Afro-

Nostalgia
Dr. Will Kurlinkus
What are
vaporwave’s
protest tactics?
• Accelerationism: speeding
capitalism’s ultimate demise by
ironically embracing its excesses.
• True Joy in decay (the new
sincerity)
• The future is now (uncanny
valley)
• Sharing Community
Who is Nostalgia available & Not Available To?
Which common nostalgias do you not have?
What does this mean?
Afro-Nostalgia
(Badia Ahad-
Legardy)
• What does it mean for nostalgia to be available or unavailable
to Black people in the U.S.?
1. Black historical nostalgia is missing: “narra?ves of
black subjuga?on and disenfranchisement do not
easily mesh with the roman?c wisCulness
generally associated with nostalgia”
2. Black people were historically denied nostalgia.
3. Memory studies (and oIen Black studies) has
focused on black trauma as a mode of cri?que.
Pleasurable memory feels like erasure.
4. Black history, achievement, and joy has been
unrecorded
• “I can’t go back to the fiIies because life in the fiIies for me
is not preRy, not is it preRy in 1320 or 1460 or 1580 or 1820
or even 1960 in this country, frankly” —Zadie Smith, NPR
Black Slaves were
Denied Nostalgia

• Because kidnapped African slaves were

likened to cattle they were imagined to
not have complex enough inner-states to
be nostalgic. Indeed, the medical system
of the time supported this.
• “Flying Africans” consumed by
“drapetomania”/nostalgia, committed
suicide and/or ran off and portrayed in
much art and poetry—eventually it was
thought that the black peoples of the
world were more nostalgic than other
races.
Arthur Ashe Monument
Chapter 2. Nostalgic
Restoration
• Black Restorative Nostalgia: “returns to shining moments of
black resistance signified by the long ibil rights and Black
Power movements to reinvoked the emancipatory affect
captures in those historical moments. Black restorative
nostalgia involves revivifying a black communal spirit of
resistance and solidarity made through intentional
intertextuality” (61).
• “Disrupting white nostalgic fantasies of racial hegemony and
reinscribing blackness in aesthetic spaces coded as historically
and unambiguously white” (64)
• “Beyonce had become ‘race-less’ in the public
consciousness, what media vernacular describes as
‘transcendent’” (76).
• The idea that black folks might be country too
challenges white country nostalgia (80)—when you
bring black bodies into country it challenges raceless
white nostalgia of the south
• “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in
times of great moral conflict.”

• Nostalgic Other
Why Was Beyonce Booed at the Super Bowl?
• Containment Rhetoric: For a long time Beyonce had NOT been
political or at least not overtly in her music (it definitely was there).
So there was a lot of humor parodying these booers saying this was
the first time they realized Beyonce was black.
• You see this with queer people historically and today as well. As soon
as a popular artists comes out-–often a favorite artist--there’s a
cognitive dissonance “wait, I’m anti-LGBTQA+ but I like X” and a call to
not “wave it in my face.”
CoBagecore
• Who wants whom to remember what,
why, and how?
• What does this piece teach us about
the nature of collective memory?
• What memory work is being done
here?
• Is cottage core a nostalgic culture?
What does it rhetorically seek to do?
• What does it mean for Black creators to
participate in a culture of memory that
historically excluded/abused them?
What does this tell us about the nature
of memory?
 Nostalgia is often imagined as
inherently conservative. How else
has nostalgia been used for
progressive protest?