Jacobus Kloppers, an eminent composer, organist, pedagogue, and scholar, significantly contributed to musicological and organ teaching in South Africa and Canada and, in the latter context, art music, and liturgical composition. A Passage of Nostalgia – The Life and Work of Jacobus Kloppers, as a symbolic gesture, constitute recognition of his work both in South Africa and Canada. This publication is unique in that, apart from relevant disciplinary perspectives, biographical and autobiographical narrative, and anecdote, all constitute a necessary means through which the authors illuminate Kloppers’ compositional process and its creative outcomes. In this regard, Kloppers generously dedicated his time to the project to make information on his life and work available, often in complex ways. This retrospective input supports the work offered as an authentic, self-reflective recounting of a life of dedicated service in music. The construct of nostalgia as an overarching theme to this volume on some level denotes Kloppers’ position of cultural and religious ‘insidedness’ and ‘outsidedness’. However, apart from representing a return to a lost and challenging past, the composer’s creative work affirms his individuality, sense of artistic self, and propensity for spiritual acceptance and tolerance. Moreover, nostalgia in his oeuvre takes on importance as a rhetorical artistic practice by which continuity is as central as discontinuity.

Can one be nostalgic for the home one never had? Why is it that the age of globalization is accompanied by a no less global epidemic of nostalgia? Can we know what we are nostalgic for? In the seventeenth century, Swiss doctors believed that opium, leeches, and a trek through the Alps would cure nostalgia. In 1733 a Russian commander, disgusted with the debilitating homesickness rampant among his troops, buried a soldier alive as a deterrent to nostalgia. In her new book, Svetlana Boym develops a comprehensive approach to this elusive ailment. Combining personal memoir, philosophical essay, and historical analysis, Boym explores the spaces of collective nostalgia that connect national biography and personal self-fashioning in the twenty-first century. She guides us through the ruins and construction sites of post-communist cities -- St. Petersburg, Moscow, Berlin, and Prague-and the imagined homelands of exiles-Benjamin, Nabokov, Mandelstam, and Brodsky. From Jurassic Park to the Totalitarian Sculpture Garden, from love letters on Kafka's grave to conversations with Hitler's impersonator, Boym unravels the threads of this global epidemic of longing and its antidotes.

The Promise of Nostalgia analyses a range of texts – including The Virgin Suicides, both the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides’ and Sofia Coppola’s screen adaptation, photography of Detroit’s ‘abandoned spaces’, and blogger Tavi Gevinson's media output – to explore nostalgia as a prominent affect in contemporary American cultural production. Counter to the prevalent caricature of nostalgia as anti-future, the book proposes a more nuanced reading of its stakes and meanings. Instead of understanding it as evidence of the absence of utopia it contends that there is a masked utopian impulse in this nostalgia ‘mode’ and critical potential in what has typically been dismissed as ideological. This book will be of interest to scholars, graduate students and upper-level undergraduate students interested in contemporary culture, cultural theory, media studies, the Frankfurt School, utopian studies and American literature and culture.

Challenging the stereotype that black people who lived under South African apartheid have no happy memories of the past, this examination into nostalgia carves out a path away from the archetypical musings. Even though apartheid itself had no virtue, the author, himself a young black man who spent his childhood under apartheid, insists that it was not a vast moral desert in the lives of those living in townships. In this deep meditation on the experiences of those who lived through apartheid, it points out that despite the poverty and crime, there was still art, literature, music, and morals that, when combined, determined the shape of black life during that era of repression.

In "Ice: a passage through time," Hal Gage documents the soul and essence of ice. Far from a survey project or linear documentation, Gage's photographs dig deeper to an emotional level uncovering a personality and emotion in ice. Although beautiful, fascinating and sometimes awe inspiring, ice is also the canary in the coal mine for changes in our global climate. Gage's work is a metaphor and warning for what we might loose in this quiet crisis developing before our eyes.

This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical “snippets of experience” written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for seamlessly melding, poetically and dream-like, the intensively personal with the everyday and the world-historical. They illuminate the formative conditions for the thinking which she was to develop into her majestic work on nostalgia. Importantly, these pieces fill in gaps in understanding the genesis and scope of her take on the world. For readers both familiar with her work and for those new to it, The Origins of Nostalgia will enable our own cultural past as well as that of the former Soviet Union to be viewed in a different light.

Often thought of as the quintessential home or the Eden from which humanity has fallen, the natural world has long been a popular object of nostalgic narratives. In Reclaiming Nostalgia, Jennifer Ladino assesses the ideological effects of this phenomenon by tracing its dominant forms in American literature and culture since the closing of the frontier in 1890. While referencing nostalgia for pastoral communities and for untamed and often violent frontiers, she also highlights the ways in which nostalgia for nature has served as a mechanism for social change, a model for ethical relationships, and a motivating force for social and environmental justice.