Make America Great Again (MAGA), Global Britain, and the Chinese Dream: Nostalgia in Times of Uncertainty Conferences uri icon

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abstract

  • The rise of nostalgia as a public sentiment, an articulation relating to time (not necessarily linear), and as a tool of political manipulation in an era of uncertainties (e.g., economic, political, public health, and environmental) raises questions about the relationships among geo-temporality, affect, politics, culture, and history. Taking the UK, the US, and China as cases, this paper aims to understand the transnational connections of the rhetoric of nostalgia – or, more precisely, what Robertson (1990) calls “willful nostalgia” – in the current phase of globalization. Despite the differences in their articulations, the willful nostalgias of the cases discussed have features in common. First, nostalgia – with its hybrid, multidirectional, affective orientation of time – allows the political leaders in the respective countries to move back and forth in time to bring back the “glorious” past; not even, necessarily, for the sake of the present, but rather for the promise of an imagined future. Second, identity politics – defining the Self against the Other – has become an important tool with which to create a dichotomous or oppositional trajectory of national belonging and to narrate the nation at the respective turning points of globalization. Third, while trade is integral to the rhetoric of nostalgia in all three cases, the politics of culture is also apparent. I contend that the divergent rhetoric of nostalgia reflects these countries’ different empirical stages and experiences of globalization and (re)articulations of the places to which they aspire in the future world. While the willful nostalgia under discussion has revealed the continuing tensions among nation-states, citizens, international relations, and humanity in the context of accelerated global capitalism, the conflictual and mutually constitutive relationship between globalization and nostalgia are also important to consider.