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  • Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity
  • David Herman
Andreea Deciu Ritivoi . Yesterday's Self: Nostalgia and the Immigrant Identity. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002. viii + 184 pp.

An incisive study of the interconnections among nostalgia, identity, and the immigrant experience, this book is written in a lucid, engaging style and will appeal to readers in a variety of disciplines. The book draws on sources ranging from philosophy, rhetoric, sociology, Homeric epic, literature (Defoe, Tournier, Nabokov), and immigrant memoirs to present a narrative-based model of identity whose relevance extends beyond the immigrant experience into human experience generally. Thus, although her specific focus is on "how immigrants deal with the transition from their culture of origin to the culture of adoption" (2); and although her final two chapters discuss as case studies the memoirs of Vera Calin and Eva Hoffman, who emigrated to the U.S. from Romania and Poland, respectively; Ritivoi's broader concern is with the relation between homesickness or nostalgia and adjustment to new sociocultural contexts. Adjustment of this sort throws into relief basic and general processes—processes fundamentally linked with the telling and interpretation of narratives—by which people seek to negotiate differences between past and present selves. As Ritivoi's powerfully integrative account suggests, phases of the self are only more or less reconcilable within the framework of an overarching life-story. In one form, nostalgia, when it reifies a particular stage of an unfolding self as more authentic than other, subsequent stages, can jeopardize the ongoing elaboration of a encompassing narrative of identity, e.g., one that can be used to bridge life in a culture of origin and life in an adopted culture. In a more productive form, nostalgia can function as "an interpretive stance in which a person is aware of the element of discordance in her life" (165), enabling immigrants to suture the self to new surroundings such that these can be accepted as reality. In any case, the immigrant experience affords a kind of laboratory for studying the temporal—more specifically, the narrative—dynamics of identity-construction in general.

As Ritivoi points out in her introduction (1-11), immigrants are faced, all too vividly, with the question of how much to change—and in what ways. In this context, "homesickness plays a crucial role, by creating and stimulating an awareness of personal history, identity patterns, alternatives, and necessities" (3). Exploring the dialectics of nostalgia and openness to change, the author draws on ideas from Paul Ricoeur's study of Oneself as Another to develop a narrative model of identity, whereby the self can be defined in dynamic terms as a process [End Page 360] rather than as a core or feature (6-7). In particular, Ritivoi adapts Ricoeur's etymological analysis of the concept of identity—a twofold notion with roots in both the Latin word idem (= same), according to which personal identity entails an enduring or even immutable essence, and the Latin word ipse (= self), according to which identity, no longer tied to claims for permanence, becomes open to variation, differences in degree, and transformation. Examining the constitution of selves in cross-cultural experiences of immigration, Ritivoi suggests how both aspects of identity, the idem and the ipse, factor into the strategies of survival and change, self-reinforcement and self-repudiation, using her two immigrant case studies to argue for a synthesis of two, apparently opposed views of personal identity, "realist" and "constructivist."

Chapter 1, "Longing to Be Home" (13-42), provides a wide-ranging history of the term nostalgia (coined in 1678 by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer of Mulhouse) and of changing understandings of the condition designated by that term. As Ritivoi notes, by the end of the 19th century, nostalgia was no longer part of medical discourse, such that by the time it entered American popular discourse in the 1950s it had come to denote a relatively harmless, "bittersweet" emotion. For Ritivoi herself, the key issue is that "nostalgia raises important questions about the role of the past and the present, about what it means to belong someplace, about continuity and gaps in one's personal history" (39). Chapter 2 outlines...

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