We are familiar with the importance of 'progress' and 'change'. But what about loss? Across the world, from Beijing to Birmingham, people are talking about loss: about the loss that occurs when populations try to make new lives in new lands as well as the loss of traditions, languages and landscapes. The Geography of Nostalgia is the first study of loss as a global and local phenomenon, something that occurs on many different scales and which connects many different people. The Geography of Nostalgia explores nostalgia as a child of modernity but also as a force that exceeds and challenges modernity. The book begins at a global level, addressing the place of nostalgia within both global capitalism and anti-capitalism. In Chapter Two it turns to the contested role of nostalgia in debates about environmentalism and social constructionism. Chapter Three addresses ideas of Asia and India as nostalgic forms. The book then turns to more particular and local landscapes: the last three chapters explore the yearnings of migrants for distant homelands, and the old cities and ancient forests that are threatened by modernity but which modern people see as sites of authenticity and escape. The Geography of Nostalgia is a reader friendly text that will appeal to a variety of markets. In the university sector it is a student friendly, interdisciplinary text that will be welcomed across a broad range of courses, including cultural geography, post-colonial studies, landscape and planning, sociology and history.

We are familiar with the importance of 'progress' and 'change'. But what about loss? Across the world, from Beijing to Birmingham, people are talking about loss: about the loss that occurs when populations try to make new lives in new lands as well as the loss of traditions, languages and landscapes. The Geography of Nostalgia is the first study of loss as a global and local phenomenon, something that occurs on many different scales and which connects many different people. The Geography of Nostalgia explores nostalgia as a child of modernity but also as a force that exceeds and challenges modernity. The book begins at a global level, addressing the place of nostalgia within both global capitalism and anti-capitalism. In Chapter Two it turns to the contested role of nostalgia in debates about environmentalism and social constructionism. Chapter Three addresses ideas of Asia and India as nostalgic forms. The book then turns to more particular and local landscapes: the last three chapters explore the yearnings of migrants for distant homelands, and the old cities and ancient forests that are threatened by modernity but which modern people see as sites of authenticity and escape. The Geography of Nostalgia is a reader friendly text that will appeal to a variety of markets. In the university sector it is a student friendly, interdisciplinary text that will be welcomed across a broad range of courses, including cultural geography, post-colonial studies, landscape and planning, sociology and history.

Although the end of the Cold War was greeted with great enthusiasm by people in the East and the West, the ensuing social and especially economic changes did not always result in the hoped-for improvements in people's lives. This led to widespread disillusionment that can be observed today all across Eastern Europe. Not simply a longing for security, stability, and prosperity, this nostalgia is also a sense of loss regarding a specific form of sociability. Even some of those who opposed communism express a desire to invest their new lives with renewed meaning and dignity. Among the younger generation, it surfaces as a tentative yet growing curiosity about the recent past. In this volume scholars from multiple disciplines explore the various fascinating aspects of this nostalgic turn by analyzing the impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences, and political orientation. They argue persuasively that this nostalgia should not be seen as a wish to restore the past, as it has otherwise been understood, but instead it should be recognized as part of a more complex healing process and an attempt to come to terms both with the communist era as well as the new inequalities of the post-communist era.

This book looks at the role nostalgia plays in the radical imagination to offer a new guide to the history and politics of the left. In "Left in the Past", Bonnett re-assesses the place of nostalgia within radical politics and, in doing so, provides a new introduction to the history and politics of the left. Bonnett argues that nostalgia has been a chronic, but repressed, aspect of the socialist imagination. "Left in the Past" is premised on the idea that, in our 'post-socialist era', the relationship between radicalism and a sense of loss, and the ambivalent position of socialism in and against modernity, can be viewed with greater clarity. In Section One of the book, Bonnett shows the centrality and repression of nostalgia in both 19th-century radicalism and anti-colonial radicalism. In Section Two, he explores the consequences of this inheritance by way of 20th century and contemporary studies of revolutionary intellectuals and intellectual culture. Bonnett's unique approach in how to understand the left in an age of post-socialism will make book a needed resource for anyone interested in the history and politics of the left and radicalism.

Makes correlations between success and geography, explaining how such rising centers of innovation as San Francisco and Austin are likely to offer influential opportunities and shape the national and global economies in positive or detrimental ways.

In What Nostalgia Was, historian Thomas Dodman traces the history of clinical "nostalgia" from when it was first coined in 1688 to describe deadly homesickness until the late nineteenth century, when it morphed into the benign yearning for a lost past we are all familiar with today. Dodman explores how people, both doctors and sufferers, understood nostalgia in late seventeenth-century Swiss cantons (where the first cases were reported) to the Napoleonic wars and to the French colonization of North Africa in the latter 1800s. A work of transnational scope over the longue duree, the book is an intellectual biography of a "transient mental illness" that was successively reframed according to prevailing notions of medicine, romanticism, and climatic and racial determinism. At the same time, Dodman adopts an ethnographic sensitivity to understand the everyday experience of living with nostalgia. In so doing, he explains why nostalgia was such a compelling diagnosis for war neuroses and generalized socioemotional disembeddedness at the dawn of the capitalist era and how it can be understood as a powerful bellwether of the psychological effects of living in the modern age.

A sweeping reassessment of our longing for the past, from the rise of “retro” to the rhetoric of Brexit and Trump. Nostalgia has a bad reputation. Its critics dismiss it as mere sentimentality or, worse, a dangerous yearning for an imagined age of purity. And nostalgia is routinely blamed for trivializing the past and obscuring its ugly sides. In Yesterday, Tobias Becker offers a more nuanced and sympathetic view. Surveying the successive waves of nostalgia that swept the United States and Europe after the Second World War, he shows that longing for the past is more complex and sometimes more beneficial than it seems. The current meaning of “nostalgia” is surprisingly recent: until the 1960s, it usually just meant homesickness, in keeping with the original Greek word. Linking popular culture to postwar politics in the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, Becker explains the shift in meaning. He also responds to arguments against nostalgia, showing its critics as often shortsighted in their own ways as they defend an idea of progress no less naïve than the wistfulness they denounce. All too often, nostalgia itself is criticized, as if its merit did not depend on which specific past one longs for. Taking its title from one of the most popular songs of all time, and grounded in extensive research, Yesterday offers a rigorous and entertaining perspective on divisive issues in culture and politics. Whether we are revisiting, reviving, reliving, reenacting, or regressing, and whether these activities find expression in politics, music, fashion, or family history, nostalgia is inevitable. It is also powerful, not only serving to define the past but also orienting us toward the future we will create.