Download or read book Cultural Nostalgias written by Merry Osemwegie and published by Author House. This book was released on 2014 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a narrative account of the lived experiences of an immigrant. In many ways, this book discusses a range of issues that transcend different sociocultural, philosophical, and political terrains. Paved with comical and simple narrative, the author located poignant and challenging issues within personal experiences of orphanhood, racism, race and sex, acculturation, deculturation, immigration, and his nostalgic feelings. Reflectively, he recalled how his early years in Africa were filled with happy memories of his parents and siblings and his lifelong regret over his failure to adequately care for his father. From a child who hated education to someone with five degrees, he has had to face many challenges, including his unstoppable desire to acquire academic qualifications, which oftentimes offered him no significant professional and material gains in return. The author is living a life in the UK that millions of people would envy, and yet he is troubled by cultural nostalgias. For a man who did everything to leave Africa, he could neither come to terms with why he could not just move back to Africa, where his heart is, nor is he able to make up his mind about where he would like to be buried.
Download or read book Anthropology and Nostalgia written by Olivia Angé and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nostalgia is intimately connected to the history of the social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, though finely grained ethnographies of nostalgia and loss are still scarce. Today, anthropologists have realized that nostalgia constitutes a fascinating object of study for exploring contemporary issues of the formation of identity in politics and history. Contributors to this volume consider the fabric of nostalgia in the fields of heritage and tourism, exile and diasporas, postcolonialism and postsocialism, business and economic exchange, social, ecological and religious movements, and nation building. They contribute to a better understanding of how individuals and groups commemorate their pasts, and how nostalgia plays a role in the process of remembering.
Download or read book Ecological Nostalgias written by Olivia Angé and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-11-01 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.
Download or read book Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia written by Nancy Martha West and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The advertising campaigns launched by Kodak in the early years of snapshot photography stand at the center of a shift in American domestic life that goes deeper than technological innovations in cameras and film. Before the advent of Kodak advertising in 1888, writes Nancy Martha West, Americans were much more willing to allow sorrow into the space of the domestic photograph, as evidenced by the popularity of postmortem photography in the mid-nineteenth century. Through the taking of snapshots, Kodak taught Americans to see their experiences as objects of nostalgia, to arrange their lives in such a way that painful or unpleasant aspects were systematically erased. West looks at a wide assortment of Kodak's most popular inventions and marketing strategies, including the "Kodak Girl," the momentous invention of the Brownie camera in 1900, the "Story Campaign" during World War I, and even the Vanity Kodak Ensemble, a camera introduced in 1926 that came fully equipped with lipstick. At the beginning of its campaign, Kodak advertising primarily sold the fun of taking pictures. Ads from this period celebrate the sheer pleasure of snapshot photography--the delight of handling a diminutive camera, of not worrying about developing and printing, of capturing subjects in candid moments. But after 1900, a crucial shift began to take place in the company's marketing strategy. The preservation of domestic memories became Kodak's most important mission. With the introduction of the Brownie camera at the turn of the century, the importance of home began to replace leisure activity as the subject of ads, and at the end of World War I, Americans seemed desperately to need photographs to confirm familial unity. By 1932, Kodak had become so intoxicated with the power of its own marketing that it came up with the most bizarre idea of all, the "Death Campaign." Initiated but never published, this campaign based on pictures of dead loved ones brought Kodak advertising full circle. Having launched one of the most successful campaigns in advertising history, the company did not seem to notice that selling a painful subject might be more difficult than selling momentary pleasure or nostalgia. Enhanced with over 50 reproductions of the ads themselves, 16 of them in color, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia vividly illustrates the fundamental changes in American culture and the function of memory in the formative years of the twentieth century.
Download or read book The Hours Have Lost Their Clock written by Grafton Tanner and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Hours Have Lost Their Clock charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. In The Hours Have Lost Their Clock, Grafton Tanner charts the rise of nostalgia in an era knocked out of time. Nostalgia is the defining emotion of our age. Political leaders promise a return to yesteryear. Old movies are remade and cancelled series are rebooted. Veterans reenact past wars, while the displaced across the world long for home. But who is behind this collective ache for a home in the past? Do we need to eliminate nostalgia, or just cultivate it better? And what is at stake if we make the wrong choice? Moving from the fight over Confederate monuments to the birth of homeland security to the mourning of species extinction, Grafton Tanner traces nostalgia’s ascent in the twenty-first century, revealing its power as both a consequence of our unstable time and a defense against it. With little faith in a future of climate change and economic anxiety, many have turned to nostalgia to weather the present, while powerful elites exploit it for their own gain. An exploration into the politics of loss and yearning, The Hours Have Lost Their Clock is an urgent call to take nostalgia seriously. The very future depends on it.
