Editorial

Memory Studies
3(3) 181–186
Nostalgia and the shapes © The Author(s) 2010
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DOI: 10.1177/1750698010364806
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Editorial

Nadia Atia and Jeremy Davies

Queen Mary, University of London, UK

Nostalgia is always suspect. To give ourselves up to longing for a different time or place, no matter
how admirable its qualities, is always to run the risk of constricting our ability to act in the present.
In Doris Lessing’s phrase, nostalgia is a ‘poisoned itch’ (1976: 7): its real cause is buried, perhaps
invisibly, within us, and scratching it – or trying to reach out and grasp what we imagine we have
lost – will only make matters worse. If nostalgia is dangerous on an individual level, its political
impact can be much more threatening: the politics of nostalgia are often reactionary at best (Steiner,
1974; Doane and Hodges, 1987), and at worst can be deeply exclusionary and atavistic. On the
other hand, nostalgia’s pleasures are probably familiar to everyone, and especially treasured by
travellers, immigrants, exiles and refugees: by displaced peoples of all kinds (Boym, 2001; Vīķe-
Freiburga, 2001; Bryant, 2008). Indeed, it has often seemed that a life purified of nostalgia might
be in some way inhuman. Nostalgia is both the bittersweet side-effect of modernity and a potential
cause of a deadening hostility to the changes that modernity brings. Yet varied as its consequences
can be, it is a distinctive and sharply defined phenomenon, one that seems open to scrutiny as a
discrete mode of thought and feeling.
The problems thrown up by nostalgia have a special significance for memory studies. Students
of memory have often been inclined to look sympathetically upon informal, communal projects of
remembrance, particularly among subordinate or marginal groups and in cases where that group
memory has not readily been legitimated by more rigid kinds of historiographic understanding.
Nostalgia can be a potent form of such subaltern memory. At the same time, if the value of this kind
of recollection stems in part from its rich particularity and sincerity, then its most urgent need may
be to free itself from the unexamined clichés of nostalgic thinking. In that light, nostalgia might
seem to be not only a ‘betrayal of history’ (see Spitzer, 1999: 91), but a betrayal of memory itself – a
debilitating imposition upon our consciousness of the past. If we are bound to admire nostalgia’s
empowering agency whilst keeping a sceptical distance from its illusions, then our interpretation
of it seems committed to an unsettling form of compromise. Many of the articles collected in the
following pages attempt to illustrate one way of moving past this deadlock: they call attention to
nostalgia’s critical potential. Moving across centuries and continents, they explore the great variety
of ways in which nostalgic thinking can become a force that complicates, rather than one that
simplifies. Whether deployed as a way of reading poetry, as a means of asserting the rights of

Corresponding author:
Nadia Atia, Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK.
Email: n.h.atia@qmul.ac.uk.
182 Memory Studies 3(3)

indigenous peoples, or as a prompt to politically subversive commemoration, nostalgia can be an

