Nostalgia for lost community displaces analysis of its present causes
Evidence
The beautiful image of the Caring Adult community contrasted sharply with the reality of the suburban city, with its empty streets, seven-lane strips, mobile nuclear families, and commuter parents. Portraits of this supportive, loving community always referred to the past, never to the present reasons that this type of community was absent. This ‘culture of nostalgia’ (Skolnick 1991) encouraged people to change their feelings about the community, as if the feelings themselves were the only problem. Officials tried to inspire citizens to recreate that dreamed-of tight-knit community; the image helped vaporize volunteers’ expressions of public-spiritedness. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics, 198
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in mechanisms of solidarity that avoid politics, and to work on nostalgic ‘imagined community’ claims (Anderson). — connects to: Old moral panics about community loss breed reactionary nostalgia rather than constructive reform — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1445; Pervasive cultural nostalgia signals an inability to make new memories — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 249; Nostalgia retroactively reconstructs past communities as more unified than they were. (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Old moral panics about community loss breed reactionary nostalgia rather than constructive reform
#corroborates(0.85) — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1445 - Nostalgia retroactively reconstructs past communities as more unified than they were.
#qualifies(0.75) - Pervasive cultural nostalgia signals an inability to make new memories
#expands(0.72) — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 249 - Contemporary cultural objects repress the socio-economic context that past ones merely lost
#expands(0.70) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 694