(Be)longing; nostalgia and the construction of ideology
updated:
Monday, October 7, 2024 - 5:20pm
American Comparative Literature Association
deadline for submissions:
Monday, October 14, 2024
In How Societies Remember (1989), Paul Connerton writes that the present “distort[s]” the past, and vice-versa, in our collective memory” (2). These distortions can be instrumentalised by politicians seeking to mobilize people behind a nostalgic vision of the past. Conceiving of nostalgia as a “superimposition” of the past over the present, Svetlana Boym explores how it creates a multi-temporal memory-scape that one longs to recover – but which, paradoxically, has never and can never exist (The Future of Nostalgia, xiv). Similarly, Joseph Roach describes how societies seek replacements for figures from the past via a process he calls “surrogation,” which is virtually always doomed to fail (Cities of the Dead, 2).