interpretative tool rather than a retreat into hidebound certainty.
In 1688, the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer proposed a name for a certain type of wasting disease.
The word combined the Greek Nostos, ‘return to the native land’, with ‘Algos, [meaning] suffering
or grief; so that thus far it is possible from the force of the sound Nostalgia to define the sad mood
originating from the desire for the return to one’s native land’ (Hofer, 1934[1688]: 381). Nostalgia
was a medical condition, a state of fever and lassitude that was potentially fatal if left untreated, but
readily cured by a return home. Throughout the 18th century and into the 19th it remained princi-
pally the province of doctors, whilst gradually accreting more and more political and epistemologi-
cal implications. In particular, its association with soldiers sent to fight away from their native
lands made the condition a focus for debates about national identity and masculinity (Starobinski,
1966; Roth, 1991; O’Sullivan, 2006). Progressively embedded in psychophysiology, in the 19th
century the disease came to be regarded as a form of corporeal and instinctual memory (Austin,
2007), before its eventual disappearance as a diagnostic category within the emergent science of
psychiatry. By then, nostalgia had begun a new life as a cultural, and especially a literary, mode.
David Lowenthal describes a Europe-wide awakening to the otherness of the past around the time
of the French Revolution (Lowenthal, 1985). In recent years, scholars have traced an 18th-century
collocation of certain poetic tropes (‘villages, ruins, and schooldays’) into a new class of nostalgic
experience (Santesso, 2006: 19), the embedding of medical nostalgia in Romantic aesthetics
(Goodman, 2008) and the endorsement of sentimental selective forgetting as an ethical principle in
the Victorian novel (Dames, 2001). Most of all, as the focus of the nostalgic’s longing has turned
from other places to departed times (such that potentially attainable desires for a literal return home
give way to impossible ones for a journey into the past), nostalgia has changed from a transient
affliction into something approaching an inescapable predicament. Once a pressing individual
demand, nostalgia has increasingly come to indicate a condition of generalized longing, its indefin-
able and half-pleasant yearning a defining characteristic of the postmodern age (Stewart, 1988;
Jameson, 1991; Hutcheon, 2000; contrast Stauth and Turner, 1988).
Sociologists and historians have described a late 20th-century nostalgia boom in the USA, often
sympathetically (Davis, 1979; Wilson, 2005), but sometimes as ‘symptomatic of a more general
crisis in cultural confidence’ (Cameron and Gatewood, 1994: 30; emphasis in original), or as a debili-
tating fantasy that seeks to ‘deny history’s hold over the present’ (Lasch, 1991: 118). The British
experience has been analysed by the History Workshop project (Shaw and Chase, 1989, and see
Patrick Wright’s remarks, below). Psychoanalysis, meanwhile, has allowed for a newly precise kind
of scrutiny (Radstone, 2007). Two commentators in particular are cited in several of the articles that
follow: Susan Stewart, who writes of nostalgia as ‘a sadness without an object’, a ‘desire for desire’
(1984: 23), and Svetlana Boym, whose meditations on exile and émigré culture describe nostalgia as
‘a symptom of our age, a historical emotion ... coeval with modernity’ (Boym, 2001: xvi). What is
achieved by bringing together nostalgia criticism and memory studies, though, is something rather
different. Here, nostalgia is read not only as a symptomatic state of mind, but also as a way of shaping
and directing historical consciousness. It is taken to be – at least potentially – much more mobile,
more active, and more self-aware than either Stewart or Boym have allowed for.
The work presented here adopts a range of different approaches: history and anthropology, liter-
ary criticism and art history, environmental and cultural studies. In particular, it illustrates what the
field of English studies can bring to the analysis of memory. It also emphasizes, although not
exclusively, the nostalgias of the years around the start of the 20th century. The first three contribu-
tions define points of entry to the themes of the collection. Susannah Radstone shows how psycho-
analysis can offer a means to go beyond the ways nostalgia has been analysed by Walter Benjamin
Atia and Davies 183

and Fredric Jameson, Lisa O’Sullivan’s article looks at nostalgia through the prism of changing
ideas of the self in 19th-century French medicine, and an interview with Patrick Wright sees him
reflect on the course of his ‘adventures in critical nostalgia’ – his involvement in the long-running
debate on the idea of heritage in modern Britain. There follows a series of seven articles that begins
with Ruth Abbott’s meditation on temporality in the reading of poetry. William Wordsworth’s Ode.
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood is certainly nostalgic, but more
than that, it leads us to consider how nostalgia may be implied by ‘the very shape of reading, pro-
cessing from beginning to inevitable end’. Harry Whitehead explores the uses of nostalgia among
the Kwakwaka’wakw people of British Columbia. If a nostalgic narrative of decline was originally
foisted upon them by western anthropologists, it has since become a valuable tool in their struggles
for identity and acknowledgment. Kathryn Brown describes how the French writer and politician
Jules Simon invoked a selective nostalgia for a pre-Revolutionary feminine ideal as a model for
social progress. Simon did not seek to withdraw from modernity, but to build the future upon an
ahistorical principle of femininity; in his work, Brown argues, ‘nostalgia functions not as a sick-
ness, but as a cure’.
Nadia Atia looks at the impact of nostalgia on the way Mesopotamia was seen and represented by
British travellers to the region, in the years preceding the First World War. Nostalgia functions in
their travelogues both as a motivation for travel and as a lens that coloured their impressions of
Mesopotamia’s contemporary civilization, rendering Mesopotamia an animated vision of their own
nostalgic desires. Bethan Stevens invites us to think about lost works of art, exemplified in her arti-
cle by Vanessa Bell’s nostalgic The Nursery. Stevens suggests that loss can be ‘a medium in its own
right’; instead of simply trying to reconstruct the artworks we no longer have, we might conceive of
‘a kind of nostalgic viewing, a sensory attentiveness to loss’. Kate Houlden unpicks the ironic han-
dling of postcolonial nostalgia in Paule Marshall’s novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People.
Satirising complacent understandings of the past, Marshall finally presents us with a dramatic vision
of how ‘subversive nostalgic thinking’ can spark new connections and bring about fresh understand-
ing. Finally, Jeremy Davies describes the notion of ecological sustainability as an inverted nostalgia
that projects an ideal home ahead of us rather than behind. This does not mean we should reject it,
but that we can interrogate it as a form of memory-work with a longstanding history of political
significance. The volume concludes with a responding article by Nicholas Dames, who distinguishes
between a Jamesonian ‘diagnostic’ understanding of nostalgia devoted to the uncovering of its inau-
thenticity, and the ‘functionalist’ work represented here. Dames describes ‘a move past an inquiry
into essences – what nostalgia is – toward studies of uses, purposes, and circumstances’, whilst call-
ing attention to the tropes of healing that run through the collection.
In taking these approaches, the articles collected here raise as many questions as they answer.
The most obvious is the fundamental problem of why nostalgia, which so often encourages super-
ficial forms of understanding, should sometimes possess the critical capacity with which it is cred-
ited in the following pages. This is an active nostalgia that is something more than just a rhetorically
powerful propaganda technique. Equally, it is not simply a rational, judicious preference for some-
thing lost over what remains. Edward Said noted the exile’s tendency towards nostalgia, but also
that an ‘exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of
daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still’ (Said, 2001[1993]: 381). As
Raymond Williams points out in his analysis of the role of European metropolises in the emergence
of Modernist art, it is in the anonymity of displacement that fruitful new avenues for creativity and
community can be found (Williams, 2007[1989]). Recent historians of nostalgia have shown per-
suasively that nostalgia can become creative or radical by virtue of its object, by its being nostalgic
for anything from farming equipment in Northern Ireland to pre-scientific English agrarian
184 Memory Studies 3(3)

