Nostalgia retroactively reconstructs past communities as more unified than they were.
Evidence
It is a moot point by anybody who takes this argument directly on the pulses, as to whether they ever functioned in that way. Perhaps they never functioned in that way. This may be, indeed, what the narrative of the West is like: the notion that we told of the story we told ourselves, about their functioning in that way. … You know the story about the organic community? The organic community was just always in the childhood you have left behind. Raymond Williams has a wonderful essay on these people, a range of social critics who say you can measure the present in relation to the past, and you know the past because back then it was much more organic and integrated. When was “back then”? Well, when I was a child, there was always some adult saying, “When I was a child, it was much more integrated.” And so, eventually, some of these great collectivities are rather like those people who have an activity of historical nostalgia going on in their retrospective reconstructions. We always reconstructed them more essentially, more homogenously, more unified, less contradictorily than they ever were, once you actually know anything about them. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 194
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- XREF: Directly useful for reading nostalgia-driven imaginings of a homogenous national past in Islamophobia discourse; also echoes Hobsbawm’s invented traditions.
- SEED: The ‘organic community’ as a perpetually receding past could anchor an essay on how anti-Muslim rhetoric appeals to an imagined integrated past.
Related
- Nostalgia for lost community displaces analysis of its present causes (similarity 0.80)