A strong emotional attachment to the memory of empire runs deep in British culture. In recent years, that memory has become a battleground in a long-drawn ideological war, inflecting debates on race, class, gender, culture, the UK’s future and its place in the world. This provocative and passionate book surveys the scene of the imperial memory wars in contemporary Britain, exploring how the myths that structure our views of empire came to be, and how they inform the present. Taking in such diverse subjects as Rory Stewart and inter-war adventure fiction, man’s facial hair and Kipling, the Alt-right and the Red Wall, Imperial Nostalgia asks how our relationship with our national past has gone wrong, and how it might be improved.

Poetry. IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS is the second collection by poet and translator Joshua Edwards. Written in Mexico, China, Germany, Nicaragua, and during a train trip around the U.S. and Canada, the book reckons with itinerancy, innocence, and American privilege, while pointing toward a strange horizon. "'Through a turnstile, past a diorama / of ruins, into the ruins themselves, ' Joshua Edwards escorts us into the desert of the real in his haunting and prismatic second collection, IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS. Deepening the archaeological excavation--or is it a salvage operation?--of his first book, CAMPECHE, Edwards brushes the dust from the remains of history, desire, and nostalgia itself, to reveal 'ruins as diorama, ruins as sculpture, / birds as music boxes. Everything / moves toward metaphor and dream.' A breathtaking cascade of parables, images, lyrics, and aphorisms, IMPERIAL NOSTALGIAS is necessary work, and required reading for anyone who has felt the cold undertow beneath all beauty. 'Life, ' writes this poet, 'is terrible enough without swans.'"--Srikanth Reddy Symbolic gestures feel bound not by referential expression, but by mystery and drama. If all languages are essentially alike, then softness or firmness is a matter of tissues in which blood takes a clausal complement. Taste for etymology, however, comes from the poetry of crucial decision making, fruit in one hand and broad-bladed knife in the other.

A short, polemical study of the persistence of imperial nostalgia in modern British culture, politics, heritage and media.

Making a country great again is a theme for nationalist authoritarians. Across countries with past experience as great powers, nationalist politicians typically harken back to a golden age. In Nostalgia for Empire, Hakan Yavuz focuses on how this trend is playing out in Turkey, a nation that lost its empire a century ago and which is now ruled by a nationalist authoritarian who invokes nostalgia for the Ottoman era to buttress his power. Yavuz delves into the social and political origins of expressions of nostalgia for the Ottoman Empire among various groups in Turkey. Exploring why and how certain segments of Turkish society has selectively brought the Ottoman Empire back into public consciousness, Yavuz traces how memory of the Ottoman period has changed. He draws from Turkish literature, mainstream history books, and other cultural products from the 1940s to the twenty-first century to illustrate the transformation. He finds that two key aspects of Turkish literature are, on the one hand, its criticism of the Jacobin modernization of Turkey under Ataturk, and on the other a desire to search the Ottoman past for an alternative political language. Yavuz goes onto to explain how major political actors, including President Erdogan, utilize the concept of empire to craft distinctive conceptualizations of nationalism, Islam, and Ottomanism that exploit national nostalgia. As remembered today, the Ottoman past seems to be grounded in contemporary conservative Islamic values. The combination of these memories and values generates a portrait of Turkey as a victim of major powers, besieged by imagined enemies both internal and external. In mapping out how nostalgia is crafted and spread, this book not only sheds light on Turkey's unique case but also deepens our understanding of nationalism, religion, and modernity.

Edge of Empire examines struggles over urban space in three contemporary first world cities in an attempt to map the real geographies of colonialism and postcolonialism as manifest in modern society. From London, the one-time heart of the empire, to Perth and Brisbane, scenes of Aboriginal claims for the sacred in the space of the modern city, Jacobs emphasises the global geography of the local and unravels the spatialised cultural politics of postcolonial processes. Edge of Empire forms the basis for understanding imperialism over space and time, and is a recognition of the unruly spatial politics of race and nation, nature and culture, past and present.

This volume investigates how versions of Trojan War narratives written in Greek in the first through fifth centuries C.E. created nostalgia for audiences. In ancient education, the Iliad and the Odyssey were used as models through which students learned Greek language and literature. This, combined with the ruling elite’s financial encouragement of re-creations of the Greek past, created a culture of nostalgia. This book explores the different responses to this climate, particularly in the case of the third-century C.E. poet Quintus of Smyrna’s epic Posthomerica. Positioning itself as a sequel to the Iliad and a prequel to the Odyssey, the Posthomerica is unique in its middle-of-the-road response to nostalgia for Homer’s epics. This book contrasts Quintus’ poem with other responses to nostalgia for Homeric narratives in Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Some authors contradict pivotal events of the Iliad and Odyssey, such as the first-century orator Dio Chrysostom’s Trojan Speech, which claims that the Trojan hero Hector did not in fact die, contrary to the Iliad’s account. Others re-created Homeric narratives but did not contradict them, improvising some elements and adding others. Quintus strikes a compromise in his epic, re-imagining Homeric narrative by introducing new characters and scenarios, while at the same time retaining the Iliad and Odyssey’s aesthetics. Nostalgias for Homer in Greek Literature of the Roman Empire is of interest to students and scholars working on Homeric reception and the Greek literature of the Roman Empire, as well as those interested in classical literature and reception more broadly.

Comparative study of the writings and strategies of European women in two colonies, French Algeria and British Kenya, during the twentieth century. Its central theme is women's discursive contribution to the construction of colonial nostalgia.