attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home” (xviii), the latter does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place of home but “takes sensual delight in the texture of time not measurable by clocks and calendars” (49).5 Similarly, Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli differentiates between ‘a longing to return home’ and ‘homesickness’, both of which are implied by the word ‘nostalgia’ depending on how one reads the Greek algos vs the Latin algia: ‘longing to return home’ opens us the possibility of a future return to a home that still exists as it did in the past, whereas homesickness “offers no such consolation” but reminds us of time’s irreversibility (26).6 Invoking Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between a ‘master’ and ‘minor’ literature— master literature “creates a mythical place on the foundation of the real place” while minor literature tries to “create a mythical place in the face of the dissolution of the real place” (34)—Aga Skrodzka, too, distinguishes a regressive, nationalist form of nostalgia from the nostalgia of vernacular East Central European magic realist cinema, which, she argues, can be incorporated into a progressive politics “when the desire for home and the sense of belonging that comes with it are no longer framed by nationalism but is instead translated into a much more abstract, and ironically a more basic notion of groundedness” (44).7 Like Skrodzka, Lenuta Giukin acknowledges that nostalgia for the past in the former communist countries of the Eastern Bloc, where “the values of Western thinking could not fill the gap created by discarded ideologies,” is still common (Giukin qtd 141), but this kind of nostalgia is not necessarily politically regressive inasmuch as it could raise old questions about the necessity to reform capitalism and the need to modify the West’s seemingly naturalized standards.8 With her book Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? Barbara Cassin joins this line of thinking about the progressive aspects of nostalgia, trying to rethink the relationship between nostalgia and the native land in order to make nostalgia “a much broader and welcoming way of thinking, a vision of the world freed of all belonging” (8). Like other scholars, she distinguishes between two forms of nostalgia: the traditional, politically regressive notion of nostalgia Heimweb as the “desire to return, a closed-off nostalgia, one that goes round in a circle,” which relies on a circular conception of philosophy and time, and Sehnsucht, “an open nostalgia that never ‘re-turns’ to itself” (26).9 The lesson of Homer’s Odyssey, she
4 Aurora E. Rodono, “Nomadic Narratives: Migration Cinema in Germany and Italy” in The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, ed. Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 171-201. 5 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). 6 Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Mythopetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (New York: Columbia UP, 2017). 7 Aga Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012). 8 Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl, “Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale” in European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition, ed. Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl (Bielefield: Verlag, 2015), 15-46. 9 Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (New York: Fordham UP, 2016)
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maintains, is “that we cannot stay ‘there’ i.e., that we ‘are’ never ‘there’, never at home. Rather than cultivating roots, I would cultivate the elsewhere, a world that does not close itself off, full of the ‘likes’ of us, all different—like us, not like us” (63).
After examining the ways in which the notion of nostalgia has been reshaped in studies of European identity and cinema, I will ask whether Boym’s notion of ‘diasporic intimacy’, which she defines as “a shared longing without belonging” (352), offers a convincing, progressive re-reading of nostalgia in the context of recent attempts to conceive of a post-national European identity.
Bibliography Aga Skrodzka, Magic Realist Cinema in East Central Europe (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012). Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996). Aurora E. Rodono, “Nomadic Narratives: Migration Cinema in Germany and Italy” in The Cinemas of Italian Migration: European and Transatlantic Narratives, ed. Sabine Schrader and Daniel Winkler (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 171-201. Barbara Cassin, Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home? (New York: Fordham UP, 2016). Chiara Bottici and Benoit Challand, Imagining Europe: Myth, Memory and Identity (New York: Cambridge UP, 2013). Fredrick Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992). Helmut Illbruck, Nostalgia: Origins and Ends of an Unenlightened Disease (Evancston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2012). Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl, “Introduction: Towards a Politics of Scale” in European Visions: Small Cinemas in Transition, ed. Janelle Blankenship and Tobias Nagl (Bielefield: Verlag, 2015), 15-46. Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, Mythopetic Cinema: On the Ruins of European Identity (New York: Columbia UP, 2017). Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 2011). Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001). Thomas Elsaesser, “European Cinema into the Twenty-First Century: Enlarging the Context” in The Europeanness of European Cinema: Identity, Meaning and Globalization, ed. Mary Harrod, Mariana Liz and Alissa Timoshkina (London: I.B.Tauris, 2015), 17 – 32.
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Media and nostalgia through the lens of postclassical narratologies. A theoretical approach
Sébastien Fevry
School of Communication in the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium
My paper seeks to provide a new theoretical insight into mediated nostalgia (Niemeyer 2014) through the lens of post-classical narratologies (Herman 1997, Meister 2013). More precisely, I would like to show how the new developments of narratology may contribute to better understand different functions of nostalgic narratives in media such as films, series or transmedia constellations.
Although many media narratives (such as the series Strange Things for instance) are associated with the production of a nostalgic feeling or a nostalgic atmosphere, the contribution of narratology is rarely took into account (Kanai 2016) to explore the relationship between narrative and nostalgia. However, this kind of approach would allow us to bring some light on issues that remain too often in the shadows. When we describe a narrative as 'nostalgic', are we talking about feelings expressed by one or more characters, about an atmosphere specific to the whole narrative or about the ‘effet retour’ driven by the narrative process? In other words, how and through which narrative relays is nostalgia shared with the viewer or the reader?
In my sense, the postclassical narratologies can bring some answers to these questions, notably because the ‘new’ narratologies focus on the dynamic of the narration as well as on its pragmatic functions (Meister 2013), which helps us to analyze nostalgia as produced by the narrative in act. In this perspective, my paper will particularly rely on the concepts of narrative tension (Baroni 2007), focalization (Baroni 2017), narrative empathy (Keen 2013) and experientiality (Fludernik 1996).
On this base, the purpose is to propose a theoretical model considering narrative nostalgia according to three complementary axes. Nostalgia can be relative: 1) to the point of view and focalization (nostalgia expressed by one or several characters or by the narrator himself); 2) to the diegesis1 (nostalgia aroused by the story-world without necessarily going through the mediation of a character); 3) to the plot as such (the narrative proposes a configuration of temporality that triggers nostalgia by suggesting reversibility of the action or by playing on the recognition of places or characters already seen before in the story).
My paper aims to develop this model by relying on several examples coming mostly from cinema and series. A special attention will be paid to the third axis of the model that consists in considering nostalgia in terms of narrative tension, notably by linking the narratology perspective of Baroni (2007) with the philosophical approach of nostalgia by Jankélévitch (1974).
1 Translation of the French term ‘diégèse’ (Souriau, 1951).
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In conclusion, the paper aims to draw new perspectives for nostalgia and narratology in the Media Studies field. Narrative nostalgia will be seen as depending on variable focalizations; as located in the diegesis and as temporally build.
Bibliography Baroni, R. (2007). La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité, surprise, Paris: Seuil. Baroni, R. (2017). “Les fonctions de la focalisation et du point de vue dans la dynamique de l’intrigue.” Cahiers de Narratologie 32. http://journals.openedition.org/narratologie/7851 Fludernik, M. (1996). Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge. Herman, D. (1997). “Scripts, Sequences, and Stories: Elements of a Postclassical Narratology”. PMLA 112.5, 1046-1059. Jankélévitch, V. (1974). L’Irréversible et la Nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion. Kanai, A. (2016). “Narrative Simulation for Film Rhetoric Composition With or Without Story and Nostalgia Effects”. In Takashi Ogata and Shin Asakawa (Ed.), Content Generation Through Narrative Communication and Simulation, Hershey PA: IGI Global, 148-161. Keen, S. (2006). “A Theory of Narrative Empathy.” Narrative 14, 209–36. Meister J. C. (2013). “Narratology”. The living handbook of narratology. http://wikis.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php/Narratology Niemeyer, K. (Ed.) (2014). Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan.
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Feeling nostalgic in the digital age: Revisiting conceptualizations of nostalgia as an emotion
Manuel Menke
University of Augsburg, Germany
In the history of nostalgia research there was always the notion that nostalgia is an emotion. This is reflected in the terms that are used to describe nostalgic engagements, such as “longing”, “dwelling”, or “wallowing”. In the main strands of literature concerned with the conceptualization of nostalgia we find terminologies describing nostalgia as an “individual emotion” (social psychology) (Sedikides et al., 2015), “historical emotion” (cultural studies) (Boym, 2001), or “social emotion” (sociology) (Davis, 1979). Even though all refer to emotions the diverse understandings of what emotions actually are makes a consistent definition problematic.
The individual is the only entity capable of feeling emotions. Social psychology therefore focuses on the functions of the emotional structure of nostalgia for the psychological well-being of an individual mentally engaging in nostalgia. Even though there is also the argument that nostalgia is a social emotion because it is related to social contexts, can make one feel less lonely and more open to give to charity, the bittersweet “self-conscious” emotion is highly conceptualized as something happening in the individual (Sedikides et al., 2015, p. 190). But focusing on the individual psychology alone is limiting because nostalgia is often emerging and shared in socio-cultural contexts. This was taken into account by Svetlana Boym when she conceptualized nostalgia as a “historical emotion” that is related to societal and cultural change since modernity. Here “emotion” becomes an analytical term to historically track the affective impact society has on its citizens and how it is shaping a culture of feeling that can entails productive (“reflective nostalgia”) and destructive (“restorative nostalgia”) elements (Boym, 2001, pp. 41–50). Her nostalgia is not about the composition of the individual emotion but about the historical circumstances that made nostalgia thrive as a socio-cultural phenomenon that is emotionally experienced by many. However, she did not go much into detail about how this was related to media and communication. It was Fred Davis who pointed out that nostalgia only became a “social emotion” because media make socio-cultural change salient and evoke feelings of loss and discontinuity that are not experienced in isolation by each individual but as a society (Davis, 1979, p. vii).
How can these perspectives be useful today to analyze and understand nostalgia in a digital age where it is possible to connect with each other online in digital public spheres? In my talk I will illustrate that in this environment the individual and the social dimensions of nostalgic emotions fuse. People publicly participate bottom-up in discourses that comprise the communication of individual experiences, memories, and emotions from people´s lifeworlds as well as societal perspectives represented in mass media (Baym, 2010; Papacharissi, 2015; van Dijck, 2007). Digital communities therefore share and debate both the experience of socio-cultural change and loss as well as personal and collective memories. This mixture of individual and social elements in communication is the foundation to commit to nostalgia as a collective
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emotion (Gilbert, 2014). It allows to identify as a group with a common emotion, yet, to personally feel and commit to this emotion as an individual.
Bibliography Baym, N. K. (2010). Personal connections in the digital age. Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA: Polity. Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Davis, F. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: a sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press. Gilbert, M. (2014). How we feel: Understanding everyday collective emotion as ascription. In C. von Scheve & M. Salmela (Eds.), Collective emotions: perspectives from psychology, philosophy, and sociology (pp. 17–31). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Papacharissi, Z. (2015). Affective publics: sentiment, technology, and politics. Oxford ; New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To Nostalgize: Mixing Memory with Affect and Desire. In Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 51, pp. 189–273). Elsevier. Retrieved from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0065260114000045 van Dijck, J. (2007). Mediated memories in the digital age. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
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(Not) to tell nostalgia of the immigrant. The case of digital portraits of the The French National Museum of History of Immigration
Emmanuelle Fantin
Sorbonne-Université, France
The French National Museum of History of Immigration was launched in 2007, with the will to change the opinions on immigration by offering a new point of view on French History. Besides the numerous exhibitions offered by the institution, the website is enriched with various content (educational, historical, illustrative, etc.), including a Gallery of Portraits of immigrants, entitled Histoires Singulières 1 (“singular histories”).This digital gallery aims at reflecting “ the richness and the diversity of immigration in France”. If we take a closer look at this portraits, we can observe that nostalgia is both omnipresent and ambiguous: most of the time, nostalgia is mentioned to be explicitly rejected. Considering this multimedia portraits are not “raw” materials but rather mediatic artefacts, shaped and written by a journalist and cautioned by the museum, the aim of this communication is to analyze the role and the narratives of nostalgia in this gallery. What imaginaries of the immigrant and its nostalgic feeling emerge from this digital dispositive? What representations of nostalgia offers this national museum on migration?
The methodology of the case study relies on a content analysis and a discursive analysis of the twenty-three portraits that compose the gallery, a semiotic analysis of the dispositive of the digital gallery and an interview with Irène Bérélowitch, the journalist that wrote all the portraits.
First, I will question on the role of nostalgia in the story of the immigrants, more specifically the way nostalgic feelings are minimized, in favor of a pacified vision of the migration in France. Rhetorical tools are used to deny nostalgia – just after expressing it – which signals that the gallery is guided by the need to bring to the forefront a representation of a peaceful and fantasized experience of togetherness. Then, I will study how the transcultural memories and the singularity of each testimony are standardized by the mediatic and narrative dispositives. The portraits are rewritten in order to smooth the asperities and the difficulties of the immigrants in France. The collection allows to systematize the metonymic projection between the individual and the idea of an idealized group, in order to build an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983). It reveals that the plurality of feelings of losses reflects by nostalgias of the immigrants are considered by the museum as antinomic of the idea of a community. Finally, I will explore how, in the current and complex
1 http://www.histoire-immigration.fr/ressources/histoire-de-l-immigration/histoires-singulieres
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context of migration in France, the memories exposed in the Gallery can be seen as a tool to trigger imagination for a future of pacified national representation of french identity, more than the production of an actual historical testimony. The gallery is less a historical testimony than a narrative about nostalgia for a pacified future.
