In her 2001 book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that nostalgia is an affective experience based on two simultaneous forms of longing to return home: one palliative and comforting, as we try to attach ourselves vicariously to idealized worlds and pasts that may or may not exist; and the other bittersweet and painful, as we grapple with palpable absence, irretrievable loss, and the impossibility of return. It is a force that profoundly shapes the way we understand our own sense of identity, belonging, and longevity, in both the individual and collective senses. Consequently, nostalgia, for Boym, “is not merely an individual sickness but a symptom of our age, a historical emotion,” one that is, in fact, “coeval with modernity itself.”

25 years later, and especially in the context of Russian and Eastern/Central European cultural production, Boym’s insights are more timely than ever. When she writes that nostalgia can be seen “as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals,” she diagnoses a long horizon of catastrophic developments whose true scale and impact we are only now starting to understand. In a time marked by deepening crises – environmental degradation, the global wealth gap and the digital divide, pandemic and outbreak, and the rise of far-right political movements and military violence – Boym’s explorations of nostalgia and humanism are precisely the type of theoretical intervention we require in these profoundly inhuman times.

This seminar, held every year since 1997 as part of the ACLA’s annual conference, and which Boym herself co-founded with Thomas Jesús Garza, honors her scholarship and memory. We welcome papers that re-awaken and dive deeper into the socio-cultural, political, and aesthetic dimensions of nostalgia and its relation to catastrophe and crisis in the Russian and Eastern/Central European context. 

We welcome the following topics:

• nostalgia’s relation to catastrophic events in the socialist or post-socialist world;
• material cultures of nostalgia and their functions and meanings in wider efforts to commemorate or erase the past;
• emotional geographies of nostalgia, especially in sites marked by Anthropocene or military violence;
• nostalgia’s discursive dimensions, applications or institutional links to state power or modes of resistance;
• nostalgia’s place in contemporary popular culture, performance, or gaming cultures; and
• nostalgia’s relationship to unlived or displaced lives, foreclosed future possibilities, or hauntologies of the self or nation.

Please contact seminar organizer Drago Momcilovic at [email protected] for more information. We hope to generate enough preliminary interest and participation to put toward an edited scholarly volume or special-themed journal issue, which will also highlight the work, legacy, and continued relevance of Boym’s work, especially in Russian and Eastern/Central European narratives of catastrophe and crisis.