Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity

Oral History in Southeast Asia

“…These accounts of the past, as Fritzsche notes, provide "a critique of the claims and pieties of the present." 70 It is not only individuals of course who choose to represent the past in particular ways. States have the biggest monopoly in this regard when it comes to constructing national histories.…”

Yearning for a Past that Never Was: Baseball, Steroids, and the Anxiety of the American Dream

“…K. K. Smith suggests that nostalgia was initially used as a psychological category used to explain the ''ailments'' of resisting modernization and later as a discursive mode to dismiss those who resist the narratives of progress and technological advancement as irrational. Fritzsche (2001) contends that nostalgia contributes to an alienation from modernity, where the longing for a different place linked to a different time serves as a mode of escape from the present governed by the telos of progress, rationality, and technology. While other discursive communities eschew nostalgia as regressive, baseball embraces rhetorics of nostalgia as essential to its character.…”

Repetition without Reproduction: Esko Männikkö’s The Female Pike

“…The photographs elicit nostalgia for the lost certainty of the nation as a guarantor of identity, but in repeating that loss, they reaffirm it. After all, one must recognize the absolute irreversibility of the loss before nostalgia is possible (Fritzsche 2001(Fritzsche , 1595.…”