Bibliography Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,Verso books Angé, O., Berliner, D. (dir.) (2015) Nostalgie, Terrain, n° 65 Arnold-de Simine, S. (2013) Mediating Memory in the Museum – Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bonnett, A. (2015) The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. London: Routledge. Bourdieu, P. (1986) “L’illusion biographique”, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, pp. 69-72 Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Cassin, B. (2013) La nostalgie. Quand est-on chez soi? Ulysee, Enée, Arendt. Paris: Autrement Editions. Davis, F. (1979) Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press Duyvendak, J. W. (2011) The Politics of Home – Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. London: Palgrave Macmillan Glynn, I. (2012). History, Memory and Migration. Perceptions of the Past and the Politics of Incorporation. Palgrave MacMillan Jankélévitch, V. (1974) L’Irréversible et la Nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion. Ricoeur, P. (2000). La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli. Paris : Seuil. Wrona, A. (2012). Face au portrait. De Sainte-Beuve à Facebook. Paris : Hermann.
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Visualizing the 1980s ‘Deviant’ Athenian Youth On Facebook: Nostalgia and Spatial Questions
Panagiotis Zestanakis
University of Crete, Greece
The 1980s, a period of relevant prosperity and growing democratization in Greece, witnessed the emergence of novel ‘deviant’ juvenile identities in Athens, the country’s capital. New groups, almost exclusively comprised by male youngsters, such as ‘kamikaze’ (motorcycle riders driving recklessly), football hooligans and heavy metal music fans flourished, gained media attention and alarmed the Athenian public sphere. Many of the then youngsters are today around fifty years old; in recent years, some of them established Facebook groups devoted to the then ‘deviant’ juvenile identities discussing the ‘wild 1980s’ through a usually nostalgic prism. The names of some of these popular groups such as ‘The motorcycles of our heart, 1970s- 1980s’ (with about 17,000 members in late 2017) openly convey a nostalgic climate reinforced by the use of 1980s visual material, mainly photos. The proposed paper will: a) analyze the roles of visual sources from personal collections (photos, videos, articles in the press, photos from books etc.) in the (re)construction of memories on the ‘deviant 1980s’ highlighting how nostalgia is articulated and examining how the current crisis enforced nostalgia on the ‘happy go lucky 1980s’, b) drawing on the ‘spatial turn’, a methodological trend highlighting the importance of space in the humanities, the paper will examine how Athens is depicted in the groups’ strategies of ‘self-representation’ and if, and to which degree, these strategies reproduce or challenge the representational politics of the 1980s media.
Bibliography Cross G (2015) Consumed Nostalgia. Memory in the Age of Fast Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press. Neiger M et al (eds) (2011) On Media Memory. Collective Memory in New Media Age (Houndmills: Palgrave). Warf B and Arias S (eds) (2009) The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives (London: Routledge) Zestanakis P (2018) Online Memories from 1980s-2000s Consumption and Lifestyle Politics in Greece During the Current Economic Crisis. Journal of Consumer Culture. DOI: 10.117/146950517745708
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"No intenso agora": Footages from 1968, a case of nostalgia and archive effect
Talitha Ferraz & Gabriel F. Marinho
Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
The Brazilian filmmaker João Moreira Salles has consolidated his career as a Latin- American documentarist focusing his movies on issues related to alterity in contemporary sociocultural dynamics. They appear, for instance, in films such as "Santiago" (2008), "Notícias de uma guerra particular"(1999), and "America"(1989). Salles’ last movie, "No intenso agora" (2017), seams to rotate in another direction: identities and memories concerning his own sociocultural grounds. Based on archive footage, the movie discusses the imaginaries and representations of 1968, a year noted by its social and cultural transnational quakes.
Four events guided the documental narrative of Salles: the protests of the May 1968, in Paris; the Prague Spring; the funeral of Edson Luís, a Brazilian student killed by the military dictatorship, crime that unleashed one of the biggest demonstration against the authoritarian regime; and, among socio-historical events, images from the director’s family archive that recount a trip of his mother to the Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. Based on a methodological approach which combines film analysis with an archaeological perspective (Foucault, 2008), we will examine limits, continuations and ruptures associated to the events the documentary highlighted and how the documentarist merges macro-historical and individual layers in representations of the 1968 as a fetish-year. We understand that the narrative reinforces the monumentalization of the year of 1968 as a strong element of an exercise of nostalgia, which finds in the “archive effect” (Baron, 2013) ways to re- experience past collective and individual events, despite its very close relation with social and personal traumas. The article theoretical approach will focus on notions such as “restorative and reflective nostalgia” (Boym, 2001), “collective memory” (Halbwachs, 1990) and “archive” (LeGoff, 1992; Foucault, 2008) taking into account different associations between nostalgia and mnemonic processes in documentaries, which are undertaken through archival footages.
Bibliography Baron, Jaimie. The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History. New York: Routledge, 2013. BOYM, Svetlana. The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. FOUCAULT, Michel. A arqueologia do saber. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitária, 2008 Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. HALBWACHS, Maurice. A memória coletiva. São Paulo: Vértice, 1990. NIEMEYER, Katharina. Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Hampshire, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. PICKERING, Michael & KEIGHTLEY, Emily. The modalities of nostalgia. In: Current Sociology, 54 (6), pp. 919-941, 2006. Available at: http://csi.sagepub.com/content/54/6/919.full.pdf+html , accessed on March 8, 2018
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‘Communism never happened’ - Romanian Retro-aesthetics and the “nice” side of communism
Caterina Preda
University of Bucharest, Romania
This presentation focuses on a specific case of aestheticization of Romanian communist visual culture in recent years. Several examples of this phenomenon are addressed so as to show how this dynamic functions also with the help of online media including blogs and Facebook pages.
A blog called “Postcards from the past: the nice side of communism” started as a collection of cards showing the first years of modernist architecture in several seaside resorts of Romania. The blog has gradually developed and presents images that document not only the official side of reality as expressed in the polished, colored postcards 1 , but also darker images, less joyful clichés from the period. Other Facebook pages have followed such as “Bucharest in images”, “Via Bucharest” and specific ones for different neighborhoods of the capital city, as well as of other Romanian towns; additional pages were established such as “Alimentara” that documents images with food stores, restaurants, and food rituals during communist times, “The museum of toys”, etc.
Although there is a predominant discourse in Romanian society that emphasizes the interwar period as the “Golden epoch” of Romanian development, more and more, communist times have become for a certain segment of society a period of reference in positive terms. This nostalgic discourse emphasizes this retro-aesthetics that embraces positive aspects such as modernist architecture, the cleanliness of design, the empty streets (!) compared to the chaotic traffic nowadays. A good illustration in this sense is the multi-year project launched by the Graphic Studio (Atelierul de Grafică) and that includes a blog and several volumes (Graphics without computers vol 1, 2, 3, Iron Curtain) that document graphic and design (posters, letters, work related signs, etc.) realized during the communist regimes and that are collected so as to save them from getting lost in the post-1990 period. The intention of the editors of the collection is one that openly highlights the positive aspects of Romanian design compared to nowadays situation.
Gradually, communist products have become “vintage” and are acquired by hipsters as valuable products, “cool”, imbued with a pop aesthetic. This can be seen in the auction of communist products by auction houses, in the case of pubs and bars that either use vintage communist objects to decorate (Atelier mechanic bar in Bucharest), or willingly create a space dedicated to the nostalgic outlook on communism such as the bar Scânteia (the name of the official newspaper of the Communist Party). Artistic examples include films that were produced after 2006 such as, Tales from the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu et ali., 2009), I am an old communist hag (Stere Gulea, 2013), or contemporary art interventions such as the project of Vlad Nancă, Dacia: 30 years
1 Mostly formed of the postcards produced since 1964 by the German company Kruger.
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of social history (2003) that documents the car produced by Romanian authorities before 1989 and that has largely disappeared from the streets in the last few years. Artists have also touched upon the subject in order to criticize this attitude as the work by Ciprian Muresan shows.
Ciprian Mureșan, Communism never happened, 2006
Bibliography Asavei, Alina, “Nicolae Ceausescu: between Vernacular Memory and Nostalgia” in Gavin Bowd (ed. Special issue, ”Memory and Nostalgia”, Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History) Issue 11, 2016: 27-42. Marin, Manuela. “Communist Nostalgia in Romania“, in Studia Universitatis Babes- Bolyai, Historia, Vol. 58, nr. 2, December 2013, pp. 58-73. Preda, Caterina, “The Digital Artistic Memory of Nicolae Ceauescu” in Memory. Conflict and New Media Web Wars in post-socialist states, edited by Ellen Rutten, Julie Fedor, and Vera Zvereva (Routledge 2013), pp. 197-214. Preda, Caterina, “Project 1990 as an anti-monument in Bucharest and the aestheticization of memory”, Südosteuropa 64 (2016): 307-324. Preda, Caterina, “Le role de la nostalgie dans la mémoire artistique du passé communiste dans la Roumanie contemporaine”, Canadian Slavonic Papers, Vol 57, Nr 3-4 (2015), Nostalgia, Culture , and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe. Pușcă, Anca, Post-Communist Aesthetics(Routledge: London, NY, 2016). Sandu, Oana Popescu, “’Let’s all freeze up until 2010 or so’: Nostalgic Directions in Post-communist Romania” in Post-communist Nostalgiaedited by Maria Todorova and Zsuzsa Gille (New York: Berghan Books, 2010), 113-125. Todorova, Maria, A.Dimou, S. Troebst, Remembering Communism Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in South-East Europe (Budapest, NY: CEU Press 2014).
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Rebuilding Village Gates and Sacred Swings: The Cultural Politics of Hani Ethnic ‘Home’ and Nostalgic Discourse Practice in China
Yingchun Xu
Zhejiang University of Media and Communications, China
Due to enormous wave of immigration, “Home Sickness” or “Nostalgia” had been catchwords since 1980s and 1990s in USA and Europe. Nationalism and Patriotism have shaped the ethos of “nostalgia” in China. During 1920s and 1930s, a big wave of rural reconstruction movement was set off by Liang Shuming and Lu Zuofu. The starting point of cultural “nostalgia” was the publishment of the popular poem titled “Nostalgia” in 1973 by Yu Guangzhong, who had to leave mainland China for Taiwan because of the civil war. Recently, a political strategy of “nostalgia” proposed by Chinese government based on the concepts of “new-type urbanization” and “sustainability”’ has evoked a second wave of rural reconstruction movement under the context of grand immigration of rural population to urban area, and ecological crisis.
China has 56 ethnic groups, in which Han group occupies 90% population in total (National Bureau of Statistics of People’s Republic of China, 2010). Minority Groups thus severely feel the identity crisis for globalization and Chinesization. Root-seeking is essentially linked with cultural identity reconstruction in China. In this paper, my concerns are: under this complex circumstance internationally and domestically, how do people define nostalgic culture; and how do they seek their cultural roots or “home” originally? In the journey of so-called ‘root-seeking’, communication as culture (Carey, 2008) must deploy a set of cultural symbols, rituals and rules to represent “home”. During the course of cultural communication, how does the political factor influence the signification of ‘root’ or ‘home’, and how does the cultural interaction proceed?
I adopt qualitative approach based on the grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) in this research. Since from February 2016, I have been working on the field in four Hani ethnic villages (Guangnali, Hongmaoshu, Guanlei and Baka) in Xishangbannan of Yunnan Province, China. I spent two weeks every year in these three years in on-site interviews, daily life observations, photographing, and participating Hani Ethnic holiday and worship rituals. Like Glaser (2002) said, “everything is data”. I have also gathered different kinds of data through ethnic museums, social media such as Hani ethnic Wechat accounts and groups etc., closely connecting with data analysis and data check, trying to find any possibilities and specific process purely based on the ethnological data. Afterwards, the data have been coded. Theories of Semiotics are
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also applied for analysis, and the whole communicational process is regarded as cultural discursive practice for “nostalgia” or “root-seeking”.
As a result, there are several different focus coding categories, which represent five different cultural ends for four Hani ethnic villages and the government. I find out that the symbols of Hani ethnic gates and sacred swings have been presented everywhere, becoming the important cultural mediators. However, it is worth noting that the scenarios embedded the gates and swings are different, which leads to opinion divergence among stakeholders. The representations of “home” struggle for dominant meanings. The rebuilding of village gates and sacred swings is a nostalgic discourse practice. This research is essentially a reflection and examination to the rising trend of “nostalgia” in contemporary China.
Bibliography: Bauman, Zygmunt (2017). Retrotopia. Polity Press. Boym, Svetlana (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books. Carey, James W.(2009). Communication as Culture. New York: Routledge. Duyvendak, Jan Willem (2011). The Politics of Home. Palgrave Macmillan. Eliasoph, Nina and Lichterman Paul (2003). Culture in Interaction. American Journal of Sociology, Vol.108, No. 4 (Jan.): 735-94. Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Glaser, Barney G. In Kathy C. Charmaz (2006). Constructing Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide through Qualitative Analysis. London: Sage Publications. Li, Leilei (2015). Theorizing "Nostalgia" and Its Implications on Culture Heritage Preservation of Rural and Urban China. Journal of Beijing Union University (Humanities and Social Sciences), Vol.13, No.4:51-57. Lundby, Knut (editor) (2008). Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories. Peter Lang. Ritivoi, Andreea Deciu (2001). Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and Immigrant Identity. Maryland: Rowman&Littlefield Publishers. Swidler, Ann (1986). Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies. America Sociological Review, Vol.51. No. 2 (Apr.): 273-86.
