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This chapter attends more closely to the competing ways of constructing and drawing on the past that each type of jeremiad employs. The chapter opens with a consideration of the U. S. Supreme Court's decision in Abington v. Schempp(1963), which outlawed public school prayer. It goes on to explore the uses of the past in traditionalist jeremiads, focusing on traditionalist appeals to nostalgia and an American Golden Age. The progressive jeremiad looks to the past as well, seeking to renarrate founding principles in language appropriate to changing times. Thus the progressive jeremiad is not concerned so much with the way “things really were” in the past, and even less in casting the future into the mold of the past. But the progressive jeremiad's past, containing such a powerful founding promise, is equally constructed, and equally mythic. Both types of jeremiads construct a past in accord with their fundamental political values and agenda, and in doing so call forth critical counternarratives from their political opponents.

Schenker's sometimes virulently conservative politics have been a major problem for later commentators, who have sought to minimize their relevance to his theory. Taking as its starting point his essay “The mission of German genius” (1921), this chapter argues that while prompted by the experience of the First World War, Schenker's politics expressed an underlying cultural conservatism, with roots in the previous century, that is fundamental to his work. In early 20th-century Vienna, the collision between this conservative tradition and processes of modernization resulted in a perniciously binary pattern of thought that is reflected in Schenker's writings, but also prompted a desire for reconciliation heavily coloured by nostalgia. Both the desire and the nostalgia — which are shared with such disparate contemporaries as the piano manufacturer Ludwig Bösendorfer and T. W. Adorno — are central to Schenker's project, for which music is understood as always imbued with social meaning.

This chapter reflects on the idea of an American heartland now beset with problems and how it intertwines with nostalgic visions of a better past. Both perceptions play well to the insiders who live in declining rural communities and to audiences who have long since pursued more glamorous lifestyles elsewhere. The chapter considers the case of Smith County, situated at the exact geographic middle of the United States: the heart of America's heartland. That America's heartland is a thing of the past is a long-standing refrain in treatments of the region. The reigning motif is nostalgia for a pastoral village-based America. The other common perspective on middle America sees the region as a social problem. The chapter argues that neither nostalgia nor an emphasis on social problems adequately captures the complexity of the social transformations that took place in America's heartland.

The idea of a ‘postnational constellation’ conjures up a world in which globalisation, privatisation, and individualisation have changed the basic configuration of the legal and political world. The state has become disaggregated as regulatory authority has shifted towards transnational governance structures and devolved to subnational public authorities or private actors. There are a number of questions one might ask about these changes. Have they strengthened human rights and have they furthered peace, justice, and prosperity within and across societies? Or have they created new inequities and new dangers? The literature on these questions, either generally, or addressing specific policy issues, is endless. This chapter focuses on the more limited question of how these changes can best be described and assessed in constitutional terms. Specifically the question is: How are these changes affecting the tradition of modern constitutionalism? It provides a deeper understanding of the nature of the dispute between triumphalists and nostalgists.

This chapter explains why Britons were particularly drawn to the Ottoman Empire in this period and how intelligence agents' particular cultural motivations disposed them to epistemological experimentation. It describes the agents' central role in cultural production about the region, as famous explorers and authors intimate with Edwardian literary society, with whom they fashioned a new literary cult of the desert, in which the spy novel figured centrally. Many of them had gone to the Middle East looking for literary inspiration, a modernist aesthetic, romantic adventure, and spiritual fulfillment in a time in which social change and modern science had made many Britons anxious about their place in society and the universe. The agents saw their work in the Middle East, particularly during the war, as an opportunity to shape their own lives and Middle Eastern reality in the image of fiction.

In Tamil-speaking south India, and in South Asia more generally, secrecy as a mode of disseminating knowledge has undergone a radical change in value, from its consideration as a moral duty that keeps powerful knowledge in the hands of the good, to its regard as a selfish act that has led to the disintegration of a unified Tamil community. This chapter documents the historical trajectory of obfuscation in siddha medicine, a history that is just one instance of more general debates in South Asia about whether the proper locus of knowledge is in public or private spheres, in the archive or in the home. It argues that the function of secrecy as a strategy for garnering prestige is now served by another form of concealed knowledge—that is, Tamil medical knowledge that has been lost in the ravages of time.

Since early modern times, art has paralleled religion in its response to technology as illustrated by Ruskin’s thoughts on the colour purple. Heidegger also turned to art, especially the poetry of Hölderlin, as an alternative to technology. Against the background of Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility’, the question is asked whether the thoroughly technicized art of film can become a focus for such creative counter-technological thinking. A positive answer is developed with reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Nostalgia.