socialism or the unfulfilled promises of the East German state (Cashman, 2006; Bonnett, 2009;
Enns, 2007). But even studies like these that draw extensively upon the tradition of theoretical
writing on nostalgia have attended less often to the possibility that an analytic capability might
reside not just in the ‘content, author, and audience of a nostalgic narrative’ but within ‘the struc-
ture of nostalgia itself’ (Tannock, 1995: 456). Might nostalgia become a mode of critique by virtue
of that very structure, by the way it correlates place, time, and desire?
Whatever its object, nostalgia serves as a negotiation between continuity and discontinuity: it
insists on the bond between our present selves and a certain fragment of the past, but also on the
force of our separation from what we have lost. Some of the most sophisticated of all analyses of
nostalgia have described it in terms of the continuity that it gives to our identity in an age of unset-
tling change (Davis, 1979), the false historical discontinuity to which it lays claim (Lasch, 1991),
or the agile way in which it balances continuity and discontinuity against one another (Tannock,
1995). None of these readings are quite adequate, though, while they think of continuity and dis-
continuity as clear-cut opposites. Our identity is not simply a matter of preserving continuously the
selfhood embodied in some earliest germ or seed of consciousness. Rather, we are inclined to
define who we are by reference to the least determined of our choices, the characteristically indi-
vidual ways in which we have responded to our circumstances. As subjects of modernity, the con-
tinuity of our identity resides precisely in our most personal discontinuities, in the ways we have
altered and created ourselves. If ‘nostalgia’ names the particular emotion or way of thinking that
arises from a deeply felt encounter between our personal continuities and discontinuities, then
nostalgic emotion might be nothing less than the felt awareness of how identity is entangled with
difference (compare Steinwald, 1997: 9–10). Instead of starting from the assumption that nostalgia
is a typically unreflective form of memory, we might say that it gives sensory depth to our aware-
ness of the other places, times and possibilities that are at once integral to who we are and defini-
tively alien to us. In that sense, nostalgia always has the potential to function as a kind of critical
self-consciousness. Yet this is evidently not to define an agenda for the articles that follow. We
might equally say that nostalgia can only take on critical agency in relation to the particular object
of its longing, and each of these studies describes the functioning of nostalgia in a markedly differ-
ent way. The strength of the work collected here lies partly in the sheer variety of the forms of
nostalgia that it brings into view.
Most of these articles are based on papers first presented at ‘Nostalgia and the Shapes of
History’, a postgraduate conference hosted by the Department of English at Queen Mary, University
of London, UK, in June 2008. That event was made possible by the financial support of the Arts
and Humanities Research Council, Queen Mary’s Humanities and Social Sciences Graduate
School, and the Department of English. We thank them for their generosity. We acknowledge with
gratitude the various kinds of assistance given to us by Michèle Barrett, Paul Hamilton, Andrew
Hoskins, Jenny Gault, Bill Schwarz, and Beverley Stewart. We owe a special debt to the other
organisers of the conference: Kate Houlden, Rhiannon Moss, Tamar Steinitz, and Victoria Walker.
Finally, our very warmest thanks to Clair Wills for her invaluable guidance and support throughout
the process of developing this collection for publication.

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Atia and Davies 185

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Author biographies
Nadia Atia is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of London, UK.

Jeremy Davies is a PhD candidate in the Department of English, Queen Mary, University of
London, UK.