Fixing the hiatus between the habitus of memory and nostalgia

Abstract

Dennis Walder"s Postcolonial nostalgias (2011) demonstrates coherent scholarship based on a critique of representation. It delves into the twilight zone identified by E.J. Hobsbawm as existing between history and memory in the finale of The age of Empire (1989), from which Walder gleans uncertainty, obscurity and fuzziness. Penetrating this uncertainty involves identifying the sources of nostalgia in that hiatus between history and memory. Walder"s original contribution lies in the intellectual temperament of "homing in" (no pun intended) on the selective nostalgia involving constructions of home and deconstructions of colonial histories of silences and hidden lossesin the identity-making scripts of empire. This is one of the hallmarks of Walder"s significant contribution to the field of memory studies in literature, if ever there was one, as he explores the nature of longing as a state of mind attending the contemplation of the possibility of a return to a homeland. Only in the self-reflexivity concerning such return "may the sense of the difference between present and past at the heart of nostalgia counteract its undeniably negative tug towards self-indulgence and misperception" (2011: 9).