Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

This Interlude between Part 1 and Part 2 of the book briefly considers the use and delayed currency of Shakespeare in the aftermath of the Russian War of 1853–56 (also known as the Crimean War), an unpopular conflict that nevertheless did not dampen the appeal of rousing militarism in Britain or position Shakespeare as a cultural figure through whom critical perspectives about the conduct of war could be presented. The Interlude concentrates on Charles Kean’s post-war Henry V at the Princess’s Theatre, London, in 1859, a production that does not contemporize the play’s events, but rather historicizes and distances them from its own time, reflecting a Victorian nostalgia for medieval history. It shows how the conditions of war and developments in war reporting can affect (and delay) the use of theatre for immediate wartime commentary. Shakespearean productions can be as much about forgetting or displacing contemporaneity, as invoking the specific contexts of a conflict or crisis, a pattern that recurs in the second part of the book.

Histories of urban sound have often fixated on the regulation of soundscapes and sensitivities to noise – frequently on the part of a perpetually rising bourgeoisie. Using the case study of the ’news-horn’, a tubular instrument used by newspaper vendors, this chapter offers an alternative way of understanding the changing soundscapes of towns and cities: rhythm. Developing from the post-horn which had been used in England since the sixteenth century, the news-horn became a common sound on the streets of 1770s London. However, with the growth of newspaper print and news from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the intensity and frequency of the news-horns’ blasts increased. This produced an arrythmia in London’s soundscape that clashed with other street sounds, sabbath-day silence, and the busy hum of London’s commercial centres. During the 1820s this resulted in the disappearance of the news-horn from London’s streets. Looking back from the mid-nineteenth century, many writers did not celebrate the news-horn’s removal. Instead, they remembered its sound with a fond nostalgia. The news-horn was one among many casualties in the emergence of a new London soundscape that replaced a pointillist pattern of auditory information with a roaring blanket of urban noise.

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard the phrase: ‘Everything was better in the old days’? The more stressful the present feels, the greater the longing for the past becomes. The wave of Ostalgie (a play on the German words for ‘east’, Ost, and nostalgia) felt by some East Germans has since been joined by a ‘Westalgia’. Furniture and fashion venerate the retro and vintage look of previous decades, and a not insignificant number of citizens view the time before the fall of the Wall through rose-coloured glasses. In the Weimar Republic, when democracy was still in its infancy, many people longed for the return of the abdicated kaiser and his empire. The longing for a strong leader to rule the country was widespread. In 1925, it found its expression in the election of World War General Paul von Hindenburg as president, and in 1933 it was manifested in the form of Private Adolf Hitler. This chapter shows how appropriations of the past often go hand in hand with critiques of the present.

In a survey that begins by looking at the ways in which post-war Britain gradually escaped from the popular cultural domination of the USA to create a new musical empire of its own, this chapter explores the manner in which home-grown pop reflects upon and influences notions of national identity. While progressive and revolutionary through the creation of new musical styles that sought to change the cultural, social or political landscape, pop has sometimes revealed itself to be nostalgic and backward-looking. This has often resulted in the curation of an Anglocentric musical tradition celebrating national stereotypes, but this is a tradition that has more recently been contested by other sounds, other voices, writing themselves into the pop history of the UK to become an integral part of the equally evolving character of the nation.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.

The contemporary fascination with comics archives also revolves around imaginary collections of invented “forgotten” comics. This chapter is not about forgeries of actual cartoonists but about imaginary constructions, fictive comics objects, and pseudo recoveries – whose transmissive function can be as important as the recirculation of actual archives. It details the stakes of this retro reflexivity by looking more closely at paratextual elements in Seth’s graphic novels and then in a more detailed close-reading of Cole Closser’s Little Tommy Lost, which presents itself as a playfully anachronistic work, mobilizing all the conventions of the 1920s comic strip within the publishing framework of a contemporary graphic novel. Productively fed by the many reprints of newspaper comics of the mid-2000s, Little Tommy Lost also offers an indirect critique “in practice,” reminding us of the complexities in reviving these serial objects, but also perhaps failing to take up the digital publication opportunities where such forms might find a new context.

