In recent years, South African literature, art, and cultural criticism have been registering the feelings of disappointment, nostalgia, and of a general impasse that signify a crisis of postapartheid imaginations. At the same time, we can observe a turn in cultural production toward reexamining South Africa's socialist archives and reconnecting them to the present-day predicaments and emerging social movements. Reading these processes in Imraan Coovadia's latest novel, artworks by Haroon Gunn-Salie, and an exhibition by the Stellenbosch Open Forum, this article argues that they confront the feelings of postapartheid disillusionment by critically re-invoking memories of the 1970-80s socialist practices in South Africa and the transnational frameworks they involved. It argues that these changing approaches to the socialist archives can be read as a decolonial critique, which links the described trends in South African culture to other "post-dependence" (and specifically, post-socialist) contexts worldwide.

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken to be and do in and across specific locations, and what social, political and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format.

More than any other recent event, Vladimir Putin's speeches in the wake of the annexation of Crimea raise questions about the political uses of nostalgia in the post-Soviet context. On March 18, 2014, during a carefully orchestrated festive concert in the Red Square, Putin solemnly declared that "after a hard, long and exhaustive journey at sea, Crimea and Sevastopol are returning to their home harbor, to the native shores, to the home port, to Russia!" ( Ria Novosti 2014 ). At first sight, Putin's rhetoric is a schoolbook example of what Svetlana Boym has called "restorative nostalgia," with its characteristic mobilization of collective myths and its wished-for return to, or rebuilding of, a "lost home" (Boym 2001).On closer inspection, however, Putin's interpretation of the events was less clear-cut. The Homeric story of Crimea's exhaustive journey at sea, and its subsequent sailing back to Russia, allocated the initiative with the peninsula itself, a reading that resonated with the Russian government's emphasis on Crimeans' right to self-determination. Yet, in another speech delivered to Duma Deputies on that same day, Putin implied that it was Russia that had returned to Crimea, symbolically reclaiming those Crimean places that were, supposedly, pivotal to Russia's identity. The ancient Crimean site of Khersones, he emphasized, was the site where Prince Vladimir was baptized in the 10th century; Sevastopol was the birthplace of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; and the peninsula still harbored the graves of Russian soldiers from the 19th and 20th centuries.Flexible as these narratives of "home" and "return" were, a constant factor was their thrust to cultivate a sense of shared belonging. Vladimir's baptism, Putin posited, was a "spiritual feat" that united "the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus"; and Crimea, "similar to Russia as a whole," had always been a multi-ethnic region where Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, and other groups had lived side by side for centuries, blending their cultures and traditions over time ( Ria Novosti 2014 ). Through references to a common "home," nostalgic narratives about the return of (or to) Crimea sought to create political consensus among diverse groups, both on the peninsula and in Russia itself. The grandiloquent celebrations of the Crimean campaign thus testify to not only the political force

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