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As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories. Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia's capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments. Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Ten Thousand Recollections: Afro-Nostalgia and Contemporary Black Aesthetics
1. (Nostalgic) RETRIBUTION: The Power of the Petty in Contemporary Narratives of Slavery
2. (Nostalgic) RESTORATION: Utopian Pasts and Political Futures in the Music of Black Lives Matter
3. (Nostalgic) REGENERATION: Absent Archives and Historical Pleasures in Contemporary Black Visual Culture
4. (Nostalgic) RECLAMATION: Recipes for Radicalism and the Politics of Soul (Food)
Postscript: A Future of Black Nostalgia
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Badia Ahad-Legardy is a professor in the Department of English and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of
Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture.