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Nostalgic returns: on the phrasing, targets, and forms of nostalgia in Turkey
Josh Carney
American University of Beirut, Lebanon
Roughly coincident with the political rise of the Justice and Development Party (AKParty), Turkey has seen a marked increase in visible forms of nostalgia, ranging from public celebrations, to consumer goods, to books and, especially, popular media related to the nation’s past. While the most striking wing of this movement has focused on the imperial glory of the Ottoman era, there has also been a surge of interest in the more recent Republican past. Like many other places, Turkey appears to be subject to what Huyssen has termed a growing “culture of memory,” a trend tied both to the increasing presence of media in everyday life and the shifts in belonging that accompany globalization and late capitalism.
Recognizing that nostalgic affect is difficult to guage, I focus instead on circulation, and adopt a three-part approach to the situation in Turkey. I first examine phrasing, touching on how the word “nostalgia” is inflected in one of Turkey’s most noted memoirs and comparing this with ethnographic accounts from viewers discussing mediated portrayals of the past to suggest that the term is generally taken to refer to a consumable past in the Turkish milieu. I next shift to the matter of target, exploring both mediated discourse and ethnographic data in turn to shed light on the most visible and remarked upon “types” of nostalgia—Ottoman and Republican—both with respect to of their marked differences and their surprising similarities. Ultimately, I turn to a third dimension of nostalgia—form—and I adopt and adapt Boym’s dyad of restorative and reflective nostalgia to clarify how nostalgia circulates among and is integral to the formation of publics. I provide an example of this triangulated approach with regard to a particular nostalgic debate in Turkey: the great controversy that arose over the highly popular televised Ottoman costume drama Magnificent Century (Muhteşem Yüzyıl, 2011-2014).
Bibliography Appadurai, Arjun. (1996). Modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bennett, Tony. (1983). Texts, readers, reading formations. The Bulletin of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 16(1), 3-17. Berliner, David. (2012). Multiple nostalgias: the fabric of heritage in Luang Prabang (Lao PDR). Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 18(4), 769-786. doi:10.1111/j.1467- 9655.2012.01791.x Berliner, David. (2014). Are anthropologists nostalgist? In Olivia Angé & David Berliner (Eds.), 2 Anthropology and Nostalgia (pp. 17-34): Berghahn Books. Boym, Svetlana. (2001). The future of nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Davis, Fred. (1979). Yearning for yesterday: a sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. (1996). Subject positions, speaking positions: from Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler's List. In Vivian Sobchack (Ed.),
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The persistence of history: cinema, television, and the modern event (pp. 145- 183). New York: Routledge. Elsaesser, Thomas. (1999 [1997], 16 April). 'One train may be hiding another': private history, memory and national identity. Screening the Past. Retrieved from http://tlweb.latrobe.edu.au/humanities/screeningthepast/classics/rr0499/terr6b.ht m Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present pasts: Urban palimpsests and the politics of memory: Stanford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. (1991). Nostalgia for the present Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (pp. 279-296). Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Landsberg, Alison. (2004). Prosthetic memory: the transformation of American remembrance in the age of mass culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Landsberg, Alison. (2015). Engaging the past: mass culture and the production of historical knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press. Özyürek, Esra. (2006). Nostalgia for the modern: state secularism and everyday politics in Turkey. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. Pamuk, Orhan. (2003). İstanbul: hatıralar ve şehir: Yapı Kredi Yayınları. Pamuk, Orhan. (2006 [2005]). Istanbul: memories and the city (Maureen Freely, Trans.). New York: Vintage International. Spigel, Lynn. (1995). From the dark ages to the golden age: Women's memories and television reruns. Screen, 36(1), 16-33. Stewart, Kathleen. (1988). Nostalgia--a polemic. Cultural Anthropology, 3(3), 227- 241. Warner, Michael. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. New York: Zone Books. Biography.
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U.S. Television and the Forgotten War: Nostalgia Production and Institutionalized Forgetting
Danielle Seid
Baruch College (City University of New York), USA
Since at least the 1990s when the collection The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict was published, television scholars have demonstrated considerable interest in the historical events and media of the 1960s. In the introduction to the aforementioned collection, Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin identified a strain of “recent popular nostalgia for the decade,” nostalgia, it would seem, that ensnared television historians represented in the collection whom, they wrote, “lived through the time.” For Spigel and Curtin, the tool for working with, or perhaps against, nostalgia’s cruder or “cartoonish” qualities is critical distance. Similarly, Svetlana Boym has argued for a concept of “reflective” and unsettled nostalgia that blends longing with critical thinking, held in constant tension with nostalgia’s uncritical “restorative” form. As a scholar of early TV who did not live through the 1950s and 60s, I begin this paper by inquiring into the ways in which critical, reflective nostalgia guides my attempts at recovery and analysis of marginalized early television histories. Given the way that Hollywood (film and television) manufactures and capitalizes on nostalgia for things that “never were,” to borrow Stephanie Coontz’s framework, I seek a method of looking back at early TV that can help us to understand the relationship between nostalgia production and institutionalized forgetting.
My working thesis is that early TV was a crucial force in nation and empire making because of the way it produced racialized nostalgic yearnings that erased and buried some of the most critical events unfolding at the time. Exploring the politics of nostalgia—what and how we remember, and what is systematically erased and forgotten—I focus on early televisual racial representations and the out-of-sight Korean War, dubbed the “forgotten war” even as the war was still being fought. Through examples of seemingly benign irruptions on network television, drawn from various genres and forms, I analyze how TV images of the 1950s and 60s proximate to the Korean War anxiously worked to produce dominant ideologies via strategies of obfuscation and whitewashing. As someone who did not “live through the time,” I simultaneously theorize my own curious nostalgia for images of forgotten Asian/American women on early U.S. television vis-a-vis longings for community, identification, and, ultimately, redress.
Bibliography Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Callahan, Vicki. Introduction to Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History. Edited by Vicki Callahan. Detroit: Wayne State University, 2010. Cho, Grace M. Haunting the Korean Diaspora: Shame, Secrecy, and the Forgotten War. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Coontz, Stephanie. The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. New York: Basic Books, 1992. Cumings, Bruce. The Korean War: A History. New York: The Modern Library, 2011.
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Doherty, Thomas. Cold War, Cool Medium: Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Man, Simeon. Soldiering through Empire: Race and the Making of the Decolonizing Pacific. Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018. Sperb, Jason. Flickers of Film: Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2016. Spigel, Lynn and Michael Curtin. Introduction to The Revolution Wasn’t Televised: Sixties Television and Social Conflict. Edited by Lynn Spigel and Michael Curtin. New York: Routledge, 1997.
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Mediatized White Nostalgia: Racist Representations of the Past in Swedish Digital Media
Samuel Merrill
Umeå University, Sweden
This paper is based on research into Sweden’s largest anti-immigration Facebook group: Stå Upp För Sverige [SUFS], which combined the quantitative topic modelling of a large data-set of the group’s user-generated content with the qualitative critical discourse analysis of a sample of that data-set in order to establish how Facebook’s architectures and affordances shaped the production and circulation of racism. This research showed that Facebook enables and influences various discursive strategies of identification and persuasion - within which covert and overt racist discourses are embedded – through processes of cybertyping, roleplaying, crowdsourcing and (counter-)reaction. It also showed that these strategies and processes regularly contributed to the creation of a general discursive and narrative structure that relied on utopian and nostalgic interpretations of Sweden’s past and their contrast with dystopic diagnoses and forecasts of the country’s present and future. Most prominently group users expressed nostalgia for a time before immigration occasionally through specific references to, among other historical periods, the Viking Age and the 1940s and 50s. Restorative in nature this nostalgia emphasises a “return to national symbols and myths” and regularly relies on conspiracy theories and intimate cultural knowledge to differentiate between in- and out-groups, and in turn resonates with the group’s disenfranchised users and their search for scapegoats to blame for their misfortunes (Boym 2001: 41). In this sense it mirrored the sorts of nostalgia evident in the rhetoric of Sweden’s largest far-right political party, the Sweden Democrats, which, for example, positions the 1940s and 50s as a ‘golden age’ of ‘Swedish democracy, socio-economic wellbeing and ethnic homogeneity and cohesion’ and accuses its political opponents of betraying the country by pursuing an immigration policy that has led to Sweden’s dystopic decline (Elgenius & Rydgren 2017: 355). Insofar as the pasts that are referred to nostalgically are predominantly white and male-dominated, they also reflect the historical links between ideas of Swedishness, whiteness and masculinity (Mattsson 2005).
Departing from this point and through the application of similar methods, this paper will present a more detailed analysis of the group’s nostalgically inflected textual and visual user-generated content and more broadly consider what can be thought of as ‘mediatised white nostalgia’ in other Swedish digital settings. Drawing on established works (Davis 1979; Boym 2001) and different strands of the interdisciplinary literature dedicated to nostalgia, including those offered by media studies (e.g. Pickering & Keighltey 2006; Niemayer 2014) and organizational studies (e.g Strangleman 1999; Ybema 2004), and set against broader theoretical conceptualizations of cultural and post-racial racism, whiteness and white fragility (see Valluvan, 2016; DiAngelo 2011 ), where empirically relevant it will also engage with the concepts of utopia and dystopia, nostrophobia and postalgia, while seeking overall to understand how social media platforms like Facebook influence the production nostalgically racist discourse.
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Bibliography Boym S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia, New York: Basic Books. Davis F. (1979). Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia. New York: The Free Press. DiAngelo R. (2011). White Fragility, International Journal of Critical Pedagogy, 3(3), 54–70 Elenius G., and Rydgren J. (2017). The Sweden Democrats and the ethno-nationalist rhetoric of decay and betrayal. Sociologisk Forskning, 54(4), 353–358. Mattsson K. (2005). Diskrimineringens andra ansikte – svenskhet och ”det vita västerländska”, Statens Offentliga Utredningar, 2005(41), 139–157. Niemayer K. (ed) (2014). Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Pickering M., and Keightley. (2006). The Modalities of Nostalgia, Current Sociology, 54(6), 919–941. Strangleman, T. (1999). The Nostalgia of Organisations and the Organisation of Nostalgia: Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry. Sociology 33(4), 725–746. Valluvan S. (2016). What is ‘post-race’ and what does it reveal about contemporary racisms? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 39(13), 2241–2251. Ybema, S. (2004). Managerial postalgia: projecting a golden future, Journal of Managerial Psychology, 19(8), 825–841.
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Consuming colonial nostalgia: An investigation of audiences' engagement with Gurinder Chadha's film Viceroy's House (2017)
Emily Keightley, Clelia Clini & Chloë Alaghband-Zadeh
Loughborough University, UK
2017 marked the seventieth anniversary of the Partition of British India and the birth of the new nations of India and Pakistan, prompting a new wave of media representations of Partition in the UK. These representations enter a media landscape in which nostalgic references to the colonial past abound, employed by politicians during the Brexit debate but also emerging in popular culture (from TV shows to pop music video clips), and accompanied by a public debate over the political and cultural currency of colonial nostalgia and its relation to ideas of Britishness. For example, the 2017 commemorations of Partition occur against the backdrop of the media fallout surrounding a 2016 Yougov poll that revealed that 59% of British people felt that the British Empire was something to be proud of.
In this context, Gurinder Chadha's Viceroy's House (2017) presents itself as an interesting case study. It is a film on the Partition of British India made by the most prominent South Asian woman filmmaker in Britain which has on the one hand been accused of reproducing a colonial imagination (https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/03/fatima-bhutto-viceroys-house- watched-servile-pantomime-and-wept), and on the other hand it has also been praised as an antidote to colonial nostalgia, "[filling] a gap in Britain's collective consciousness and cultural memory" (https://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2017/03/partition-india).
In this paper, we examine the ways in which audiences make use of the mediatised nostalgia of Viceroy's House. We present the results of a series of film screenings and focus groups, in which we discussed the film with groups of white British and British Asian participants. We explore the discursive and affective links between nostalgia and British nationalism, and how both white British and British Asian individuals creatively inhabit the different positions afforded by representations of British colonialism. In analysing people's engagement with nostalgic representations of the Empire, we especially focus on how their processes of meaning-making are intertwined with their investment in collective identities (Pickering and Keightley, 2006), including intersecting national, ethnic and gendered identities.
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Yugonostalgic communities – new Yugoslav politics?
Milica Popović
University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
Taking into account the specificities of (post) Yugoslav neostalgia (Velikonja, 2010) there is a strong need for theory to take a closer look at the multiplicities of both Yugoslavia and its nostalgia(s). Introducing the political aspect of nostalgia, with particular focus on the last generation of pioneers (born between 1974 and 1982), we are leaving the banalizing official post-communist discourses (Buden, 2012) on nostalgic transition losers and those academic discourses that deny nostalgic sentiments of the ability to generate a political movement or a programme (Horvat and Štiks, 2015). Within revisionist political and cultural discourses, nostalgia emerges, through Svetlana Boym’s concept of counter-memory (Boym, 2001), in public spaces without state control and without the control of dominant discourses of political elites, and as such is being translated into reflective nostalgia (Boym, 2001, p.49). Through this reflection, the last generation of pioneers creates memory narratives that interweave the political and the nostalgic. These narratives perform as “noeuds de mémoire” – exceeding attempts of territorialisation and identitarian reduction (Rothberg, 2010) and through their multidirectionality (Rothberg, 2009), they emerge as meta-national Yugonostalgic memory, creating a new paradigm in the political field. Is there a political potential within this Yugonostalgic memory, and if yes, how does it translate into the political field? In this research we are interested in the political engagement of the last pioneers – whether their political activism mediates nostalgia, do their organizations embrace Yugonostalgic narratives in the public discourse and do they understand their political subjectivity through the lens of the continuity of the Yugoslav identity. In our attempt to find an answer to these questions, we have conducted 65 qualitative interviews in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia with the political activists (both members of parliament and non-institutional actors), on the whole of the political spectrum. The gathered data will undergo discourse analysis (Fairclough, Wodak, Laclau and Mouffe etc.) in order to further understand the links between the personal narratives of political activists on the left and the public and media discourses of their political organizations – which would be the main focus of this article. As Dragan Markovina asks the question if Yugoslavia is a name for a utopia which is about to be born (Markovina 2015), we try to understand what significance, if any, does Yugonostalgia bear for the politics of the left in the post-Yugoslav space. In defining Yugonostalgia as a mobilizing force for the socio-economic and antinationalistic politics, or to say ideologies of the left, through the meta-national memory, we will try to see if and how, within the generation of the last pioneers, the subversive potential of Yugonostalgia transforms into an active Yugoslav politics of today.
