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This volume reflects on the significance of nostalgia in the construction of traumatic pasts, both on an individual and a collective level. By employing an interdisciplinary approach, the volume enhances our understanding of how the entanglements of trauma and nostalgia influence the construction and development of identity. Scholars from a range of academic disciplines and contexts explore the integration of nostalgic memories in discussions of trauma, attending to their interactions in public spaces, patriotic symbolism and rituals, popular culture, cinema, religion, museums, and memorials. The contributors emphasize the role of media and other mass-cultural technologies in disseminating images and narratives related to traumatic and nostalgic experiences. These essays ultimately bring to light the frequently overlooked role of nostalgic longing in shaping the discursive, visual, and material aspects of collective trauma.
List of contents
1. Time Will Bury in Oblivion. An Introduction to Trauma and Nostalgia - Srdjan Sremac and Lucien van Liere, 2. Trauma and Nostalgia in the Israeli Televised Memory of the First Gulf War - Dan Arav, 3. Filters, Risks and Ironies. A Semiotic Inquiry between Nostalgia and Trauma - Mario Panico, 4. The Transmission of Nostalgia. Memories of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco Regime - M. Paula O'Donohoe, 5. Trauma, Nostalgia, and Redemption among Veterans in Home-coming Film - Mariecke van den Berg and Jan Grimell, 6. Nostalgia, Trauma and Contested Cultural Heritage. The Afghanistan National Museum and Its Attempts and Failures at Statehood Imagining - Bram Verhagen and Srdjan Sremac, 7. Fighting Against the Dying of the Present. On Nostalgia, Resonance and Edgar Reitz's Heimat - Mathijs Peters, 8. The 1960s and America's Haunted Present. Ghosts, Trauma and Nostalgia in Mad Men - Joshua Hollmann, Index.
About the author
Lucien van Liere is Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University. His research interest is on material and discursive representations of violent conflict as well as on micro-situational analyses of violence. Srdjan Sremac is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Religion and Theology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-director of the Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion. His focus is on (visual) lived religion from theoretical and ethnographic perspectives, and on theory and methodology in the study of religion.