Through a reading of the fanbase response to Sally Wainwright’s 2019 BBC/HBO adaptation of the Anne Lister diaries, Gentleman Jack, this chapter asks the following questions: what is at stake in bringing the diaries to the screen, and how does the process of adaptation queer time? In the case of Gentleman Jack, many fans will have experienced the adaptation as the original. With her glamorous androgynous wardrobe, her butch walk and her seductive presence, Suranne Jones’s Gentleman Jack not only rewrites history for a contemporary audience, but also queers our temporal relationship to the past. This chapter analyses how the fans’ intensive affective response to Gentleman Jack - variously described as a form of community building, of self-discovery, and of mourning and loss - merges the fictional and the original archive in productive ways. In this dialogue between the present and the past, the Lister archive continues to forge a queer trajectory that highlights the losses and gains of an occluded and rediscovered queer history. Wainwright’s refashioning of the Lister diaries for today’s television audience has in fact led us back to the ‘phenomenon’ that Lister was in her own time and to a new understanding of the importance of Lister for today.

I start with a brief overview of the literature on meaning. The tripartite model proposes coherence, significance, and purpose as the key factors. The first component of the Creativity Advantage model, self-insight, is strongly connected to coherence, which is being able to look back and feel as though your life has made sense. Some nostalgia may be involved (which is associated with creativity as well). As long as some kind of narrative is present, writing expressively on a regular basis is associated with many positive outcomes, both psychological and physical. Forming narratives in general is a powerful tool and may help shape our identity in adolescence and beyond – which can also be seen as a creative act itself.

This chapter argues that the Linguistic Landscape (LL) brings together orientations towards past, present, and future in complex ways which distinguish it from other forms of discourse and from language in the grammatical sense. In this analysis, every unit of the LL points to a past act of a sign instigator which is viewed in the framework of present relevance but which also points toward states and actions in a relative future. This complexity determines that each unit in the LL carries its own temporal frame of reference, which may include direct reference to time, time inflections that allow for stylistic means of invoking additional notions of time, and the unit time which follows as a consequence of the unit’s physical features. From this perspective, it is argued that there is no single present in the LL, but, rather, that the LL encompasses a flow of different – sometimes contradictory – temporal references. Fieldwork examples from six countries illustrate the operation in the LL of historical ghost signage and remnants, changes in street naming policies, tourism, nostalgia and repurposing, historical commemoration, and discourse features of political graffiti.

This chapter analyses the nostalgia deployed in 1910s–1930s memoirs of Mughal Delhi by local ashrāf prose writers. It argues that the idealisation of the pre-colonial local past enabled authors to face the displacement lived during the construction of the colonial capital and the growing challenges of communal tension in the city. As heterogeneous texts both recording knowledge and inducing multi-sensory pleasure in the manner of qissahs (tales), city memoirs aimed at moving the Mughal past permanently into collective fantasy and at maintaining collective identity continuity. Examining the elements of nostalgic recollection, the chapter shows that those memoirs responded to the urgencies of the present, by articulating a critique of British rule and of the growth of communalism, but that they also reflected a Muslim collective identity that yearned for power.

A great deal of international and domestic conflict is driven by feelings of humiliation. But what does political humiliation consist of? In this chapter I argue that a key part of political humiliation involves the sense of being replaced. After looking at several case studies including the rhetoric used by ISIS recruiters, the rise of revanchist Russian and Chinese foreign policies, and the language deployed by white supremacists to frame and justify their grievances, I point to some features of the sense of replacement. These include the loss of status and perceived break of a promise or denial of an entitlement – both coupled with a reactionary brand of nostalgia that aims to return the world to how things were before these losses occurred. Part 1 introduces the idea of humiliation in international and domestic conflict. Part 2 uses four case studies to suggest that replacement is key in making sense of political humiliation. Part 3 offers several reasons why it’s particularly important to understand the dynamics of replacement.

This essay explores attitudes towards childhood in the surrealist novel but does so not via the familiar lens of psychoanalysis but via the concept of ’nostalgia’ as theorized by Svetlana Boym in her book The Future of Nostalgia (2001). Taking two contrasting examples of surrealist writing on childhood – Giorgio de Chirico’s seminal Hebdomeros (1929) on the one hand and Michel Leiris’s autobiographical novels Manhood (1939) and Scratches (1948) on the other – it is argued that, in both cases, Boym’s concept of ’reflective nostalgia’ (as opposed to ’restorative nostalgia’) provides a useful tool of analysis. However, the melancholic tone of de Chirico’s writing – with its stylistic debts to Lautréamont and Nietzsche – has a regressive dimension, and lacks the self-reflexivity specified in Boym’s account of a critically incisive ’reflective’ nostalgia. By contrast, Leiris’s more robust exploration of his male sexuality, along with the ’anthropological’ tenor of his analysis of the linguistic and material universe of childhood, fits more productively with Boym’s conception of a positive role for nostalgia within modernism.

