Nostalgia Toward the Future. In: BECKER, Tobias; TRIGG, Dylan. The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia.
Autor: Lucia Santa-Cruz
Breve resumo: The Routledge Handbook of Nostalgia serves as a guide to the complex and often contradictory concept of nostalgia, as well as the field of “nostalgia studies” more broadly.
This chapter comes up with a projective perspective on nostalgia. Instead of treating nostalgia as only a past-oriented emotion, it suggests that we conceive of nostalgia as an active, creative, productive and future-oriented strength. Even if it represents the mourning of a lost object, time, person, or country, future-oriented nostalgia perceives that loss a source of strength for elaborating on historical and personal experiences. This considers nostalgia as an active force, driven to the future although based on the past. In this perspective, nostalgia assumes a broader meaning than just a melancholic state of mind, often fatalistic and passive. By this sense, nostalgia is consciousness of the potentialities of the past.