Content area
Full Text
Home is, I suppose, just a child's idea. A house at night, and a lamp in the house. A place to feel safe.
-V. S. Naipaul1
Nostaklígja: Icelandic slang, a combination of the French word "nostalgie" and the Icelandic word "klígja," which denotes the gall like taste you get in your mouth just before you throw up. Used where an overly romantic view of a bygone era transcends good taste and/or common sense.2
Nostalgia is something that we do not understand very well; indeed it is a concept that even the most sophisticated of its critics acknowledge is paradoxical. Its history shows it to have been variously treated as a physical disorder, a mental disorder, a "mere" emotion, and a symptom of the modern age. It involves a backward glance through history, but not toward a place or even a time that is necessarily real. It is therefore not really historical, although it has been called a "historical emotion." It fuels parochial and cosmopolitan, as well as radical and conservative, moral and political imaginations and their projects. It belongs neither to the present, the past, nor to the future, and yet it remains in some way attached to all three of these temporal zones. It would be easy to remain vague about nostalgia, risking nothing and letting our presumably shared intuitions do the work of establishing the pretence that we are in agreement about its central terms of reference, its power, and its deep implication in the fabric of our modern psychic lives. And yet to do so would be to miss the opportunity to succeed in becoming even slightly clearer about what nostalgia is and how it works both for and against us. In this sense, I agree with Svetlana Boym, who argues in her suggestive book devoted to aspects of postcommunist European nostalgia that nostalgia "speaks in riddles and puzzles, so one must face them in order not to become its next victim-or its next victimizer."3
This paper ostensibly centers on the social and political dimensions of the "European" colonial experience, represented in its historical aspect, in two so-called "heritage" films.4 The real weight of my account, however, falls on the specification of nostalgia-on what it is and what it has been taken...