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Initial Bibliography Assman, A. 2011. Duga senka prošlosti. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek. Assmann, A. 2014. Transnational Memories. European Review. 22(4), pp.546-556. Assmann, J. 2011. Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Balibar, E. 2003. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Boym, S. 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Buden, B. 2012. Zona prelaska – o kraju postkomunizma. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga. Calic, M-J. 2013. Istorija Jugoslavije u 20. Veku. Beograd: Clio. De Cesari, C. and Rigney, A. eds. 2014. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter. Duda, I. 2015. Danas kada postajem pionir – Djetinjstvo i ideologija jugoslavenskoga socijalizma. Zagreb, Pula: Sveučilište Jurja Dobrile. Erll, A. 2011. Memory in Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Erll, A. and Rigney, A. eds. 2012. Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fairclough, N. 2004. Analysing discourse – Textual analysis for social research. Taylor & Francis. e-library. Halbwachs, M. 1968. La mémoire collective. Paris: PUF. Horvatinčić, S. 2015. Monument, Territory, and the Mediation of War Memory in Socialist Yugoslavia. Život umjetnosti. 96, pp.34-61. Horvat, S. and Štiks, I. 2015. Introduction: Radical Politics in the Desert of Transition. In: Horvat, Srećko and Štiks, Igor. eds. Welcome to the desert of post- socialism: radical politics after Yugoslavia. New York: Verso, pp.1-20. Huyssen, A. 2006. Nostalgia for Ruins. Grey Room. [Online]. 23, pp.6-21. [Accessed 20 February 2015] Available from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20442718 Jouhanneau, C. 2007. La gestion du passé conflictuel en Bosnie-Herzégovine: le difficile apaisement des mémoires dans un quasi-protectorat européen. In: Mink, Georges and Neumayer, Laure. Eds. L’Europe et ses passés «douloureux». Paris: La Découverte. pp.181-192. Kirn, G. 2014. Transnationalism in Reverse: From Yugoslav to Post-Yugoslav Memorial Sites. In: De Cesari, A. and Rigney, A. Eds. Transnational Memory. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp.313-338. Kirn, G. 2017. Jugoslavenski spomenici ruše se jer su izvan nacionalne doctrine. [Online]. [Accessed 16 March 2017]. Available from: http://balkans.aljazeera.net/vijesti/jugoslavenski-spomenici-ruse-se-jer-su-izvan- nacionalne-doktrine Kuljić, T. 2009. Sociologija generacije. Beograd: Čigoja štampa. Lavabre, M-C. 1994. Le Fil rouge. Sociologie de la mémoire communiste. Paris: Presses de la FNSP. Markovina, D. 2015. Jugoslavenstvo poslije svega. Zemun: Most Art. Mink, G. and P. Bonnard. eds. 2010. Le Passé au présent – Gisements mémoriels et actions historicisantes en Europe centrale et orientale. Paris: Michel Houdiard Editeur. Nora, P. ed. 1997. Les lieux de mémoire. Paris: Gallimard. Petrović, T. 2012. Yuropa – jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga. Petrović, T. 2015. On the way to Europe: EU metaphors and political imagination of the Western Balkans. In: Welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics
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after Yugoslavia. Horvat, Srećko and Štiks, Igor. eds. New York: Verso, pp.103- 121. Popović, M. 2012. La Yougonostalgie: la Yougoslavie au regard des derniers pionniers. MA thesis, Université Paris 2 Panthéon-Assas. Radović, S. 2013. Grad kao tekst. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek. Rajakovic, N. 1992. Les ambigüités du «yougoslavisme». In: Rupnik, Jacques. ed. De Sarajevo à Sarajevo – l’échec yougoslave. Paris: Editions Complexe, pp.30- 35. Ramet, S. 2006. The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918- 2005. Washington, DC and Bloomington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Indiana University Press. Rothberg, M. 2014. Locating Transnational Memory. European Review. 22(4), pp.652-656. Rothberg, M. 2010. Introduction: between memory and memory: from lieux de mémoire to noeuds de mémoire. Yale French Studies. 118/119, pp.3-12. Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Stojanović, D. 2010. Interpretacije istorije i promene sistema vrednosti u Srbiji. In: Listhaug, Ola., Ramet, Sabrina P. and Dulić, Dragana. eds. Građanske i negrađanske vrednosti u Srbiji: Vreme posle Miloševića. Belgrade: Žene u crnom, pp.213-232. Velikonja, M. 2010. Titostalgija. Belgrade: Biblioteka XX vek. Velikonja, M. 2011). Nostalgic/patriotic mythology after Yugoslavia. In: Perica, Vjekoslav and Gavrilović, Darko. eds. Political myths in the former Yugoslavia and successor states – a shared narrative. The Hague/Dordrecht: Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation, pp.85-92. Velikonja, M. and Perica V. 2012. Nebeska Jugoslavija. Interakcije političkih mitologija i pop-kulture. Beograd: Biblioteka XX vek. Velikonja, M. 2015. Mapping Nostalgia for Tito: From Commemoration to Activism. In: Horvat, Srećko and Štiks, Igor. eds. Welcome to the desert of post-socialism: radical politics after Yugoslavia. New York: Verso, pp.173-195. Traverso E. 2009. L'Europe et ses mémoires. Trois perspectives croisées. Raisons politiques. [Online]. 36(4), pp.151-167. [Accessed 17 March 2017]. Available from: https://www-cairn-info.acces-distant.sciences-po.fr/revue-raisons- politiques-2009-4-page-151.htm
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Postsoviet nostalgia in contemporary Russia: the phenomenon of the mediatisation and the materialization of the late soviet past
Roman Abramov
National Research University Higher School of Economics Moscow, Russia
Nostalgia became is worldwide phenomenon that covered different countries and generations. The nostalgia is the reaction of usual people on the fast social political and technological changes modern capitalism. Postcommunist nostalgia is vivid manifestation of his trend when many people suffer from the collapse old regimes of the organization their life. The most famous example of this is "Ostalgia": an ironic nostalgia for the material world of the Soviet past, which spread in the eastern part of Germany. There is also a version of this in the countries of the former Yugoslavia called “Yugo-nostalgia”. Several years ago a variety of publications emerged covering this new form of nostalgia This type of nostalgia also has its own forms of museumification
In Russia postsoviet nostalgia exists too and plays important role in ideological discussions, cultural life, media and commemorations. I am interested in the research of mediatiazed and material forms of nostalgia by late soviet period in the contemporary Russia. During last ten years I study how these nostalgic mood becomes part of mediatisation, commodification and museums’ commemoration. My research includes three parts: 1) participant observation exhibitions, museums and flea markets that specialization is late soviet period1 This part of research is based on an empirical study into how the Soviet is represented in Russian museums, including aspects of the commodification and nostalgia of this era. 2) interviews with experts (organisers of museums and exhibitions) During the research, fifteen interviews were conducted with employees and organizers of exhibitions in public and private museums on the topic of the Soviet period. 3) discourse analysis thematic blogs and media resourses about late soviet period. The research panel included eighteen "nostalgic" LJ communities2 and several individual blogs, where the memory of the Soviet has become an
1 Famous examples of the folk museumsification of the USSR are the Museum of Soviet Arcade Machines in Moscow, (opened 2009 at Baumanskaya metro station), the Museum of Socialist Life in Kazan, (opened in 2011 in a former communal apartment), the Museum of the Life of Soviet Scientists in Moscow (opened 2010-2011 at the Metro station of Shchukino), the Museum of the USSR at VDNH (opened 2012-2014 in the VDNKh Exhibition Centre), the Museum of Industrial Culture in Moscow (opened 2010 at the Kuzminki metro station), The Art Commune (opened 2011 in Kolomna, Moscow region), the Musuem of Soviet Life (opened in 2010-11 in Voronezh), the Museum of the USSR (2009 in Novosibirsk), the Museum “The Flat of the Time ” (2015-2016, Moscow, Arbat street), the Museum of the Soviet era (2017, St. Petersburg) and, finally, in a more professional form, the Moscow Design Museum in the Moscow Manege, which opened exhibitions on Soviet design and Soviet packaging styles from 1950-1980. 2 62_69, 76_82, back_in_ussr, born_in_ussr, cccp_foto, cherdak_ussr, gdr_ddr, nashe_detstvo, ru_1950s, ru_60th, ru_museum70, soviet_art, soviet_id, soviet_life, staraya_dacha, su_foto, ussr_best, ussr_toys
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important topic of discussion3. Self-description of the studied communities helps to understand why they are identified by us as a "nostalgic" in nature.
The idea of my research is show how postsoviet nostalgia appears itselfes in media and material culture.
Selected bibliography Assmann J. and Czaplicka J. Collective Memory and Cultural Identity / / New German critique, No. 65, 1995, pp. 125-133 Balazs F. The apotheosis of Janos Kadar-On the glorifying gesture of nostalgic memory. In N / Osztalgia-Ways of revisiting the socialist past, ed. I. Willinger. Budapest: Anthropolis, 2007, 5-9. Bancroft C. Yugonostalgia: The Pain of the Present / ISP Collection, Paper 787, #1, 2009, http://digitalcollections.sit.edu/isp_collection/787. Berdahl D.'(N) Ostalgie' for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things//Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology in 1999, 64.1pp.192-211. Betts P. Remembrance of Things Past: Nostalgia in West and East Germany, 1980- 2000.Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History. Ed.Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003, pp.178-207. Boym S. From the Russian Soul to Post-Communist Nostalgia // Representations, No. 49, 1995, pp. 133-166; Boym S. The end of nostalgia? Arts and cultural memory of the end of the century: the case of Ilya Kabakov // New Literary Review, 1999. Number 39. Boym S. The future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2002 Cook R.F. Good Bye, Lenin!: Free-Market Nostalgia for Socialist Consumerism //A Journal of Germanic Studies. 2007. #2. P.206-219. Creighton M.R. Anthropology of Nostalgia / International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. 2001. P.10744-10746. Cross G. Consumed Capitalism: Memory in the age of fast capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Davis F. Yearning for yesterday: a sociology of Nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. Eckman J. and Linde J. Communist Nostalgia in Central and Eastern Europe: A Matter of Principles or Performance? Conference paper, Nordic Political Science Association's Annual Meeting, Aalborg, Denmark, August 15-17, 2002. Halbwachs M. Reconstruction of the Past / M. Halbwachs Social frameworks of memory. M.: New publishing house, 2007. Hookway N 'Entering the blogosphere': some strategies for using blogs in social research//Qualitative Research, 2008, vol. 8 (1), p.91-113 Kalinina Е. Mediated post-soviet nostalgia. Stockholm: Södertörns högskola, 2014. Martin B. Club Cola and Co.: Ostalgie, Material Culture and Identity. Transformations of the New Germany. Ed. Ruth A. Starkman. New York: Palgrave, 2006. Museums and Memory. Ed. By Susan A. Crane. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
3 http://allan999.livejournal.com/, http://germanych.livejournal.com/, http://zina- korzina.livejournal.com/, http://aquatek-filips.livejournal.com/, http://untercug.livejournal.com/
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Nikolayenko O. Contextual effects on historical memory: Soviet nostalgia among post-Soviet adolescents // Communist and Post-Communist Studies,2008, №41, p.243-259. Post-communist nostalgia/edited by M. Todorova and Z. Gille. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. Sedikides C., Wildschut T., Arndt J. and Routledge C. Nostalgia: past, present, and future//Current Directions in Psychological Science, No. 17, 2008, 304-307 Silke A., Mediating memory in the museum: trauma, empathy, nostalgia, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Tannock S. Nostalgia Critique//Cultural Studies, No. 9, 1995, pp. 453-464 Twenty Years After Communism. The Politics of Memory and Commemoration, Edited by Michael Bernhard and Jan Kubik (eds), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Velikonja M. Lost in Transition: Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-socialist Countries // East European Politics and Societies, 2009, Volume 23 Number 4, p.535-551. Velikonja M. Titostalgia – A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Bros. Ljubljana: Mirovni Institut, 2008. Velikonja Mitja, “Lost in Transition: Nostalgia for Socialism in Post-socialist Countries,” East European Politics and Societies 4 (2009):535-551. Wertsch J. Texts of Memory and Texts of History// L2 Journal 4 (2012): 9-20. Wilson J. Nostalgia: A Sanctuary of Meaning. Bucknell University Press, 2005. Witheford N., de Peuter G., Games of Empire. Global Capitalism and Video Games. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Zerubavel E. Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003
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Yura, we are sorry: Internet memes as a means of remediating post-Soviet nostalgia
Mykola Makhortykh
Amsterdam School for Communication Research, Netherlands
The paper examines how Russian-language digital communities express and interpret nostalgic feelings about the Soviet past through internet memes. A number of studies (Morenkova, 2012; Kalkina 2013; Kalinina & Menke 2016) point out the importance of digital media for (re)mediating post-Soviet nostalgia in Russophone communities; however, until now the role of internet memes in this process remains under- investigated. Defined by Shifman (2014) as groups of digital content units, which share common features (e.g. content or form), internet memes constitute an integral element of post-socialist digital cultures, being used not only for humorous purposes, but also for expressing cultural and political identities. In the latter case, internet memes often draw upon collective memories of the Soviet time (Makhortykh, 2015; Laineste & Voolaid, 2016), thus becoming a potent means of remediation of the past as well as nostalgic feelings attached to it. In order to examine how internet memes are used for mediating post-Soviet nostalgia, the paper focuses on use of internet memes related to Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut and the first human to journey into outer space. Specifically, the paper scrutinizes the use of two Russophone Gagarin-related memes - Yura, we are sorry and Hello, descendants - which gained significant popularity in the 2000s and were re-discovered after the beginning of the Ukraine crisis in 2014. Using close reading, it explores how both memes are represented on entertainment-focused digital platforms (e.g. Iaplakal and Pikabu) and asks which aspects of the past are addressed and emphasized by the memes to communicate nostalgic feelings about the Soviet time. Following the examination of memes, the paper employs quantitative content analysis to investigate how the memes are received and interpreted by Russophone web users; for this purpose, it explores user comments to trace the ways in which the memes are used to express nostalgic feelings about the past and/or comment on the present political and economic situation.