The coincidence between the events on 9/11 in Santiago in 1973 and New York in 2001, earlier observed by Ariel Dorfman, lends itself to an analysis of the spiral of Bolaño’s oeuvre from the trauma of the 1970s Chilean dictatorship to the neo-globalizing moment that overlapped with the world dissemination of Bolaño’s work. Bolaño is nostalgic for the Allende era in Chile when meaningful social change seemed possible. Yet he is conscious that it was the authoritarian force and neoliberal economics of the Pinochet regime that was truly prophetic of the future. The nostalgic and the counterfactual, the elegiac and recursive, intertwine as Bolaño looks back on his generation’s odyssey and sees analogies for its trauma in the femicides of 2666. A nodal point of this intertwining is the tenth anniversary of the coup on September 11, 1983, where a group of “masochistic Chileans” meet in Paris in The Savage Detectives, poised between a past they never knew and a future they can scarcely envision. Bolaño knows he has to face the necropolitics of the then-present and not the nostalgia of the deferred past; yet the dream of the Allende era is never entirely renounced in his oeuvre.

“Revolution and Nostalgia: Walter Scott, and the Forms of Jacobite Nostalgia,” examines the concept of revolution in relation to the events of 1688–89 by way of thinking about why this paradigmatic event of modernity – the first “modern” revolution on some accounts – only very hesitantly embraces the idea of revolution. It examines the figure of the Jacobite in Walter Scott’s Waverley, in order to argue that historical fiction works by a logic of nostalgia, structuring the past as the place of the fantasies of the present. This chapter explains why revolution becomes the central if disavowed political fantasy of secular modernity; why nostalgia, a word invented in 1688 and reaching its apotheosis and its formal incarnation as historical fiction over a hundred years later, haunts the project of secularity; and why the Jacobite is at once the exemplary revolutionary, the prototypical nostalgic, and the object of nostalgic investment. This chapter also explains why representations of the “revolution” of 1688–89 tend to allegorize it in terms of racial or colonial conflict and thus how the invention of the Highland rebel managed England’s ambivalence about its own experience with revolution and its colonization projects.

In 2018, Lauren Alaina released her single “Ladies in the ’90s,” which takes a nostalgic look at her childhood through cleverly chosen lyrics from chart-topping songs of the 1990s. “Ladies in the ’90s” references women—and only women—from country music, as well as pop, rock, and R&B. The song establishes Lauren Alaina’s broad musical lineage and evokes nostalgia for an earlier decade. This chapter explores the performative and affective use of nostalgia and lineage in country music. A close reading of “Ladies in the ’90s” reveals how the generation of country artists coming of age in the second decade of the twenty-first century are redefining and expanding the stylistic, cultural, and even racial boundaries of the genre through the nostalgic tropes that have been used for decades in country music. In so doing, artists like Lauren Alaina are challenging the industry and carving out new musical and narrative spaces.

Chapter 6 explores memories of domestic service and intimacy between the 1960s and 1980s. Using oral history interviews, the chapter argues that the memories of former domestic workers and former employers of domestic workers informed their racial politics in the present. These memories were almost entirely devoid of political activism, even though this book has demonstrated that domestics were politically active for all of twentieth-century Cuban history. Instead of politics, the emblematic memory that Cubans retained was “the emotional logic of domestic service,” which allowed and even celebrated harmony between black and white Cubans while maintaining a strict and often unspoken racialized hierarchy. After the official end to domestic service in the 1960s, nostalgia for domestic service became a way for anti-Communist Cubans in exile and on the island to argue that pre-1959 had not been racist, as the revolutionary government has always insisted. This chapter historicizes the emotions around domestic service and demonstrates that an institution that had always distilled racial hierarchy in Cuba into its purest form was used to argue for a horizontal equality that never existed.

The introduction to Hierarchies at Home presents the central argument: Although women of African descent only briefly made up the majority of domestic servants in Cuba before 1959, for the entirety of the twentieth century the archetypal figure of a domestic servant in Cuba was an African-descended woman. The centrality of the black Cuban woman to the image of domestic service mattered because the work was a primary way that racialized hierarchies reproduced in Cuba throughout the twentieth century. Cuba’s public-facing image after its war for independence was a country founded on anti-racist ideals. But the steady association between blackness and domestic service sustained and revealed a stratification that placed African-descended Cubans in positions of subservience to white Cubans and ran counter to the public image. The introduction briefly reviews literature on domestic service in the United States, the Caribbean, and Latin America, and outlines the chapters.