3 items
theamericanscholar.org
Jess Love acquires a binder of 92 DVDs from a neighbour’s porch and talks herself into a moral framework around physical media, parenting, and opting out of streaming. The real subject is the reminiscence bump: why the technologies of your formative years feel not just familiar but correct, and how nostalgia oscillates between protective instinct and self-delusion.
Arnold-Foster offers a cultural history that traces nostalgia’s journey from a fatal medical diagnosis (a homesickness severe enough to kill C17th Swiss mercenaries) to the soft, wistful feeling we recognise today. She is compelling on nostalgia’s medical past, but earns contemporary relevance by showing how the emotion was gradually weaponised by advertisers, politicians and an industry happy to sell the feeling back to us. She’s admirably even-handed on its political use: the left have our own sentimental golden ages (the heydays of the NHS and BBC) as well as its recent association with the dreaded MAGA and Brexit. Her argument that nostalgia is rooted in selective, reconstructive memory gives the book genuine rigour. Occasionally the sweep outruns the depth, but as an introductory history of a feeling that quietly shapes how we vote, buy and remember, it’s illuminating.
