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place, with a hearty lack of nostalgic longings for ancestral roots - yet the sentimental or strategic nostalgia of overseas Chinese for their ancestral homes in China has also been well documented and described.1
Nostalgia is of course now commodified, fragmented and eclectic, as befits a late capitalist era in which global capital determines shifting allocations of labour. Nostalgia, and pastiche of the past, is almost commonplace, and through what was called the 'post-modern' eclectically mixes emblems of diverse eras of the past to provoke a momentary pang. The irony of Flagstaff House's transformation from a military site to a tea museum, noted by Abbas (1997), is a good example of this post-modern bricolage of meanings and historical ironies typified by Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (Harvey 1989), which we can find too in the toothless attendants and bright paints of restored Colonial Williamsburg (Lowenthal 1985), or the imaginary nostalgia of Disneyland disguising the unreality of America itself (Baudrillard 1994). But here I should like to draw attention to the importance of nostalgia as, if you like, a strategic resource for knitting together communities which have become dispersed and fragmented.
While nostalgia adopts a temporal form (nostalgia for the past), it essentially implies the sense of belonging to a place (nostalgia for a place), as in its etymological roots. Can there be nostalgia for a taste, a face, an experience of abandon, a vanished emotion or capacity? Of course there can, but these experiences are all associated with a particular locus, a particular time and place (in the past). That place may never have existed, as writers from Lowenthal and Lovell to Mitchell remark, or not have existed for those who pine for it; the remembered, longed-for experience may be purely fictive and imaginative. Then again, it may have been very much a reality the loss of which is regretted; it was a real, living community we mourn the passage of. In any case, through the power of memory and recollection, that experience, that community, that place, can hardly be recollected exactly as it was, so that there is an inevitably imaginative, fictive quality to the faculty or power of nostalgia.
In one sense, it may not matter very much whether the lost object was, or was not, a reality, since that reality will have been transformed through the nostalgic recollection of it. Yet, in another sense, it does matter that not all nostalgia is necessarily imaginary; that real separations, real partings, may be what are being mourned.
170
place, with a hearty lack of nostalgic longings for ancestral roots - yet the sentimental or strategic nostalgia of overseas Chinese for their ances- tral homes in China has also been well documented and described.1
Nostalgia is of course now commodified, fragmented and eclectic, as befits a late capitalist' era in which global capital determines shift- ing allocations of labour. Nostalgia, and pastiche of the past, is almost commonplace, and through what was called the 'post-modern' 19 eclec- tically mixes emblems of diverse eras of the past to provoke a momen- tary pang. The irony of Flagstaff House's transformation from a mili- tary site to a tea museum, noted by Abbas (1997), is a good example of this post-modern bricolage of meanings and historical ironies typified by Charles Moore's Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans (Harvey 1989), which we can find too in the toothless attendants and bright paints of restored Colonial Williamsburg (Lowenthall 1985), or the imaginary nostalgia of Disneyland disguising the unreality of America itself (Baudrillard 1994). But here I should like to draw attention to the im- portance of nostalgia as, if you like, a strategic resource for knitting together communities which have become dispersed and fragmented.
While nostalgia adopts a temporal form (nostalgia for the past), it essentially implies the sense of belonging to a place (nostalgia for a place), as in its etymological roots. Can there be nostalgia for a taste, a face, an experience of abandon, a vanished emotion or capacity? Of course there can, but these experiences are all associated with a particular locus, a particular time and place (in the past). That place may never have existed, as writers from Lowenthall and Lovell to Mitchell remark, or not have existed for those who pine for it; the remembered, longed-for experience may be purely fictive and imaginative. Then again, it may have been very much a reality the loss of which is regretted; it was a real, living community we mourn the passage of. In any case, through the power of memory and recollection, that experience, that community, that place, can hardly be recollected exactly as it was, so that there is an inevitably imaginative, fictive quality to the faculty or power of nostalgia.
In one sense, it may not matter very much whether the lost object was, or was not, a reality, since that reality will have been transformed through the nostalgic recollection of it. Yet, in another sense, it does matter that not all nostalgia is necessarily imaginary; that real separations, real partings, may be what are being mourned.
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