Nostalgia in Times of Uncertainty: (Re)articulations of the Past, Present, and Future of Globalization

Taking the United Kingdom, the United States, and China as cases, this chapter explores the transnational connections of the rhetoric of nostalgia—or, more precisely, what Roland Robertson (1990) calls “willful nostalgia”—in the current phase of globalization. Analyzing these cases through a lens of global studies enables an understanding of nostalgia both as a response to the paradoxes—such as between the compressed world and the intensified distinctions of clusters of nations, between integration and retreat, and between globalization and deglobalization, generated by the globalization processes—and as a multifaceted construct associated with geotemporality, affect, politics, culture, and history. I contend that the divergent rhetoric of nostalgia reflects these countries’ different empirical stages and experiences of globalization and (re)articulations of the places to which they aspire in the future world. While the willful nostalgia under discussion has revealed the continuing tensions among nation-states, citizens, international relations, and humanity in the context of accelerated global capitalism, the conflictual and mutually constitutive relationship between globalization and nostalgia are also important to consider.