Bibliography Kalinina, E. and Menke. M. (2016). Negotiating the past in hyperconnected memory cultures: Post-Soviet nostalgia and national identity in Russian online communities. International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, 12 (1), 59-74 Kalkina, V. (2013). Soviet memory on the Internet: Online visual archives of the Soviet past. New Zealand Slavonic Journal, 47,103-124, Laineste, L. and Voolaid, P. (2016). Laughing across borders: Intertextuality of Internet memes. The European Journal of Humour Research, 4 (4), 26-49. Makhortykh, M. (2015). Everything for the lulz: Historical memes and World War II memory on Lurkomor’e. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 13, 63-90. Morenkova, E. (2012). (Re)creating the Soviet past in Russian digital communities: Between memory and mythmaking. Digital Icons: Studies in Russian, Eurasian and Central European New Media, 7, 39-66. Shifman, L. (2014). Memes in Digital Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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“Mapping “Displaced Nostalgia” in Romania: the Past in the Representation of Generations Born After 1989
Alexandra Bardan & Natalia Vasilendiuc
University of Bucharest, Romania
Our presentation aims to explore the issue of nostalgia among generations born after 1989. The concept of "displaced nostalgia" has been advanced by researcher Janelle Wilson (2005) to integrate somewhat unexpected results of a survey conducted in the United States on a sample of 225 students aged 18-24. Asking what time they would choose, if they had the opportunity to travel in time, 76% of the respondents chose the past, more precisely the years of their parents' youth. "Displaced nostalgia," considers Wilson, is a nostalgia that is not based on direct experience. From the same conceptual family are also notions such as “imagined nostalgia”, “armchair nostalgia” (Appadurai, 1996), and “exo-nostalgia” (Berliner, 2014). In 2016-2018, we reproduced locally Janelle Wilson’s experimental survey and identified the concept of "displaced nostalgia" among almost 500 Romanian respondents in relation to two historical periods: the 1920s and the Communist period. Our content analysis determined that the Romanian generation of young people born after 1989 chose those two periods to find out what happened at that time (the past as event), to change the past (the past in present) and because past fascinated them by culture, art, or way of life (the charming past). In order to understand why the respondents have chosen various events from the 1920s and the Communist period, we decided to correlate their choices by analysing the contents of the Romanian history books showing those two periods. A key question we intend to explore focuses on the mediation of history by textbooks and the representations they convey. As for the method, we will carry a content analysis on history books printed over the past ten years in Romania.
Key words Surveys, collective memory, displaced nostalgia, history textbooks
Bibliography Appadurai, A. (1996). Modernity Al Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berliner, D. (2014). “Are Anthropologists Nostalgist?”. In O. Angé, D. Berliner (Ed.), Anthropology And Nostalgia. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Wilson, J. L. (2005). Nostalgia: A Sanctuary of Meaning. Bucknell University Press
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A Strange Kind of Cinephilia built by Video on Demand Services: Yearning For What Exactly?
Martin Bonnard
Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
Cinephile subscription video-on-demand services (Mubi, Fandor, La Cinetek, etc.) participate to what Francesco Casetti (2015) calls the relocation of cinema, its ability to (re)integrate experiences situated at its borders. Offering unlimited viewing of vast movie selections in exchange for a monthly fee, these services tend to advertise their subscriptions by making references to the canonic way of watching movies, in front of a white screen absorbed by the darkness of a commercial theatre. My aim is to study the yearning for a different way to relate with films, and its use as a commercial and sociocultural motivation to build hype and reinforce the subscribers’ sense of community. The use of old references to explain and advertise new experiences pertains not only to a reshaping of old media (Bolter & Grusin, 1999), or a repackaging of cultural content (Acland, 2007) but also to a familiarization of the new cultural offer through association with common practices. Based on an analysis of the cinephile recommendations and news produced by these services and the editorial content aggregated around the movies, I will describe the cinephilic mood deployed and put it in perspective with the different characterizations and studies of the ways people express their liking of cinema (Balcerzak & Sperb, 2012; Elsaesser, 2005; Jullier & Leveratto, 2010).
Each service has its own preferred vista, but they all tend to mix different recipes and rituals to portray the best attitude to adopt before each particular movie : a kind of distant reading for a cult classic (Jancovich, 2002; Shambu, 2014), the right attitude between high- and lowbrow required to appreciate a certain genre (Herbert, 2011; Valck & Hagener, 2005), even (and this is somewhat a paradox) the material qualities (along with a longing for the analogue esthetic (Schrey, 2014)) of the movie presented as a digital copy.
This eclecticism is inspired by new forms of cinephilia that mix viewing pleasure with nostalgia for ‘old’, more direct modes of engagement with cinema. As I will argue, this longing points in the direction of an imaginary cinephile culture. A cinephilia that never existed, not so much given the advent of the digital, but because of the continuous remodeling of the phenomenon and how it was described by scholarly and other works. Following this constant exploration of the right distance to film (Daney, 2001), I will also explore the relation of the two concepts (cinephilia and nostalgia) on a more theoretical basis.
My methodology is based on a thematic content analysis (Paillé & Mucchielli, 2012) of the paratexts produced by a selection of three video on demand services (Mubi, Fandor, La Cinetek) from North America and Europe.
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Bibliography Acland, C. R. (Ed.) (2007). Residual media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Balcerzak, S., & Sperb, J. (2012). Cinephilia in the age of digital reproduction. London /New York: Wallflower Press. Bolter, J. D., & Grusin, R. A. (1999). Remediation : understanding new media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Casetti, F. (2015). The Lumière galaxy : seven key words for the cinema to come. New York: Columbia University Press. Daney, S. (2001). Fonction critique (I-IV) [Cahiers du cinéma, 1974]. In A. d. Baecque (Ed.), Critique et cinéphilie. Petite anthologie des Cahiers du cinéma (VI) (pp. 254 p.). Paris: Cahiers du cinéma. Elsaesser, T. (2005). Cinephilia, or the uses of disenchantment. In M. De Valck & M. Hagener (Eds.), Cinephilia: Movies, Love And Memory (pp. 27–44). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Herbert, D. (2011). From art house to your house: The distribution of quality cinema on home video. Canadian Journal of film Studies, 20(2), 2-18. Jancovich, M. (2002). Cult fictions: Cult movies, subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinctions. Cultural Studies, 16(2), 306-322. doi:10.1080/09502380110107607 Jullier, L., & Leveratto, J.-M. (2010). Cinéphiles et cinéphilies : une histoire de la qualité cinématographique. Paris: Armand Colin. Paillé, P., & Mucchielli, A. (2012). L’analyse thématique. In L'analyse qualitative en sciences humaines et sociales (pp. 231-314). Paris: Armand Colin. Schrey, D. (2014). Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation. In K. Niemeyer (Ed.), Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future (pp. 27-38). New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Shambu, G. (2014). The new cinephilia. Montréal: Caboose. Valck, M. d., & Hagener, M. (2005). Cinephilia : movies, love and memory. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
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In search of the time and the space: nostalgia and utopia in Westworld
Ana P. G. Ribeiro1 & Bruno Souza Leal2
1Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
We propose to reflect on the articulation between past and future, having as a connecting element the ideas of nostalgia and utopia. For this, we will review the Westworld, an American television series broadcast on HBO. We understand that it materializes a peculiar articulation between these two terms (nostalgia and utopia), whose implications we will seek to delineate. Constructed in distinct temporal planes, the series presents robots and humans seeking to situate themselves in a story and in an industrial and impersonal scenario. In this context, memory allows them to give meaning to the past and is a fundamental condition for the acquisition of consciousness, production of autonomy and, consequently, opening to the future. Westworld can be considered as a sign of the tensions that mark the experience of memory today and, by extension, of the West's own temporal experience.
Some authors believe that nostalgia, as well as other forms of the culture of memory, is related to the so-called "identity crisis". In a scenario characterized by more fragile and temporary social and affective ties, by disbelief in the great narratives that explain the world and in transformative political projects, the desire for the past would express the collapse of our capacity for projection, our difficulty imagining "possible futures". Others also believe that our visions of the past and of the future are both colonized by the present. In this perspective, the past can not be experienced through memory, except as a fast consumption object, as a fragmented and spectacular construct. The future, in turn, would cease to be a promise (the time of projects, hope and expectation) and would come to be perceived as a threat (the time of catastrophes and fear).
When we think about science fiction audiovisual products, this is a tempting key to reading it. Much has been said of dystopian narratives, which express our discomfort with the present and offer a negative and threatening vision of the future. Successful series, such as Black Mirror, seem to point in this direction. We believe, however, that contemporary nostalgia, even when associated with science fiction, such as Westworld, expresses more than the bankruptcy of the future and can not be explained only by a regime of historicity marked by presentism. We argue that nostalgia may also have an utopian dimension, as it expresses a "desire for the future," in the same way that it provides experience of others temporalities, less instantaneous and less dominated by an overwhelming present.
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Bibliography BAUMAN, Sigmunt. Retrotopia. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2017. CANDAU, Joel. Memória e identidade. São Paulo: Contexto, 2011. CROSS, Gary. Consumed nostalgia: memory in the age of fast capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. DAVIS, Fred. Yearning for yesterday: a sociology of nostalgia. New York: Free Press, 1979. HARTOG, François. Regimes de historicidade: presentismo e experiência do tempo. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2013. HUYSSEN, Andreas. Políticas da Memória no Nosso Tempo. Lisboa: Universidade Católica Editora, 2014. JAMESON, Fredric. “Nostagia for the presente”. In. Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991. NIEMEYER, Katharina. Media and Nostalgia: yearning for the past, presente and future. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. SPRENGLER, Christine. Screening nostalgia: Populux Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. Londres: Berghahn Books, 2011. WILLIAMS, Raymond. Utopia and Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies, 16, v.5, parte 3, novembro de 1978.
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Nostalgia in TV Series
Antonella Mascio
University of Bologna, Italy
Nostalgia is a complex mood, able to activate starting from specific and well-defined signs anchored in the past, as well as from situations, smells, ways of doing working as a time simulacrum that no longer exists. Its evocative (and melancholic) and - at the same time - projective (and sometimes optimistic) power, is increasingly used in media productions (Loock 2017; Tsapovsky and Frosh 2015; Garner 2016). In this proposal we will deal particularly with some recent TV series where nostalgic aspects seems to prevail. Mad Men (AMC, 2007 - 2015), The Americans (FX, 2013 - ), Stranger Things (Netflix, 2016 -) and also 13 Reasons Why (Netflix, 2017 -) tell in several ways stories that designate nostalgia as an important point of reference. These narratives address a past which is represented and staged, through such dynamics and production aspects affecting the emotional effects caused in the audience. These are texts whose stylistic features must be included in Jason Mittell’s (2015) "complex" television production: something capable of enclosing, in a single whole, many variations of seriality not granted by a traditional format. Several elements linked to nostalgia appear in those texts: in the details shown on the stage, and generally in a context which is formed by a kind of past constantly winking at the present. Our study will develop in two directions: first, assuming the textual analysis of the series that make up our reference corpus. Each of them is concerned on nostalgia, but in a singular way, keeping historical periods more or less close, anchoring the idea of the past to objects, clothes, relational dynamics, but also to musical pieces, events, characters referring to specific “cultural biographies” (Kopitoff 1986). Objects and contexts speak about the taste regimes too. They are used in the television representations as precise nostalgic interpretations concernig sedimented meanings over time, used both retrospectively and with an eye towards the present and the future (Appadurai 1996). The narration focuses on settings and details deposited in the collective memory, calling into question tropes and shared cultural figures. Nostalgia is therefore used in a creative way, adding to the text a series of enhancements affecting the discourses of the audience. The second part of our analysis takes into account some online environments inhabited by the audiences. Starting from forums, to Facebook and Instagram pages, various are the spaces where the audiences expresses their affection to the TV series and the nostalgic aspects there existing. These environments are observed through ethnographic techniques and analyzed with qualitative methodologies (Hine 2015). Television narratives in many cases determine a feeling of nostalgia working as a mechanism to talk about themselves and to reaffirm their sense of belonging to a generation, real or imaginary community (Boym 2001). In this context, nostalgic longing is often defined by the original object of desire, and by its spatial and temporal displacement. We are interested in investigating the way nostalgia passing through television narratives, affects the interpretations of personal stories, past and present of the audience. And how much the world represented on the screen compose a credible imaginary - or far - from reality.
