The Future of Nostalgia

Svetlana Boym

P.13

While the longing is universal, nostalgia can be divisive.

Nostalgia (from nostos – return home, and algia – longing) is a longing for a home that no
longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of a loss and displacement, but it is
also a romance with one’s own fantasy.

p.13-14

A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images of

home and abroad, past and present, dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force into
a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.

p.14

The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic
belief in the future was discarded like an outmoded spaceship sometime in the 1960s.

Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future.
Sometimes nostalgia is not directed toward the past either, but rather sideways. The nostalgic
feels stiffled within the conventional confines of time and space.

A contemporary Russian saying claims that the past has become much more unpredictable
than the future.

Somehow progress didn’t cure nostalgia but exacerbated it. Similarly, globalization encouraged
stronger local attachments. In counterpoint to our fascination with cyberspace and the virtual
global village, there is no less global epidemic of nostalgia, an affective yearning for a
community with a collective memory, a longing for continuity in a fragmented world. Nostalgia
inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and
historical upheavals.

Yet the more nostalgia there is, the more heatedly it is denied --> something bad. Nostalgia is
to memory as kitsch is to art.

p.15

At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time
– the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is
a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic
desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like
space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.

Nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that longing can make us more empathetic toward fellow
humans, yet the moment we try to repair longing with belonging, the apprehension of loss
with a rediscovery of identity, we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding.

p.15-16

Algia – longing – is what