Abstract
Nostalgia designates a domain of historical practice that is often said to be antithetical to historiography’s production of historical meaning. Nostalgia was supposed to cause recently enslaved Africans to drown themselves in rivers and wells, go on hunger strikes, and jump overboard to their deaths, all so their souls could fly back to Africa. The scholars who sought to explain this mushrooming phenomenon made use of much of what once made it pathological, especially nostalgia’s status as an anti-social, solipsistic, narcissistic, delusional, and naive form of behavior. In the postmodernism debates, participants focused on nostalgia’s problematic relation to narrative. Anthropologists who sought to reckon with their discipline’s roles in colonial and imperial ventures found nostalgia similarly useful, as exemplified by Claude Levi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques. For geographer Alisdair Bonnett, “melancholic ideas and practices” like nostalgia “are not just reactive responses to change but can also be forms of action and activism.”