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Bibliography Appadurai, A. (1996), Modernity at Large, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis – London. Boym, S. (2001), The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Book, New York. Garner, R. (2016), “‘It is Happening Again’: Paratextuality, ‘Quality’ and Nostalgia in Twin Peaks’s Dispersed Anniversary”, in Series, Volume 2, pp. 41-54 (online: https://series.unibo.it/article/view/6590). Hine, C. (2015), Ethnography for the Internet, Bloomsbury, London-New York. Kopytoff, I. ( 1986), “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process”, in A. Appadurai (Ed.) The Social Life of Things, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Loock, K. (2017), “American TV Series Revivals: Introduction”, in Television and New Media, Sage, pp. 1 – 11 (online: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1527476417742971). Mittell, J. (2015), Complex Tv. The Poetics od Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York University Press, New York. Tsapovsky, F., Frosh, P. (2015), “Television audiences and transnational nostalgia: Mad Men in Israel”, in Media, Culture & Society, vol. 37 (5), Sage, pp. 784-799 (online: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0163443715587872).
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Still Blissing Out: It, Stranger Things, and the Politics of Trumpian Entertainment
Greg Burris
American University of Beirut, Lebanon
If the 1950s were a frequent source of inspiration for the producers of cultural texts like Indiana Jones and Back to the Future, recent years have witnessed a similar tendency by a new generation of artists who have likewise turned to the time of their childhood in creating film and television products: the 1980s. While the earlier texts had nostalgically embraced the 1950s as a way of forgetting the political turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., the peace movement, Black power, second-wave feminism), newer cultural texts replicate this same gesture, and the political developments of the last three decades (e.g., anti-globalization, the “War on Terror,” Occupy Wall Street, #BlackLivesMatter) are conveniently erased. In this way, the current wave of 80s nostalgia conceals a reactionary politics underneath a façade of political innocence. Building upon Andrew Britton’s 1987 essay “Blissing Out,” I turn specifically to two popular texts—It and Stranger Things—and argue that both deploy nostalgia in order to “make America great again.” Thus, while we may have left the Reaganite 1980s, in the era of Trump, we are still blissing out.
Bibliography 1. Andrew Britton, “Blissing Out: The Politics of Reaganite Entertainment,” in Britton on Film: The Complete Film Criticism of Andrew Britton, edited by Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2009), pp. 97-154. 2. Regina Hansen, “Stephen King’s It and Dreamcatcher on Screen: Hegemonic White Masculinity and Nostalgia for Underdog Boyhood,” Science Fiction Film and Television 10.2 (2017), pp. 161-76. 3. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University, 1991). 4. Tracey Mollet, “Looking Through the Upside Down: Hyperpostmodernism and Trans-mediality in the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things Series,” Journal of Popular Television 6.1 (2018), forthcoming. 5. Jeffrey T. Nealon, “Periodizing the 80s: The Cultural Logic of Economic Privatization in the United States,” in A Leftist Ontology: Beyond Relativism and Identity Politics, edited by Carsten Strathausen (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), pp. 54-79. 6. Cedric J. Robinson, “Indiana Jones, the Third World and American Foreign Policy: A Review Article,” Race and Class 26.2 (1984), pp. 83-92. 7. Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in American Nightmare: Essays on the Horror Film, edited by Andrew Britton, et. al. (Toronto: Festival of Festivals, 1979), pp. 7-28.
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“Analogue Renaissance”: Strategies of Technostalgia with Kodak’s new Super 8 film camera
Tim van der Heijden
University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
“There are some moments that digital just can’t deliver, because it doesn’t have the incomparable depth and beauty of film. These moments inspired Kodak to design a new generation of film cameras.” Along with this mission statement, Kodak announced the making of a new Super 8 film camera at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January 2016. The announcement preceded the re-release of various other “retro” and “vintage” products in the following years, including Kodak’s iconic Ektachrome film stock. This paper critically investigates Kodak’s so-called “Analogue Renaissance”, the return of these analogue amateur film technologies that used to be widely popular among amateur film and home moviemakers in the 1970s. The re-releases not only fostered the imagination of numerous hobbyists around the world who were familiar with analogue filmmaking already, but also a new generation of users interested in film’s analogue aesthetic and material qualities. The paper analyses Kodak’s cross-generational attempt to remediate, revive and re- imagine the Super 8 film camera as a past media technology in particular. Drawing on the concept of “technostalgia”, the reminiscence of past media technologies in contemporary memory practices, it aims to further build on previous attempts to theorize the dynamic relations between the past and the present, the analogue and the digital, and the archival and the performative. While Kodak has been strategically framing the new Super 8 film camera under the label of the “Analogue Renaissance”, it will be shown that it not limits itself to remediating the design and analogue functionality of the device’s idiosyncratic equivalent. On the contrary, remarkably enough, the new Super 8 camera comes with several additional digital features, such as the recording of digital sound and a LCD display. The paper argues that this merging of the film camera’s original analogue features with digital ones makes Kodak’s new film camera a fundamental “hybrid” media technology, whose manufacturer’s attempt to update it to the present day by adding digital features entails more than just a way of enhancing user possibilities and experiences. While Kodak advertises its new device with a statement that aims to exaggerate the impossibilities of the digital, it will be argued that Kodak’s new Super 8 film camera requires a theoretical thinking that moves beyond the analogue-digital divide as well as previous conceptualizations of (tech)nostalgia.
Bibliography Bolter, J.D. & Grusin, R.A. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: MIT Press. Campopiano, J. (2014) “Memory, Temporality, & Manifestations of our Tech- nostalgia”, Preservation, Digital Technology & Culture, Vol. 43, No. 3, pp.75- 85. Eastman Kodak Company (2018), “Kodak Super 8 Camera: Designed for Creating”. Retrieved via: https://www.kodak.com/gb/en/Consumer/Products/Super8/Super8- camera/default.htm.
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Gómez, E. & J. Sanin (2017), “Analogue Renaissance: Remediation of the Photographic Field”. RMIT. Natale, S. (2016) “There Are No Old Media”. Journal of Communication, 66 (4), pp.585-603. Niemeyer, K. (ed.) (2014) Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Reynolds, S. (2011) Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past. London: Faber and Faber. Schrey, D. (2014) “Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation. In: Niemeyer K. (ed.) Media and Nostalgia: Yearning for the Past, Present and Future. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.27-38. Van der Heijden, T. (2015) ‘Technostalgia of the Present: From Technologies of Memory to a Memory of Technologies’. In: NECSUS. European Journal of Media Studies, 4(2), pp.103-121. --- (2018) Hybrid Histories: Technologies of Memory and the Cultural Dynamics of Home Movies, 1895–2005. PhD thesis. Maastricht: Maastricht University.
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The Color of Nostalgia : Kodachrome after the digital-turn
André Habib
Université de Montréal, Canada
In his famous 1973 song Kodachrome, Paul Simon sang: « Kodachrome / They give us those nice bright colors / They give us the greens of summers / Makes you think all the world's a sunny day ». The first title the singer had come up with for this song (but had rejected, finding it too conventional) was: Going home. How can one explain this synonymy between « going home » (so dear to the singer of Homeward bound) and Kodachrome, a film stock commercialised by Kodak in 1935 (although patented in 1915), but that aquired a cult status in 1965, with the launch of the super8 format? What is the feeeling of familiarity it embodies and that seems to induce the poignant pulsion of an impossible return, a tension between rooting and uprooting, so central to Barbara Cassin’s conception of nostalgia? Reversable film stock known for its vivacious and saturated colors, it represents the idea of amateur filmmaking and photography (although Kodachrome provides the colors of a variety of other events, from the Battle of Midway in 1942, shot by John Ford’s film crew, Kennedy’s assasination filmed by Abraham Zapruder, the films of Jean Rouch or the NFB, etc.). As we know, the production of this specific film stock was discontinued in 2009, a couple of years before the company would file for bankruptcy (in 2013). The paradox is that, after having discontinued Kodachrome (and Ektachrome, another reversal color film stock, in 2012), the company launched in 2016 a selfproclaimed « Analog Renaissance » campaign, with new so-called « Real film » apps, the promise of a new Super8 camera, the return of Ektachrome fro 2018, new film labs, and a new magazine devoted to « analog culture » called « Kodachrome », seeming to surf on what Laura Marks, in a completely different context, discribed as « analog nostalgia ». This paper wishes to interrogate the specific form of nostalgia elicited by Kodachrome in our digital age. I wish to bring into discussion various works that mobilise or mediatize this affect: the musical and filmic piece American color (2011) by Joshua Bonnetta, So Leben Wir (2017) by Gustav Deutsch and the DVD In Memoria : Kodachrome by Jürgen Lossau and Heiko Riemann.
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“Haters Gonna Hate”: Nostalgia in Popular Music
Claire Coleman
University of Western Sydney, Australia
One of the issues with which contemporary nostalgia researchers must grapple is the frequent dismissal and misunderstanding of nostalgia by scholars of other disciplines, as well as by the mass media. Numerous cultural scholars have disregarded or disparaged nostalgia, describing it as “false consciousness” (Raphael Samuel, 1994, p. 17); a symptom of a world devoid of “stylistic innovation” that can do little more than “imitate dead styles” (Frederic Jameson, 1998, p. 7); or the triumph of “replica” over “reality” (David Lowenthal, 2014, p. 109). This disdain for nostalgia is echoed in the mass media, where nostalgia can be blamed for almost anything, ranging from personal self-esteem woes (Shannon Zuber, 2014), to bad Netflix reboots of old TV hit series (Laura Williams, 2018), to the popularity of President Trump (Danielle Kurtzleben, 2018). The vilification of nostalgia can be particularly extreme in popular music criticism, where nostalgia is often held culpable for a perceived crisis of innovation in popular music of the new millennium. Music critic Simon Reynolds, for example, devotes an entire book to what he calls the “‘Re’ decade” of “revivals, reissues, remakes, reenactments [and e]ndless retrospection” (Simon Reynolds, 2011, p. xi). These frequent mischaracterisations of nostalgia confuse catalyst and symptom, holding nostalgia responsible for retrogressive cultural tendencies it may merely represent.
This paper will refute the position that nostalgia in popular music is inherently regressive by highlighting examples of music from the indie folk genre that can be categorised as both nostalgic and innovative. Using methods based in multimodal discourse analysis (Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen, 2010), the indie folk songs will be examined as primary texts whose “communicational ensemble” (Ibid.) can indicate the cultural and conventional tendencies of both the genre and its subcultural actors. Examples of nostalgic ideologies, timbres, themes and vocal deliveries will be shown to be present in indie folk, alongside innovative uses of digital technologies, progressive gender politics, and irreverent approaches to the genre’s conventions. This paper will suggest, via its analyses, that nostalgia may be deployed in indie folk as a nuanced expressive device that is part of a dynamic and evolving genre, rather than manifesting a conservative communicational apparatus.
Selected Bibliography Edwards, Sarah and Juliette Wilson (2014) “Do we do the past differently now? An interview with David Lowenthal.” Consumption Markets and Culture 17:2, 105 – 119. Jameson, Frederic (1998) The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern. London, New York: Verso. Kress, Gunther and Theo Van Leeuwen (2010) Multimodal Discourse, 2nd edition. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Kurtzleben, Danielle (2018) “Trade Is An Identity Issue, and Trump Knows It,” NPR, current affairs website, March 10.
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https://www.npr.org/2018/03/10/592450875/trade-is-an-identity-issue-and- trump-knows-it Radstone, Susannah (2007) The Sexual Politics of Time: Confession, Nostalgia, Memory. London, New York: Routledge. Reynolds, Simon (2011) Retromania. New York: Faber and Faber. Samuel, Raphael (1994) Theatres of Memory Vol. I: Past and Present In Contemporary Culture. London, New York: Verson. Williams, Laura (2018) “Nostalgia sucks! Why TV needs to stop living in the past,” The Guardian, news website, February 19. https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and- radio/2018/feb/19/everything-sucks-nostalgia-tv-gilmore-girls-full-house-netflix- friends-mad-men Zuber, Shannon (2014) “The Problem With Nostalgia: Why We Need To Stop Playing The ‘I Used To Be’ Game,” Elite Daily, online magazine, November 18. https://www.elitedaily.com/life/need-stop-playing-used-game/848078
Selected Discography Bon Iver (2007) For Emma, Forever Ago, Indiana: Jagjaguwar, compact disc. Joanna Newsom (2006) Ys, Illinois: Drag City, compact disc. Sufjan Stevens (2015) Carrie and Lowell, Wyoming: Asthmatic Kitty, compact disc.
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Analog and retro aesthetics in the digital era of music videos and the role of nostalgia.
Irene Martinez Luna
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Analog aesthetics characteristics (light leaks, grain, dust, etc.) that were once considered disadvantages are now appreciated among media audiences, and there is a feeling of nostalgia for the times when technology was more human and material. The overuse of the analog and retro aesthetics might have become mainstream in regard to how easily they can be simulated (i.e. Instagram filters), and how common it is to find them in media products. Nevertheless, these aesthetics still serve as a powerful tool to re-evaluate concepts related to past and present, and cultural concerns, among others. Moreover, its visual, nostalgia-evoking appeal alone is enough reason to be used in digital recorded images.
