TPP VI: Nostalgia

If we take nostalgia as the longing to reverse the effects of change, it embodies an inverse project to that of globalization, reproducing at the same speed and gathering momentum off the same energy. If we are indeed becoming more mobile, more detached, then the reaction is an increasingly nostalgic populace, in which the spatially and temporally untethered look to distant homes, pasts and imaginings to make sense of the present and the uncertain future. As such, nostalgia becomes a key concept to understanding change and resistance to change in this historical moment when globalization arguably moves faster than ever. In this issue of Text, Practice, Performance we have gathered pieces that bring this concept closer into view by examining fragments of nostalgia spread from Austin, Texas, to central Beijing, from the “Mayan Riviera” through “Mexifornia” to Next Year in Jerusalem, manifested in social practice and emerging across a range of cultural forms and expressions.

Lauren Wagner, M.A.
Program in Folklore, Public Culture and Cultural Studies

All of the articles can be downloaded as .pdf's. Print editions are also available on request.

Introduction
Lauren Wagner

The Privilege to Play: Wang Shou on Nostalgia
Vicky Ma

Abysmal Desires for Recognition: Nostalgic Disavowal in Anti-Immigrant Texts
Jose Saul Martinez

From the Private to the Public: Photography, Film, and the Transmission of Cultural Memory in Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia)
Shira Segal

Crystallization and Drift
Scott Webel and Jen Hirt

The Tense Present History of the Second Gulf War: Revelation and Repression in Memorialization
Ken MacLeish

Trading in Nostalgia: Tourist Habitus and Tourism Governmentality at the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve
Kyeann Sayer

BOOK REVIEW: History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans, by Pamela Ballinger
Jerry Lord

Eitz Chayim
Miriam Robinson Gould.......................................... mrg-etz-chayam.mp3