Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Nostalgia, place, and making peace with modernity in East Asia

2010; Routledge; Volume: 13; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13688790.2010.520270

1466-1888

Margaret Hillenbrand,

Socioeconomic Development in Asia

This essay sets out to theorize the nostalgia boom that has held East Asia in thrall to the past for some years now. It begins by noting that this nostalgic sentiment often has an ersatz cast, not least since much of it harks back to epochs—Showa-era Japan, 1930s Hong Kong, colonial Taiwan—of which the ‘remembering’ subject has no bodily recollection. This strange vogue for the unremembered past is typically interpreted as a flight from time, and from a troubled particular present in particular: Japan's oil shocks, the looming Hong Kong handover, KMT rule in Taiwan, and so on. The present essay argues, however, that this scene realigns its component parts into a different picture when we view it through the comparative lens. Seen not contextually, but intertextually across the region, this yearning for yesteryear expresses not just a flight from time, but from place, too, and from one locale in particular. This abandoned site is the city of lived memory, a psycho-physical topos to which nostalgia has quite obstinately refused to stick. Underlying this reticence is the notion that the ‘really remembered’ city is not a proper ‘place’: earthy, gemütlich, and thus worthy of nostalgia. This notion persists across East Asia, and most especially in its literature and cinema, despite the plain fact that cities are ever more the region's primary site of dwelling. And behind this refusal to reconcile with the city as a place of home and hearth lies, unsurprisingly, the same queasy trepidation about modernity that has both plagued and sustained cultural practice both in East Asia and abroad. The essay concludes, however, by looking at two recent films—by Miike Takashi and Wong Kar-wai—which articulate an alternative aesthetic of nostalgia, and thus bring about something of a rapprochement between ‘place’ and the city-we-know.