Download or read book Afro Nostalgia written by Badia Ahad-Legardy and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2021-04-12 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories. Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments. Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.
Download or read book Nostalgia after Apartheid written by Amber R. Reed and published by University of Notre Dame Pess. This book was released on 2020-11-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this engaging book, Amber Reed provides a new perspective on South Africa’s democracy by exploring Black residents’ nostalgia for life during apartheid in the rural Eastern Cape. Reed looks at a surprising phenomenon encountered in the post-apartheid nation: despite the Department of Education mandating curricula meant to teach values of civic responsibility and liberal democracy, those who are actually responsible for teaching this material (and the students taking it) often resist what they see as the imposition of “white” values. These teachers and students do not see South African democracy as a type of freedom, but rather as destructive of their own “African culture”—whereas apartheid, at least ostensibly, allowed for cultural expression in the former rural homelands. In the Eastern Cape, Reed observes, resistance to democracy occurs alongside nostalgia for apartheid among the very citizens who were most disenfranchised by the late racist, authoritarian regime. Examining a rural town in the former Transkei homeland and the urban offices of the Sonke Gender Justice Network in Cape Town, Reed argues that nostalgic memories of a time when African culture was not under attack, combined with the socioeconomic failures of the post-apartheid state, set the stage for the current political ambivalence in South Africa. Beyond simply being a case study, however, Nostalgia after Apartheid shows how, in a global context in which nationalism and authoritarianism continue to rise, the threat posed to democracy in South Africa has far wider implications for thinking about enactments of democracy. Nostalgia after Apartheid offers a unique approach to understanding how the attempted post-apartheid reforms have failed rural Black South Africans, and how this failure has led to a nostalgia for the very conditions that once oppressed them. It will interest scholars of African studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, and education, as well as general readers interested in South African history and politics.
Download or read book On Nostalgia written by David Berry and published by Coach House Books. This book was released on 2020-07-21 with total page 114 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Mad Men to MAGA: how nostalgia came to be and why we are so eager to indulge it. From movies to politics, social media posts to the targeted ads between them, nostalgia is one of the most potent forces of our era. On Nostalgia is a panoramic cultural history of nostalgia, exploring how a force that started as a psychological diagnosis of soldiers fighting far from home has come become a quintessentially modern condition. Drawing on everything from the modern science of memory to the romantic ideals of advertising, and traversing cultural movements from futurism to fascism to Facebook, cultural critic David Berry examines how the relentless search for self and overwhelming presence of mass media stokes the fires of nostalgia, making it as inescapable as it is hard to pin down. Holding fast against the pull of the past while trying to understand what makes the fundamental impossibility of return so appealing, On Nostalgia explores what it means to remember, how the universal yearning is used by us and against us, and it considers a future where the past is more readily available and easier to lose track of than ever before. "If nostalgia was a disease in the Good Old Days, then David Berry's cogently argued, intelligent, and witty book should be prescribed reading for anyone wishing to understand what sometimes feels like a peculiarly virulent epidemic of our current times." —Travis Elborough "We're so lucky to have a writer as thoughtful, funny, smart, and cutting as David Berry. Nostalgia dictates so much of our world, and there isn't a better cataloger, critic, and guide through it than Berry." —Scaachi Koul
Download or read book Galvanizing Nostalgia written by Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2022-01-15 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Galvanizing Nostalgia? explores critical questions for the survival of Russia in its nominally federal form. Will Russia fall apart along the lines of its internal republics, as did the Soviet Union? Based on cultural anthropology field and historical research in major republics of Eastern Siberia—Sakha (Yakutia), Buryatia, and Tyva (Tuva)—this book highlights Indigenous concerns about self-determination. Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer suggests that a fragile and disorganized dynamic of nested sovereignties has developed within Russia. Ecology activism has grown, given new threats to the environment and accelerating climate challenges, especially in the Arctic. Focus on strategically chosen republics enables comparing and contrasting interethnic relations, language politics, and the salience of gender, demography, resource competition, environmental degradation, and increased spirituality. Republics vary in their neocolonial relationships to Moscow authorities. Some local leaders, such as a politicized shaman, use nostalgia for cultural achievements to galvanize citizens. Since the Soviet Union collapsed, cultural and political revitalization have been relatively more viable, although still difficult, in areas where Siberians have their own republics.
