Richard Louv wrote in America II, a text composed during Ronald Reagan’s first term, “America is awash in nostalgia.” Now it seems, the country is flooded in nostalgia. Not only are the reproductions of political slogans, mass production of automobiles with sleek stylings of yesterday, and the endless parade of films featuring heroes from the Bronze and Modern Age of comic books, the Silver Age of television, and retro clothing, making nostalgia, as experience and aesthetic, a centerpiece of American cultural living, but also looking backward has assumed the position of political paradigm in the United States. Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh tackles that discourse in a unique way, articulating nostalgia as historiographical method, a way of reading the production of consumer signs as events themselves. Rather than a relic representing an event, the relic is the event, in Chabon’s landscape. Approaching his work through the confluence of analysis offered by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Hayden White, this paper contends Chabon builds a way forward for nostalgia by figuring it as a method of charting the intersections between individual and popular memories. Rather than constructing a depthless parody of the past, as Fredric Jameson and others might contend, nostalgia, for Chabon, serves as a framework for understanding the borderlands of competing national, consumer, ethnic, and individual memories. In this fragmented state, for Chabon, popular culture – films, art, novels, music, and even critical theory – converge in a coherent matrix of nostalgic history.
About the presenterJeremy Christensen
Jeremy Christensen currently serves as an adjunct instructor of English and has held academic appointments across the US in both English and communication departments. Primarily interested in memory studies and political rhetoric, he concentrates his research projects on social movements and popular culture.