American Nostalgia

An old story of mine I call "Rock and Roll Stew" takes an interest in nostalgia. Nostalgia as a sentimental retreat from current reality.

Reading Dreadful Sorry’s Exploration of American Nostalgia, a review by Rachael Nevins gives a few ideas and a book to read. The ideas are about race and that nostalgia has a mythic, fact-free component.

...So is the fact that the “idyllic childhood” that she looks back at “in a golden light” was made so because, despite the deprivations suffered by her own ancestors, she was mostly sheltered from the complexities, unfairness, and brutality of the world. This shelter was available to her because, though she was neither wealthy nor privileged, she was white. She examines this fact throughout her collection.

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...She writes, “Nostalgia appeals to me because it can link us to the past—a kind of gateway to understanding our history.” By drawing her attention to the past, nostalgia compels her to look more closely, allowing her to see what she might have missed before.

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 ...The mythmaker, on the other hand, tends to romanticize what others might disavow. Looking through the documentary and physical evidence, however, Niesslein finds a story that is far less romantic than the myth she had made about her great-great grandmother....

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 ...In its earliest uses, according to the OED (the oldest quotation is from 1756), nostalgia referred to an “acute longing for familiar surroundings.” It is sharp, potentially painful. Later, around 1900, nostalgia began to be used also to refer to a “sentimental longing for or regretful memory of a period of the past,” or a “sentimental imagining or evocation of a period of the past.” The haze of sentimentality is not innocent; it can, in fact, be “ignerant”—a “Pittsburghese” word, Niesslein says, meaning “willfully stupid or offensive.”....

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 ...Dispelling the haze of American nostalgia matters, and in Dreadful Sorry, Niesslein shows how it can be done, particularly by those of us who are white—and that, after it is stripped of sentimentality, nostalgia can be a force that drives us to make a beloved place better.

This will not be the first story I tackle with the laptop but it will not be the last.

sch 8/13/22