This chapter begins by discussing Wolfgang Becker's 2003 film Goodbye Lenin! and its reflection of contemporary German nostalgia for the German Democratic Republic. This chapter then addresses the various manifestations of such nostalgia in the author's interviews with Soviet musicians in the late 1990s, especially in interactions with Rodion Shchedrin, Boris Tishchenko, and Lidiya Davïdova. The post‐Soviet nostalgia reflected in these oral history interviews and its affects on contemporary Soviet memories of the Thaw is also considered. Goodbye Lenin! Rodion Shchedrin Boris Tishchenko Lidiya Davïdova nostalgia memory interviews oral history

This chapter introduces the concept of the “commodified authentic” and the nostalgic, originary, and aesthetic forms of such marketing, examining the explosive growth of efforts to sell these various forms in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter traces the interdisciplinary expressions of the commodified authentic and explores how such a strategy eased for consumers the abrupt transition from the Victorian age to the modern era. The chapter further analyzes the importance of the commodified authentic in the history of modernity and for the development of literary modernism. Tracing some of the central debates in modernist criticism—such Huyssen’s concept of “the great divide,” and the relations between modernism and material culture—the chapter argues that the commodified authentic offers a new way to explore two critical but missing parts of the equation: how commercial ventures in fact deployed and dismantled the vexed relationship between high and low culture, and how literary modernism developed not through a reliance on the great divide or its dismantling but on the uneasy movement between the two impulses, a movement intimately connected to the paradoxical impulse to construct authenticity. The chapter concludes with a detailed summary of the chapters that follow.

The conclusion argues that the history and development of the commodified authentic are key to understanding later works of high modernism, as well as our contemporary moment, with its strangely hybridized blend of nostalgia and modernity. The chapter investigates how the commodified authentic became a critical modernist tool, analyzing key moments concerning advertising, authenticity, and shopping in works by D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love), James Joyce (Ulysses), and Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse). The chapter concludes by exploring how the commodified authentic remains a powerful marketing technique and cultural strategy.

This chapter deals with nostalgia and its relation to the postcolonial rhetorics of identity. In part, it is an outgrowth of the author's discomfort with the place nostalgia has come to occupy in the literatures of anthropology and cultural studies. While recognizing how “nativistic nostalgia” may obscure or deny issues of social inequality, and that Euro-American nostalgia for “tradition” and “otherness” is a dangerous motivator of scholarly quests, this chapter examines the assumption that nostalgia has a categorically negative social value for indigenous actors.

Nostalgia was more widespread than optimism. The forces resisting change were more powerful than those which accepted or welcomed it. The years after 1914 therefore need to be looked at also from the point of view of those popular reactions which were fundamentally conservative, even when they assumed apparently revolutionary stances. It has been suggested that the division of French politics into left and right was ultimately more confusing than useful, and at no time was this more obviously revealed than in this period. The men who opposed change, or who continued to repeat traditional gestures, were to be found in almost all parties, both left and right. Nostalgia was not the only form of conservatism. Another kind of resistance to change came from ignorance about the changes that were taking place, and the inability to understand them. What people thought was happening was, in some ways, as important as what actually did happen.

This chapter examines the social reasons behind collective action against economic development. In particular, it considers how early gentrifiers construct a “nostalgia narrative” that they use to create a community ideology and a new self-identity as their neighborhood's “symbolic owners” that serve as bases for collective action. It also explores how and why neighborhood residents continue to protest bars despite recognizing their powerlessness to prevent nightlife growth and occupying a role as its victim. The chapter focuses on a longtime resident named Bob, who moved to the East Village at the start of its gentrification and who, like other early gentrifiers, stayed in their neighborhood through its rough years rely on their own past experiences and definitions of community to contest them as “theirs.” Since it draws on a past that is both imagined and personal, the residents' narrative presents its own internal contradictions while their sense of community and organized protests exclude certain groups, such as the neighborhood's existing low-income residents.

This book has examined how bars and nightlife scenes structure and influence life in downtown neighborhoods that have become, through advanced gentrification, upscale destinations for consumers and residents and prime locations for investment in high-end real estate and business. The proliferation of bars and growth of nightlife scenes underscore the importance of nostalgia for people in today's postindustrial city of constant, rapid destruction and ever-changing fashions. With upscaling comes conflict as well as ephemerality, as anchors of stability lose their strength to ground people amid their turbulent surroundings. Longtime residents of New York City use a nostalgia narrative of a dark period in their neighborhood's past to fuel their continuous protest despite the process's inexorable march towards an upscale status.