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economy and the experience of emigration and global diaspora have surely been crucial (cf. Wang Gungwu 1994).
"The post-colonial is about the diasporic consciousness", complains Friedman (1999), defining it as a 'discourse of hybridity' concerned with a 'conscious critique of the colonial in all its forms, from the economic to the cultural'." And it is in this context that I should like to raise the question of nostalgia and its power to overcome barriers of time and space. Jon Mitchell, a former colleague of mine in Edinburgh, has described how a displaced urban Maltese community made use of nostalgia as a 'strategic resource' to reconstruct through imaginary means a vanished community and a sense of community which had been inevitably destroyed (Mitchell 1998), and similar work has taken place for the Algerian-Jewish community in France.1 More detailed work by Paerregord (1997) on migrants returning to their native village in the Peruvian Andes contrasts nostalgic images with other kinds of image which are held by different groups of migrants and which affect life back in the village in different ways.
Nostalgia implies the displacement from an origin, and in an age of the flexible accumulation of capital (Harvey 1989) and globalised flows of people, commodities and signs (Lash and Urry 1994) in which local contexts have become increasingly problematised as imaginary constructs, the emotion of nostalgia provides perhaps the most important and appropriate vehicle for the sentimental articulation of links between the global and the local, the present and the past. As the direct corollary to the idealism of utopianism, the idealism of nostalgia adopts a temporal structure, expressing a dissatisfaction, an unease or disenchantment with the present, together with a yearning for an imagined, or recollected, what-went-before.
Lowenthal (1985) reminds us that nostalgia (like melancholy and consumption) was for a long time thought of as a particular disease. In the seventeenth century nostalgia was common among travellers far from their native homes, who pined and sighed for their remembered pasts, in a kind of anomie which has probably always had a particular association with travelling, and with the Voyage which was to become institutionalised through the European Grand Tour pioneered by the Romantics. Nosos (return to native land) with algia (suffering). Hong Kong has often enough been characterised as a forward-looking
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economy and the experience of emigration and global diaspora have surely been crucial (cf. Wang Gungwu 1994).
"The post-colonial is about the diasporic consciousness', complains Friedman (1999), defining it as a 'discourse of hybridity' concerned with a 'conscious critique of the colonial in all its forms, from the eco- nomic to the cultural'." And it is in this context that I should like to raise the question of nostalgia and its power to overcome barriers of time and space. Jon Mitchell, a former colleague of mine in Edinburgh. has described how a displaced urban Maltese community made use of nostalgia as a 'strategic resource' to reconstruct through imaginary means a vanished community and a sense of community which had been inevitably destroyed (Mitchell 1998), and similar work has taken place for the Algerian-Jewish community in France.1 More detailed work by Paerregord (1997) on migrants returning to their native vil- lage in the Peruvian Andes contrasts nostalgic images with other kinds of image which are held by different groups of migrants and which affect life back in the village in different ways.
Notalgia implies the displacement from an origin, and in an age of the flexible accumulation of capital (Harvey 1989) and globalised flows of people, commodities and signs (Lash and Urry 1994) in which local contexts have become increasingly problematised as imaginary constructs, the emotion of nostalgia provides perhaps the most impor- tant and appropriate vehicle for the sentimental articulation of links between the global and the local, the present and the past. As the direct corollary to the idealism of utopianism, the idealism of nostalgia adopts a temporal structure, expressing a dissatisfaction, an unease or disen- chantment with the present, together with a yearning for an imagined, or recollected, what-went-before.
Lowenthail (1985) reminds us that nostalgia (like melancholy and consumption) was for a long time thought of as a particular disease. In the seventeenth century nostalgia was common among travellers far from their native homes, who pined and sighed for their remembered pasts, in a kind of anomie which has probably always had a particular association with travelling, and with the Voyage which was to become institutionalised through the European Grand Tour pioneered by the Romantics. Nosos (return to native land) with algia (suffering). Hong Kong has often enough been characterised as a forward-looking
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