sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I just posted over at gnovis on one of my pet topics: nostalgia. The meat of the post concerns a discussion of religious fundamentalism that I read today in "Empire" by Hardt & Negri, but I also pull in some comments on iPods, public transportation, bowling, the 1989 NBA finals, and heterosexual man-kisses. How could you possibly NOT read it?

I have long had a vaguely secretive fascination with what I'm going to call, in this post, "collective nostalgia," though I am often more inclined to call it "false nostalgia," emphasizing that the object of this nostalgia is generally something imaginary.

To scholars of nationalism and nation building, this concept is quite familiar, in principle if not in name -- the public memory that underlies national histories is characterized by a collective memory (and collective forgetting) that is selective, essentialized, and at times imagined.
-Full Article at gnovisjournal.org