The paper investigates the significance of the recent trend of using analog and retro aesthetics in today’s media products, specifically in music videos, in a contemporary context where digital high definition technology is the norm. The viewer experience of the feeling of nostalgia often associated with the analog and retro aesthetics is examined in depth. The paper argues that the use of analog and retro aesthetics and the associated nostalgia this evokes in the spectator can position and distinguish a music video in the market towards potential audiences.
By using a theoretical analytical approach, the research proposes answers to the primary research question: What are the meanings and purposes of using analog and retro aesthetics in contemporary music videos and in which way are they related to nostalgia? Subsequent questions arising from the research explore the differences in the use of analog and retro aesthetics by mainstream or alternative bands. Specifically, a distinction is made between the use of the aesthetic merely to follow a trend as opposed to using the aesthetic to emphasizing the message behind the music video. In the process of answering these questions, several concepts of aesthetics, media, marketing, audiences, heritage, identity and digital vs. analog medium are reviewed.
The first part of the research is centered on the theoretical framework. The different literature reviewed serves to build a theoretical background in order to explain, and connect the research question with the bases of music video analysis, position in the attention market, significance of the use of retro aesthetics, differences between the analog and the digital medium, and the functions of nostalgia.
The second part of the research consists in the analysis of six music videos that serve as examples to the different uses and expressions of analog and retro aesthetics. The videos are analyzed with a focus on aesthetics and visual elements. The analysis points at what type of analog aesthetics are visible in the video, when and how often do they appear and how they suggest nostalgia. The artist’s image, music genre and
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type of audience are also analyzed in order to find out how the music video is positioning the artist within the market. The third part of the research consists in a discussion of the several connections existing among the different music videos analyzed, pointing at the theory findings to give significance to the different uses and purposes of the analog and retro aesthetics. Key words: Nostalgia, analog, digital, retro, aesthetics, media, music videos, film, identity, super 8, identity, audience, attention market, alternative culture.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bolter, J. D. & Grusin, R. (2000). Remediation. Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press. Bourriaud, N. (2009). Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Rancie re on Art and Politics. Open! Retrieved from, http://www.onlineopen.org/precarious- constructions, 22/04/17. Boym, S. (2002). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Brown, S. (2011). Marketing: The Retro Revolution. London: Sage Publications. Buljubašić, E. (2016). Longing Is Belonging: Nostalgia and Identity in Croatian Popular (Heritage) Music. The International Journal of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, vol. 11,issue 1., p. 1-13. Croatia: University of Split. Connolly, J. & Evans, K. (2014). Cracking Ray Tubes: Reanimating Analog Video in a Digital Context. Leonardo Music Journal, vol. 24., p. 53-56. Doane, M. A. (2007). The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity. Differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 18, (1), p. 128–152. Fetveit, A. (2013). Medium-Specific Noise. In Liv Hausken (ed.). Thinking Media Aesthetics: Media Studies, Film Studies and the Arts, p. 189-215. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Fetveit, A. (2015). Death, beauty, and iconoclastic nostalgia: Precarious aesthetics and Lana Del Rey. Necsus. European Journal of Media Studies. Retrieved from http://www.necsus-ejms.org/death-beauty-and-iconoclastic-nostalgia-precarious- aesthetics-and-lana-del-rey/, 10/03/17. Foster, H. (2009). Precarious. Mutual Art. Retrieved from http://www.mutualart.com/OpenArticle/Precarious/D501E50ED64C6AE0, 12/04/17. Goodwin, A. (1992). Dancing In The Distraction Factory: Music Television and Popular Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hogarty J. (2017). Popular Music and Retro Culture in the Digital Era. New York: Routledge. Højbjerg, L. (2011). Filmstil: teori og analyse. Samfundslitteratur. Jirsa, T. (2015). Ascension of the Pop Icon: The Creativity of Kitsch (Not Only) in a Music Video by Lana Del Rey. Moravian Journal of Literature and Film, vol. 6, no. 1., p.5-28. Czech Republic: University in Prague. 14/03/18 Irene Martinez Luna 4 Marks, L. U. (2002). Touch. Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. McIntosh, C. (2013). “Retro”. In Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (4th edition). Retrieved from http://dictionary.cambridge.org/es/diccionario/ingles/retro, 13/05/2017. Niemeyer, K. (Ed.) ( 2014). Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future. Paris: Palgrave MacMillan.
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Richardson, J., Gorbman, C., & Vernallis, C. (Eds.) (2013). The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robnik, D. (2005). Mass Memories of Movies. Cinephilia as Norm and Narrative in Blockbuster Culture, in M. de Valck and M. Hagener (eds.) Cinephilia. Movies, Love and Memory, p. 55–64. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Schrey, D. (2014). Analogue Nostalgia and the Aesthetics of Digital Remediation. Media and Nostalgia. In Katharina Niemeyer (ed.), Yearning for the past, present and future, p. 27-38. Paris: Palgrave MacMillan. Smith, L. & Akagawa, N. (2009). Intangible Heritage. Taylor & Francis. Sprengler, C. (2009). Screening Nostalgia: Populuxe Props and Technicolor Aesthetics in Contemporary American Film. Berghan Books. Vernallis, C. (2004). Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. Chichester: Columbia University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (2010) Philosophical Investigations. John Wiley & Sons.
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Mediating Nostalgia in A/V Narratives of Historical News Events
Berber Hagedoorn
University of Groningen, Netherlands
Many hours of AV material have been digitised in the Netherlands since 2007. As a result, the access to radio, film, and television programmes from the past has increased immensely, offering more opportunities for re-use and research. In this process described as the archival turn (De Leeuw 2012), infrastructure and contextualisation function as important preconditions for users of archives to find their way through the enormous amounts of audio-visual material. Such users include television programme makers, media professionals and academic researchers (Hagedoorn & Agterberg 2016).
This study will function as a follow-up and continuation of my dissertation research into the audio-visual (archival) representation of the past in television and related cross-media practices, specifically practices of ‘doing history’ (Hagedoorn 2016). In this context, and the context of the forthcoming anniversary of 100 years of radio in 2019, a main emphasis will be placed on the particular case of radio as a historical object. Specifically, radio news events as represented in television narratives in the context of commemorations, anniversaries, and other forms of mediated and mediatized nostalgia (Pickering & Keightley 2006) in Dutch historical and informative programming.
To do so, from a cultural-historical perspective, I conduct a comparative and exploratory study into the cross-media, AV representation of historical news ‘events’ (Katz and Liebes 2007), particularly radio news events. Drawing upon the AV archival materials from various collections of the CLARIAH Media Suite (http://mediasuite.clariah.nl), I study the cross-media representation and historical narratives of news events, focusing on the representation of the medium radio, and it’s representative power, in televised narratives (factual programming). From the larger question how historical events and nostalgia narratives can provide context for interpretation of cultural heritage collections, this research study specially explores the biggest potential of DIVE+ (http://diveplus.beeldengeluid.nl – the Media Suite’s digital heritage browser), which lies in its focus on narratives.
DIVE is a tool for explorative search where narratives are central. DIVE offers exploratory search, and collections are interlinked and enriched with linked open data. Events are a central part of this data enrichment: giving context to objects in collections by linking them in events. My study draws upon the exploration of narratives, and compares narratives as tool for exploration (narrative centric approach) to other types of search (more traditional or document centric approaches). Based on the specific case of the AV representation of historical news events and following the research process in all stages, this study considers what the added value of DIVE’s narrative model is for researchers: what is a narrative (how to define a narrative (as a method for interpretation used by (cultural) historians) in terms of
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LOD and the ‘Simple Event Model’ (SEM) used by DIVE) ) and why narratives are important for media scholars in their research process – providing further insight into the roles of narratives in Digital Hermeneutics (the encounter of hermeneutics and web technology; Van den Akker et al 2011) and how events (and in what narrative form) help interpretation.
Such a combination of historical and digital humanities research can aid in providing specific interpretations of the vast amounts of newly digitalised materials in relation to mediated nostalgia and historical news events, as well as critically assessing how a digital event narrative exploration tool can support a researcher doing so, from beginning to end.
Bibliography (short overview) Boer, V. De, Oomen, J., Inel, O., Aroyo, L., Staveren, E. Van, Helmich, W., and De Beurs, D. (2015). DIVE into the Event-Based Browsing of Linked Historical Media. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web, 35(3), 152–158. Bron, M., Van Gorp, J., and De Rijke, M. (2015). Media Studies Research in the Data-Driven Age: How Research Questions Evolve. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 67(7), 1535–1554. Bourdon, J. and Hagedoorn, B. (Eds). (2013). European Television Memories [Special Issue]. VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture, 2(3). CLARIAH Media Suite http://mediasuite.clariah.nl Couldry, N., Hepp, A., and Krotz, F. (2009). Media events in a global age. London: Routledge. Dayan, D., and Katz, E. (1992). Media events: The live broadcasting of history. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. De Leeuw, S. (2012). European Television History Online: History and Challenges. VIEW Journal of European Television History and Culture, 1(1): 3–11. DIVE+ http://diveplus.beeldengeluid.nl Katz, E., and Liebes, T. (2007). 'No More Peace!': How Disaster, Terror and War Have Upstaged Media Events. International Journal of Communication 1, 157- 166. Hagedoorn, B. (2016a). Doing History, Creating Memory: Representing the past in documentary and archive-based television programmes within a multi-platform landscape (Doctoral dissertation). Faculty of Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. ISBN 978-90-393-6503-8. Hagedoorn, B. (2013a). Performing Cultural Memory: The Holocaust in Dutch Multi- Platform TV Documentary. in: Holocaust Intersections: Genocide and Visual Culture at the New Millennium. Eds. Axel Bangert, Robert S. C. Gordon and Libby Saxton. Legenda: Oxford, 148-168. Hagedoorn, B. (2013b). Television as a Hybrid Repertoire of Memory: New Dynamic Practices of Cultural Memory in the Multi-Platform Era. in: VIEW: Journal of European Television History and Culture, 2(3), 'European TV Memories', 52-64. Hagedoorn, B. and B. Agterberg. (2016b). The End of the Television Archive as We Know It? The National Archive as an Agent of Historical Knowledge in the Convergence Era. Media and Communication, 4 (3), 162-175. Hagedoorn, B. (2015). 'Towards a Participatory Memory: Multi-platform Storytelling in Historical Television Documentary.' in: Continuum: Journal of Media and
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Cultural Studies, 29 (4) 'New media, histories and memories', 579-592. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10304312.2015.1051804 Pickering, M. and Keightley, E. (2006). The Modalities of Nostalgia. Current Sociology 54.6, 919-941. doi: https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392106068458 Volkmer, I. (2006). News in Public Memory. An International Study of Media Memories across Generations. New York: Peter Lang.
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Evoking a shared past by enforcing nostalgia? On the role of media in nursing homes
Christa Lykke Christensen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Old people in Danish nursing homes are surrounded by media: radio and television are switched on in both private rooms and in common areas such as kitchens and living rooms; newspapers and magazines are scattered around the nursing home and both residents and staff use mobile phones, tablets and computers. Media both are used as tools to structure the everyday life and to create a homely atmosphere at the nursing home. Moreover, media are conducive to communication and social interaction among the old people, fx gathering in front of the TV-screen or showing each other pictures of family members on their tablets. The topic of this paper, however, is to study the use of media in nursing homes as a tool to promote wellbeing of the older people. Based on observational studies at Danish nursing homes the paper describes how media are integrated in everyday activities in shared spaces, and analyses who administer the use of media in common rooms and what the criteria are for using different media. Based on interviews with staff members/careworkers at the nursing homes, in particular, the study focuses on staff’s use of specific media content/media genres to evoke residents’ memories and to promote nostalgic feelings as a tool to create a shared past that residents communicate about and feel themselves empowered by.
The paper deals with mediated nostalgic feelings and, in line with Keightley and Pickering, it understands nostalgia in relation to experiences of loss and lack (Keightley & Pickering, 2012:117). Older people in nursing homes are people who have lost their own, private homes, and moved into a small apartment with only a few of their personal belongings. They often have lost their spouses, siblings, and friends. And they are people who have lost their good health and maybe are suffering from dementia. ‘Loss and lack’ are not only relevant to older people living at nursing homes, but also to the careworkers who want to help the residents to establish a meaningful life in new, strange and often unwanted surroundings. The main focus of the paper is the analysis of how careworkers use media to enforce nostalgia, regarded as an activating well-being strategy to the individual resident. On the basis of this analysis the paper discusses the creative potentials of mediated nostalgia, referring to both Dames, 2010, and Niemeyer, 2014.