Download or read book Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution written by Jing Meng and published by Hong Kong University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-19 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution argues that films and TV dramas about the Cultural Revolution made after China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 tend to represent personal memories in a markedly sentimental, nostalgic, and fragmented manner. This new trend is a significant departure from earlier films about the subject, which are generally interpreted as national allegories, not private expressions of grief, regret or other personal feelings. With China entering a postsocialist era, the ideological conflation of socialism and global capitalism has generated enough cultural ambiguity to allow a space for the expression of personalized reminiscences of the past. By presenting these personal memories—in effect alternative narratives to official history—on screen, individuals now seem to have some agency in narrating and constructing history. At the same time such autonomy can be easily undermined since the promotion of the sentiment of nostalgia is often subjected to commodification. Sentimental treatments of the past may simply be a marketing strategy. Underplaying political issues is also a ‘safer’ way for films and TV dramas to secure public release in mainland China. Meng concludes that the new mode of representing the past is shaped by the current sociopolitical conditions: these personal memories and micro-narratives can be understood as the defining ways of remembering in China’s postsocialist era. ‘Fragmented Memories and Screening Nostalgia for the Cultural Revolution takes a comprehensive look at contemporary screen depictions of the Cultural Revolution. The book convincingly ties close readings of the works analysed with broader social and cultural phenomena that already are hot topics of study and debate, offering something original while also being closely engaged with existing scholarship.’ —Jason McGrath, University of Minnesota ‘Breaking through the tired dichotomy between personal and collective narratives, individual memory and grand history, this refreshing book sheds much light on film memories of the Cultural Revolution in the post-socialist millennium. In a limpid and engaging style, Jing Meng probes memory’s nostalgia and imbrication with the collective destiny, and critiques the personal focus aligned with neoliberal economy and commodification.’ —Ban Wang, Stanford University
Download or read book Velvet Retro written by Veronika Pehe and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars of state socialism have frequently invoked “nostalgia” to identify an uncritical longing for the utopian ambitions and lived experience of the former Eastern Bloc. However, this concept seems insufficient to describe memory cultures in the Czech Republic and other contexts in which a “retro” fascination with the past has proven compatible with a steadfast critique of the state socialist era. This innovative study locates a distinctively retro aesthetic in Czech literature, film, and other cultural forms, enriching our understanding of not only the nation’s memory culture, but also the ways in which popular culture can structure collective memory.
Download or read book What Nostalgia Was written by Thomas Dodman and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2018-01-05 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.
Download or read book Futures Worth Preserving written by Andressa Schröder and published by Transcript Publishing. This book was released on 2019 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can the paradoxical conceptual overlap of nostalgia and sustainability in cultural constructions of the present be used in order to make previously unexplored territory within the study of culture accessible? This collection of essays and artistic contributions aims at answering this and other questions. It problematizes the relationship between past-oriented practices of sustaining and future-oriented forms of remembering. The present becomes the moment in which both notions overlap: Cultures have to position themselves, both in relation to what they have once been and to what they aspire to become.
Download or read book Losing Culture written by David Berliner and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2020-05-15 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Around the world, you will hear complaints that people are losing their culture and their heritage. This study explores what is triggering this sense of cultural loss, to what ends this rhetoric gets deployed, and how anthropologists deal with their own feelings of nostalgia.
Download or read book Mixtape Nostalgia written by Jehnie I. Burns and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-10-19 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mixtape Nostalgia: Culture, Memory, and Representation tells the story of the mixtape from its history in 1970s bootlegging to its resurgence as an icon of nostalgic analog technology. Burns looks at the history of the mixtape from the early 1980s and the rise of the cassette as a fundamental aspect of the music industry. Stories from music fans collecting hip hop mixtapes in the Bronx or recording songs off the radio permeate the book. She discusses the continued contemporary appeal of the mixtape as musicians, novelists, memoirists, playwrights, and even podcasters have used it as a metaphor for connection and identity. From Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape to Questlove’s Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Burns analyzes how the mixtape can function as a plot point, a stand-in for emotional connection, or an organizing structure. The book shows how creators use the iconography of the mixtape cassette to create ephemera, from coffee subscriptions to board games, which speaks to the appreciation of the tangible and the analog. The desire to find connection through sharing a physical artifact permeates the various creative uses of the mixtape. From blockbuster films like Guardians of the Galaxy to mixtape throw pillows, Burns highlights the mixtape as a site of collective memory tied to youth culture, community identity, and sharing music.
Download or read book The Ministry of Nostalgia written by Owen Hatherley and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a "make do and mend" aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prose-with subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prize-shortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cooking-Hatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.
Download or read book Culinary Nostalgia written by Mark Swislocki and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues that regional food culture is intrinsic to how Chinese connect to the past, live in the present, and imagine their future. It focuses on Shanghai?a food lover's paradise?and identifies the importance of regional food culture at pivotal moments in the city's history, and in Chinese history more generally.
