Nostalgia in an Age of Now
I think about nostalgia fairly often. I think some of that has to do with my upbringing; when I was growing up, my family moved around a lot, and my relationship with many of the homes of my youth is definitely tinged with nostalgia.
I relate this personal detail simply as an exercise in full disclosure: there’s good reason to believe that I’m primed to see nostalgia. At the same time, I do think nostalgia is part of our present Zeitgeist. From Brexit and MAGA to China’s red revival and Russia’s renewed lust for empire, the most toxic byproducts of nostalgia are busily upending the world order as we have known it for the past few decades. In a lot of ways, the current morass of world politics has borne out Svetlana Boym’s now-classic reflections on the phenomenon of nostalgia.
But I’m also intrigued by the subtler ways in which nostalgia functions. And there’s a lot of nostalgia in the Taiwanese media right now. For my next few posts, I write about three separate TV series produced here in Taiwan that all seem to engage nostalgia in very different ways, even as they craft very particular visions of history for the modern viewing public.
If you’re curious about what I mean when I use the word “nostalgia”—or if you’re curious how I lump alphorns, Hallmark greeting cards, and Brexit together in my head—the next section might be of interest to you. If that sounds impossibly tedious and you just want to jump straight to photos of fabulous 1980s Taiwanese fashion, by all means, feel free to jump ahead.
What the Hell Is Nostalgia, Anyway?
Maybe part of the reason I have a particular propensity for nostalgia—I am a nostalgia nostalgist, if you will—is because I grew up in Switzerland. Although nostalgia has probably been around as long as humans have traveled and moved and wandered, there was a myth in the 18th century that Swiss mercenaries could be made to abandon their posts by playing the Kuhreihen, a tune linked in the imagination to the alpine herders of Switzerland. The song was thought to create an overwhelming desire for home, and could even lead to physical symptoms. An early euphemism for nostalgia was, in fact, le mal des Suisses (the Swiss malady). This is all receives its own dedicated article (readable in 10 languages!) on the Swiss public broadcasting website.
Since then, nostalgia has taken off. It’s everywhere: the Hallmark holiday cards bringing back memories of the good old days; the sepia tints and gauzy lighting options on photo apps (or their closely related digital-analog hybrid technology of the digital Polaroid camera). We can see nostalgia in everything from the mundane—fond-but-bittersweet memories of popular music (they just don’t make songs like that anymore) and hipster analog revivals (locally sourced lard and hand-ground flour to create great-grandma’s pie crust that no one still alive ever actually tried themselves)—to social and political movements of far greater moment (MAGA, Brexit, the hanfu 漢服 movement1 or the red revival in China,2 Russia’s renewed ambitions for militarily managed empire).
Regardless of the movement we’re talking about, all these phenomena tend to share something in common, namely, they tend to point to something that never really existed. Was Britain ever really separate from Europe? (Please don’t tell the royal family.) Are the electric blues and vibrant fuchsias, or the lushly layered lycras and polyesters of the hanfu movement really a return to China’s traditional sartorial arts? Was music actually better when I/we/you/they were my/our/their age? (Unless, of course, we’re talking about Kylie Minogue, who has been scientifically proven to have written the best gay anthems of all time, I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules.)
All of this (minus the Hallmark cards, hanfu, MAGA, etc.) was summed up in a really classic text on nostalgia by Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia.3 She explains that nostalgics are fascinated with “longing and loss” (41), and that nostalgia itself is “an ache of temporal distance and displacement” (44). But most importantly, in Boym’s description, the object of nostalgia is always imaginary—it never really existed. It is a collective imagining, but one with enough emotional oomph that, in certain circumstances, it can shape entire national movements.4 In The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig even coins the term “anemoia” to describe “nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.”
This link between nostalgia and the contest over national identity is what has fascinated me over the last several months as I’ve watched these Taiwanese television shows. So if you’ve made it this far, congratulations! You now know what I mean when I talk about “nostalgia,” so we can get down to the fun stuff!
Other Posts in My Series on Nostalgia
Kevin Carrico, The Great Han: Race, Nationalism, and Tradition in China Today (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017).
Red Legacies in China: Cultural Afterlives of Communist Revolution, eds. Jie Li and Enhua Zhang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2016).
Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
See Boym, particularly chs. 4 and 5.