Bibliography Dames, N. (2010). Nostalgia and its disciplines: A response. Memory Studies 3(3), 269-275. Keightley, E. & Pickering, M. (2012). The Mnemonic Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lull, J. (1990). Inside family viewing. London: Routledge. Niemeyer, K (2014). Media and nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
55 The role of nostalgia in care home design for people with dementia
Silvia Maria Gramegna & Alessandro Biamonti
Politecnico di Milano, Italy
Alzheimer’s disease (AD) represents the most common form of Dementia, responsible for cognitive, behavioural and physical impairments, which severely affect people’s ability to fulfil their daily activities. Research shows there is no current treatment that can stop AD from progressing. However, non-pharmacological interventions, supported by pharmacological ones, can temporarily slow the worsening of the symptoms and improve the quality of life for people with AD and their caregivers. Moreover supporting the development of a strong social cohesion, high levels of self-esteem, and a greater sense of meaning in life proved to be responsible for a decrease in the feeling that this illness represents an existential thread. Inside the framework of Non Pharmacological Therapies, research has shown that the environment can be an important support in caring for people with dementia, as it can lessen behavioural disturbances. Furthermore Reminiscence Therapy in care home design proved to be effective in providing reassurance and helping residents to feel more familiar with the environment they are living in, recreating a sense of “home” and fostering social connectedness. Nostalgia is defined as “a longing for things, persons or situations that are not present or a longing for a perceived utopian past”. Different authors underline that nostalgic daydream is strongly connected to significant life events, and recollection of specific environmental ambiances. Thus, it fosters positive mood and emotions, and recollects desirable features. Even though reminiscence and nostalgia are strongly related, there is one relevant distinctness: on one hand, reminiscing past events is connected with the act of “remembering” but can be dissociated from evoking any feeling; on the other hand nostalgia, and nostalgic remembrance is deeply associated with feelings, adding a sentimental component. As Batcho (1995) asserts: “One can remember without being nostalgic, but one cannot be nostalgic without remembering”. To recreate nostalgic feelings and memories has deep psychological implications for human beings. In fact, research has shown that an increased self-esteem and social cohesion and connectedness can be triggered by nostalgic memories. Applying this approach to dementia care may enable us to understand more about the psychological functions of forgetting, as well as reframing the use of the past to generate new methods of intervening on/in the interiors, suggesting a therapeutic use of nostalgia in the development of environmental solutions for dementia care units. Moreover, a wide variety of external stimuli, such as objects, smells, music, sounds, perfumes, images can trigger nostalgic recollection due to their affective intrinsic qualities. Consequently, this widens the horizon to different innovative ways of engaging with people with dementia. Thus, there are strong evidences that led us to consider nostalgia as the active component of therapeutic success in Reminiscence Therapy in care home design, an
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issue that we are exploring in an on-going study for a day care center for dementia in the periphery of Milan, hereby described in this a paper.
Bibliography Batcho, K. I. (1995). Nostalgia: A psychological perspective. Perceptual and motor skills, 80(1), 131-143. Capstick, A. (2010). Places in the heart: nostalgia, psychogeography and late-life dementia. Cheston, R., Christopher, G., & Ismail, S. (2015). Dementia as an existential threat: the importance of self-esteem, social connectedness and meaning in life. Science progress, 98(4), 416-419. Dempsey, L., Murphy, K., Cooney, A., Casey, D., O’Shea, E., Devane, D., ... & Hunter, A. (2014). Reminiscence in dementia: a concept analysis. Dementia, 13(2), 176-192. Merchant, A., & Ford, J. (2008). Nostalgia and giving to charity: A conceptual framework for discussion and research. International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing, 13(1), 13-30. Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: content, triggers, functions. Journal of personality and social psychology, 91(5), 975. Woods, B., Spector, A. E., Jones, C. A., Orrell, M., & Davies, S. P. (2005). Reminiscence therapy for dementia. The Cochrane Library. Yamagami, T., Oosawa, M., Ito, S., & Yamaguchi, H. (2007). Effect of activity reminiscence therapy as brain activating rehabilitation for elderly people with and without dementia. Psychogeriatrics, 7(2), 69-75.
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Nostalgia of the future - 10 000 postcards for 2042
Katharina Niemeyer & Magali Uhl
University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada
For the 375th anniversary of the city of Montreal the artistic association Comptoir Public created the project ‘les postes du futur’ (the mail of the future). During the summer of 2017 a van was transformed into a postal office and traveled around the city districts to collect the resident’s and sometimes tourist’s messages written on picture postcards created for the event by local artists; postcards that are to be sent to their destination 25 years later, the 400th anniversary of Montreal. A focus group with the creator of the project, Guillaume Duval, and other members of the team (artists, cultural mediators etc.) will offer us the possibility to develop the idea of a triple (future-orientated) nostalgia:
1) The first is an existential one and concerns the creators of the project approaching the age of 30 2) A ‘media-archeological’ one that deals with the material aspects of the postcard itself as a communication media 3) A temporal and spatial one that concerns a nostalgic projection into the future on a personal and social level (for those who initiated the project and the participants)
In a socio-semiotic perspective, our proposal is interested in analyzing this picture postcard project within the idea of nostalgia for an (imagined) future. The vernacular aesthetic of the postcard (Batchen, 2000 ; Langford, 2008) as an everyday object of the past or the ‘souvenir’ becomes a trace of a future past still to come and in this sense a retro-topic object. Still, the event of the ‘mail of the future’ deals with an artistically planned, institutional future for 2042. This mechanical projection of a future created during a public event, does it reflect a temporal continuum between the past and the future? In other words, the installation of the postcards, their archiving and the artistic protocol are they pointing into a prospective perspective (Heurgon, 2008 ; Bérard et Uhl, 2012)? Are here dealing with personal nostalgia and projections or do they concern the city of Montreal, urbanization and politics?
To answer these questions and by relating them to the issues of institutional, communicative and artistic nostalgia, we wish to contribute with an empirical analysis
We will combine a qualitative semiotic analysis of selected postcards (around 300), the website and social media with the above mentioned focus group. The latter will be realized in April, after the initial semiotic analysis. Our communication in Stockholm will present the results of this currently ongoing research.
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References Angé, O. & Berliner, D. (Éd.). (2015). Anthropology and Nostalgia. New York [et al.] : Berghahn Books. Arndt, J., Routledge, C., Sedikides, C. & Wildschut, T. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, Triggers, Functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 975– 993. Bartholeyns, G. (2014). The Instant Past: Nostalgia and Digital Retro Photography. Dans K. Niemeyer (éd.) (2014), Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future, pp. 51-69, Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan. Batchen, G. (2000). « Vernacular Photographies », in History of Photography, vol. 24, n° 3, automne 2000, p. 262-271. Bérard, S. et Uhl, M. (2012). « La science-fiction : de la perspective à la prospective », Les Cahiers de la CRSDD, « Collection recherche », nº 8/2012, 44 p. Bolzinger, A. (2007). Histoire de la nostalgie. Paris: Campagne Première. Bonnett, A. (2015). The Geography of Nostalgia: Global and Local Perspectives on Modernity and Loss. London: Routledge. Boym, S. (2001). The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books. Burman, J. (2010). Transnational Yearnings: Tourism, Migration and the Diasporic City. Vancouver: UBC Press. De Certeau, Michel (1993). La Culture au pluriel, Paris, Le Seuil. Deléage, E. & Sabin, G. (2014). Peut-on résister à l'ère du temps accéléré ?. Ecologie & politique, 48, (1), 13-21. doi:10.3917/ecopo.048.0013. Dubar, C. (2011). Temps de crises et crise des temps, Temporalités, N°13, 1-25. Duyvendak, J. W. (2011). The Politics of Home – Belonging and Nostalgia in Western Europe and the United States. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fantin, Emmanuelle, et Thibault Le Hégarat (éd.) (2016). « L’Âge d’or », Le Temps des médias, 27/2, 5-15. Grainge, P. (2002). Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America. Westport, CT: Praeger. Heurgon, E. (2008). « Conception et prospective du présent », dans Hatchuel A. et Weil B. (dir.), Les Nouveaux régimes de la conception. Langages, théories, métiers, Paris, Vuibert. Jankélévitch, V. (1974). L’Irréversible et la Nostalgie. Paris: Flammarion. Kalinina, E. & Menke, M. (2016). Negotiating the past in hyperconnected memory cultures: Post-Soviet nostalgia and national identity in Russian online communities. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 12/ 1, 59-74. Keightley, E. & Pickering, M. (2006). The Modalities of Nostalgia. Current Sociology, 54, 919–941. Langford, M. (2008). « Strange Bedfellows : Appropriation of the Vernacular by Photographic Artists », in Photography & Culture, vol. 1, n° 1, juillet 2008, p. 73-94. Lizardi, R. (2017). Nostalgic Generations and Media. Perception and Time of Available Meaning. London [et al.] : Lexington Books. May, Vanessa (2016), ‘Belonging from afar: nostalgia, time and memory, The Sociological Review, DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.12402. Mejía, S. (2005). Transnacionalismo a la ecuatoriana: migración, nostalgia y nuevas tecnologías. Dans : H. Gioconda, C. María Cristia & T. Alicia (ed.) La migración ecuatoriana. Transnacionalismo, redes e identidades, 481-492, Quito: FLACSO.
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Natterer, K. (2017). Nostalgie ALS Zukunftsstrategie Fur Unterhaltungsmedien : Empirische Studien Zu Personlicher Und Historischer Nostalgie in Medien. München : Springer. Niemeyer, K. (Ed.) (2014). Media and Nostalgia. Yearning for the past, present and future. Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan. Padva, G. (2015). Queer Nostalgia in Cinema and Popular Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Ricoeur, P. (1991). Temps et récit. Tome 3 : Le temps raconté, Paris, Seuil. Rosa, H. (2005). Beschleunigung. Die Veränderung der Zeitstrukturen in der Moderne. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main. Sperb, J. (2015). Flickers of Film. Nostalgia in the Time of Digital Cinema. Rutgers University Press. Uhl, M. (dir.) (2015). Les récits visuels de soi. Mises en récit artistiques et Nouvelles scénographies de l’intime, Paris, Presses de l’Université de Paris Ouest. Wajcman, J. (2015). Pressed for time: the acceleration of life in digital capitalism, Chicago : The University of Chicago Press
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Nostalgia and the invention of the traditions in the rituals and performativities of the feminine in the drag culture
Vinícius Ferreira & Patrícia D’Abreu
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
This paper aims to study how nostalgia is configured as a central element in the construction of an idea of tradition (HOBSBAWM and RANGER, 1984) from the rituals and performativities of the feminine (BUTLER, 2015), which are realized by a collective which self-defines itself as the oldest gay group of Latin America. The Turma OK was created in 1961 as a member club, which promoted cultural events in Rio de Janeiro. Until today its members still gather regularly and the group is recognized as one of the main bohemian strongholds of the city.
Nostalgia is here understood not only as the romantic redemption or the conservative of the past, but as the mnemonic practice which is also marked by potencies and positiveness (NATALI, 2006; NIEMEYER, 2014; KEIGHTLE and PICKERING, 2012). Specifically regarding the Turma Ok, the collective to be analyzed, the use of the past (HUYSSEN, 2014; TODOROV, 2000) is constituted as an element which, in the present time, qualifies and constructs the identity of the group (CANDAU, 2011). It is through its memories – objectified in texts (mostly journalistic publications), but also in institutional practices (meetings, parties and presentations) – that the group bases an idea of drag tradition (BAKER; 1994). The feminine appears as a central performative element in the nostalgic evocation of a universe of specific social values, associated with the family and the bourgeois morality.
References BAKER, Roger. Drag: a History of Female Impersonation in the Performing Arts. Nova York: New York University Press, 1994. BUTLER. Judith. Problemas de gênero – Feminismo e subversão da identidade. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2015. CANDAU, Joel. Memória e identidade. São Paulo: Contexto, 2011. HOBSBAWM, Eric; RANGER, Terence. A invenção das tradições. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1984. HUYSSEN, Andreas. Culturas do passado-presente; modernismos, artes visuais, políticas da memória. Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2014. KEIGHTLE, Emily; PICKERING, Michael. The Mnemonic Imagination: remembering as creative practice. London: Palgrave, 2012. NATALI, Marcos Piason. A política da nostalgia: um estudo das formas do passado. São Paulo: Nankin, 2006. NIEMEYER, Katharina. Media and Nostalgia: yearning for the past, presente and future. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. TODOROV, Tzvetan. Los Abusos de La Memoria. Barcelona: Ediciones Paidós Ibérica, 2000.
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List of presenters (order by surname)
Name Surname Institution Country Roman Abramov National Research University Higher Russia School of Economics Moscow Chloe Alaghband-Zadeh Loughborough University UK Alexandra Bardan University of Bucharest Romania Alessandro Biamonti Politecnico di Milano Italy Martin Bonnard Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada Greg Burris American University of Beirut Lebanon Josh Carney American University of Beirut Lebanon Christa L. Christensen University of Copenhagen Denmark Clelia Clini Loughborough University UK Claire Coleman University of Western Sydney Australia Patrícia D‘Abreu Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Brazil Emmanuelle Fantin Sorbonne-Université France Talitha Ferraz Escola Superior de Propaganda e Brazil Marketing Rio de Janeiro Vinícius Ferreira Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Brazil Sébastien Fevry Catholic University of Louvain Belgium Silvia Maria Gramegna Politecnico di Milano Italy André Habib Université de Montréal Canada Berber Hagedoorn University of Groningen Netherlands Emily Keightley Loughborough University UK Bruno S. Leal Federal University of Minas Gerais Brazil Mykola Makhortykh Amsterdam School for Netherlands Communication Research Gabriel F. Marinho Escola Superior de Propaganda e Brazil Marketing Rio de Janeiro Irene Martinez Luna Copenhagen University Denmark Manuel Menke Ludwig-Maximilians-University Germany Munich Samuel Merrill Umeå University Sweden Katharina Niemayer University of Quebec in Montreal Canada Ana P. G. Ribeiro Federal University of Rio de Janeiro Brazil Milica Popović University of Ljubljana Slovenia Caterina Preda University of Bucharest Romania Danielle Seid Baruch College (CUNY) USA Temenuga Trifonova York University Toronto Canada Magali Uhl University of Quebec in Montreal Canada Tim Van der Heijden University of Luxembourg Luxembourg Natalia Vasilendiuc University of Bucharest Romania Yingchun Xu Zhejiang University of Media and China Communications Panagiotis Zestanakis University of Crete Greece
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