From TV shows like Man Men and Stranger Things, to Taylor Swift’s 1984 album, teenage blogs resembling 1970’s photo albums, or the flow of sepia filtered images of past generations on Instagram — nostalgia, it seems, is everywhere. But what should we make of this?

Svetlana Boym, a well-known theorist of nostalgia, argues that: ‘The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future was discarded like an outmoded spaceship sometime in the 1960s.’ This echoes Susan Sontag’s reflection that ‘perhaps the most interesting characteristic of the time now labelled the Sixties was that there was so little nostalgia. In that sense, it was indeed a utopian moment.’ Aside from Boym’s and Sontag’s shared characterisation of the start of the twenty-first century as more nostalgic than utopian, there is a more fundamental shared understanding in both of their statements: that nostalgia and utopia are inherently opposed, even mutually exclusive.

The intellectual intuition which led me to write this book was a notion that this longstanding presumption of an opposition between nostalgia and utopia — that, in layman’s terms, one cannot simultaneously long backwards and forwards — fails to take into account the complexity of longing, and the nuanced, often non-linear, ways in which past, present and future inform one another. The Promise of Nostalgia challenges the prominent perception of cultural nostalgia as regressive, or a sign of cultural inertia, proposing instead a more nuanced, hopeful, reading of its stakes and meanings.

The Promise of Nostalgia is an academic book — it is designed first and foremost to be of interest to scholars and graduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture — but it will hopefully spark thought for anyone interested in the hold that nostalgia has over us, both personally and culturally.

Published Jan 2020 by Routledge