Description
Book SynopsisCultures as well as individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of "futures worth preserving". The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the underlying assumptions which inform them. Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future.
Trade Review"What remains to be explored, and for which this edited volume has laid an important foundation, is the desire called utopia (sensu Fredric Jameson), its entanglement with values, its cultural manifestations across the globe, and its influence on concepts of nostalgia and sustainability." Anna Tabouratzidis, Kult_online, 64 (2021)
