Longing for the past
HANNAH SKODA finds depth and nuance in this timely cultural history of nostalgia, tracing it from the 17th century, when the word was coined, up to the present day
We are all familiar with nostalgia and its melancholic longing for the halcyon days of yore – and knowing that we’re spinning the past to suit our needs in the present in many ways only heightens the bittersweet taste. In this fascinating book, Agnes Arnold-Forster sets herself two goals: she tracks the changing meanings of nostalgia since the invention of the word by a Swiss doctor named Johannes Hofer in 1688; and she explores the histories of how and why people have become nostalgic ever since.
Arnold-Forster guides us through the intriguing ways in which the term increasingly came to refer to a longing for lost time rather than lost place. And she explores the shift from disease to emotion in the ways in which nostalgia was discussed. She introduces us to the emergence of psychoanalysis in the late 19th century, and to developments in psychology and neuroscience during the 20th century, which further moulded the ways people have thought about nostalgia.
In the first few chapters, nostalgia as homesickness is explored via a series of poignant examples: a student at the University of Göttingen in 1788 longing for home; a toddler called Eugene who became almost fatally weak when separated from his wetnurse in 1841.
But most powerfully and most tragically, we hear of the appalling suffering of enslaved people transported across the Atlantic. Subjected to a multiplicity of violences, their longing for home could prove fatal. William Wilberforce apparently evoked this nostalgia in his abolitionist appeals. But what of the ways in which enslaved people themselves expressed their emotions? As Arnold-Forster points out, this is harder to explore, but should hit us at a visceral level.
Indeed – this was a period during which nostalgia was increasingly contested. It could be attributed to enslaved people in an explicitly patronising and racist way. Equally, over the course of the 20th century, sometimes it has been co-opted for noxious political ends (Arnold-Forster’s exploration of Nazi nostalgias is particularly striking), sometimes in the interests of inclusivity and equity.
She shows how nostalgia has been used by the political right and by the left, exploring such themes as the embedding of nostalgia in discussions around the NHS. She also explores the rhetorical weaponisation of nostalgia: after the Brexit vote, Michel Barnier attributed the outcome to Britain’s “nostalgia for the past”. But Arnold-Forster very perceptively explores the ways in which both the Remain campaign and the Leave campaign were shot through with nostalgia. Nostalgia is a highly effective way to manipulate us: an intriguing exploration of a nostalgia wave in the 1970s points to how commercial brands use it to entice us to buy things.
This is a very timely book. A number of other scholars have also recently discussed nostalgia: Peter Fritzsche presents this as a phenomenon emerging out of the great rupture of the French Revolution; Tobias Becker has explored waves of nostalgia post-World War II; and Hannah Rose Woods analyses the political uses of nostalgia in Britain. In many ways, nostalgia is a phenomenon to be celebrated: psychologists now are clear that it can be good for our mental wellbeing. But as Arnold-Forster so convincingly shows, it is also a feeling worth dissecting: it can open up a rich sense of community and remind us of important values, but it can also so easily be used to manipulate us.
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