The Future of Nostalgia (review)

Writing in the spirit of Walter Benjamin, Boym traces the history of a seemingly universal sentiment. But the word nostalgia, if not the traditions of return associated with it, is not as old as its Greek roots suggest. First used in a Swiss medical dissertation in 1688, nostalgia was the name for a medical condition curable through use of leeches or opium or, of course, return to the patient's homeland. Over time, the sentiment became a generalized cultural condition and in recent decades was only still in use as a medical diagnosis in Israel; in that case, however, it "is unclear whether this reflects a persistent yearning for the promised land or for the diasporic homelands left behind." Focusing on twentieth-century Eastern and Central European exiles, Boym considers how nostalgia operates in modern global culture. She identifies two main tropes of the modern condition, "restorative nostalgia" and "reflective nostalgia," though she recognizes these as simply tendencies along a continuum. The former "puts emphasis on nostos and proposes to rebuild the lost home and patch up the memory gaps," while the latter "dwells in algia, in longing and loss, the imperfect process of remembrance." Whether today we place emphasis on the first or second parts of the term makes a great difference for Boym, since the former usage provides an intellectual basis for the "antimodern myth-making of history" that operates "by means of a return to national symbols and myth and, occasionally, through conspiracy theories." Reflective nostalgia, meanwhile, can produce an ethics of resistance to paranoid narratives that portray the world as divided between conspiratorial enemies and fellow patriots. Boym's book is a case study en route to "an alternative, nonteleological history"—a historiography that "includes conjectures and counterfactual possibilities" but avoids the most dangerous aspects of invented traditions and truths.