Nostalgia: Feminist Utopianism and Longing for the Past

The fall of modern time consciousness has impelled a glance backward, with the memories of the past coming to dominate a utopian desire for the future.These memories, however, are not purely negative.The eternal recurrence of the traumatic events of modernity, from the Middle Passage to the Holocaust, is accompanied by another mnemic force: nostalgic longing for the glories of the past.A sense that the past is better than the pre sent, and may even offer a model for the future, suffuses the contemporary cultural consciousness.As Grafton Tanner notes: "This aching hunger for the past, nostalgia, is the defining emotion of our time." 1 From the 1980s onward, political leaders have appealed to the past to win power in the pre sent, with Margaret Thatcher waxing lyrical about the need for Victorian values and Ronald Reagan seeming to have stepped straight out of the 1950s to remind Americans of an apparently calmer time. 2 The wave of authoritarian populism in the last decade, encapsulated by Donald Trump's slogan "Make Amer i ca Great Again" and the Brexit campaign's demand "Take Back Control," has also utilized nostalgia.3 The cultural realm is increasingly defined by a nostalgic frame of reference.From the rise of the retro films of the 1970s, particularly American Graffiti (1973) and Grease (1978), to the remakes, remixes, reruns, and reboots that dominate cultural production today, a nostalgia industry has emerged to rival Theodor Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's culture industry.4 As a retro