Utopian nostalgia: Resources for the imagination in ordinary crisis

Nostalgia can sometimes be a form of utopian desire – that is, desire for the future of the world. This article critically explores the utopianism of nostalgia, among people involved in various initiatives for surviving – and perhaps transforming – the crisis-ordinary in Patras, Greece. Across the political and generational spectrum, the people I spoke to expressed nostalgia for the rural 1960s in Greece, as a basis for what they wanted the world to be like in the future. The romanticizing nature of forms of nostalgia which intend futures, rather than simply memorializing the past, is frequently lamented as historically inaccurate and politically reactionary. Indeed, the nostalgia I found in Patras could sometimes be (though it was not always) both of these things. Yet, I argue that nostalgia should not be dismissed in these terms. Nostalgia can also play a mythopoetic role within a future-oriented desire that is purposely – and not just inauthentically – inventive. Nostalgia can also be a way of narrating a desirable future world as having the concrete weight of something that already happened. In this way, nostalgia can invest utopian desire with a feeling of a world which could come to pass (again); not as a revanchist homeland to restore, but rather as a bricolage of salvage materials to rework anew.