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Thomas Dodman, Tobias Becker. Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 420–421, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae572
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Nostalgia, we all know, comes dressed in sepia. In Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia, Tobias Becker uncovers it for us in black and white, like a photo negative: not the thing itself—emotion, disease, style, or whatever it may be—but rather a sprawling “nostalgia discourse,” or what is said about nostalgia. This is a book about “how and why the term nostalgia is used” (232), or has been used since the 1960s in the United States, United Kingdom, and, to a lesser extent, Germany and France. These uses have also tended to be negative, but in the pejorative sense of the word, bordering on insult. Few proudly claim to be nostalgic or like to be labeled as such; on the contrary, many are experts at telling others that they are stuck in the past. Herein lies the originality of Becker’s approach: Nostalgia is like modernity’s black hole, the “counterpart or antithesis to progress” (5) that we all need, whether to quietly comfort ourselves in the face of change or imply that we, unlike others, can still change for the better. (No wonder Derrida was interested in it). Its gravitational pull has been hard to ignore since the 1960s, Becker argues, when the teleology of progress came under intense scrutiny. It is not so much the History that is New here, but Nostalgia itself: The thing is in fact older and harks back to the late 17th century, when the term was first coined and defined as a deadly form of homesickness. Nostalgia has always been in dialectical tension with capitalist modernity and for 200 years people succumbed to it when forced to leave their homes (by war, migration, enslavement). But between the 19th and 20th centuries we learned to cope with nostalgic yearning and rearticulate it in time—as a lost past—rather than space. Cope with, and eventually indulge, for as Becker points out, nostalgia became a household word after the Second World War—its success rivaled only by the vitriol of its detractors.
