The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

We begin this chapter by outlining what constitutes a humiliating foreign policy. We then linger on a key feature in the phenomenology of political humiliation, namely the sense of being replaced. This sense manifests in a perception of being removed from importance and consequence – usually by someone not viewed as a worthy competitor. After describing the phenomenology of replacement, we point out that it is particularly important to understand this sentiment because it straddles personal and political psychology, and because a focus on the sense of replacement helps us distinguish normative and descriptive aspects of political humiliation. After discussing the phenomenology of replacement, we highlight the difference between democratic and autocratic rulers in their susceptibility to humiliation. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the dual role of humiliation as both driver and method of war.

This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

On 2 December, Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly’s The Student Prince in Heidelberg (or The Student Prince), a romance-filled operetta that does not have a happy ending, opened on Broadway, later becoming the longest-running musical of any sort to open on Broadway in the 1920s. Set in nineteenth-century Heidelberg, its tale of a prince who must leave behind his young love, a waitress at the inn he frequents, is set to an expansive musical score that features waltzes, marches, a buoyant drinking song and more. Other musicals that followed later in the month included Betty Lee, set in Southern California with a plot concerning a footrace in which a phonograph is the prize. Revues also appeared as the year drew to a close, further emphasizing the ubiquity of the genre.

This chapter examines the departure from Egypt from the perspective of oral history and personal collections. It shows how repatriated Italians remembered their departures, and their reception and integration in Italy. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of imperial nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate how departure and arrival evoked different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. Considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and the reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership for repatriated Italians in relation to other migrant departures to and from the Mediterranean.

This chapter draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

Black Rhodesian soldiers were integrated into the new Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU government, contrary to widespread fears of persecution. This was highly unusual, as in the aftermath of many wars of decolonisation, the fate of those who had fought for the colonial army was dire. Mugabe government’s prime motive was to retain the RAR’s military capabilities, which it relied upon to control conflicts between the liberation armies in the tumultuous post-independence period. This chapter also discusses how black ex-Rhodesian troops played a decisive role in quelling inter-liberation army fighting in the Assembly Points (APs) and the ZNA battalions that were being integrated during 1980 and early 1981. My interviewees felt that, during the conflicts of 1980–1, their military performance demonstrated their loyalty to the ‘government of the day’ and their military skills, and thus cemented their place in the ZNA. Finally, this chapter discusses the nostalgic reminiscences of these veterans and how the hindsight of the post-2000 ‘crisis’ years has impacted their narratives.

This chapter tracks the changes to the American conservative movement that have unfolded since the heyday of William F. Buckley, who founded the conservative magazine National Review in 1955. Centered on Buckley’s defiance of all things left wing and on his provocative writings on welfare, critiques of the New Deal, and Cold War anxieties, this chapter shows the conflicted relationship many contemporary American conservatives have with his legacy. "Serious conservatives" who place themselves in Buckley’s lineage find themselves alienated in the contemporary media landscape, which, although displaying the same incendiary spirit as Buckley’s essays and his television show Firing Line, lacks the intellectual seriousness that many found in his writings. More generally, this chapter identifies the recurrent themes in conservative writing and dwells on the agitational poetics of conservative essayism.

The variety of immigrant experiences expressed through the essay form is the subject of this chapter, which presents a panorama of writing by US immigrants who have found unique ways to give language to an often disorienting venture. The personal essay has proven to be a powerful tool for US writers exploring what it means to be a migrant or a descendant of migrants. Social scientists tend to look at the big picture when it comes to migration, theorizing and investigating migration as the large-scale movement of people from one place to another. But every mass migration is an aggregation of individual experiences, fraught with hardship, sacrifice, and the full gamut of human emotions, from hope to despair. Personal essays about migration and its effects chart the transformations that occur when people leave one place for another. Leaving home is inevitably wrenching, and many essays about migration register a nostalgia for the place – and the life – left behind. The personal essay is a form ideally suited for capturing the motivations, achievements, and disappointments of migrants who have often come to the United States because of the promise of the nation’s democratic principles.

Race has always been a central issue in discussions of jazz. A history of the representation of jazz in the American cinema is, in many ways, a history of the representation of African Americans, including their struggle to overcome oppression from whites. But as the title of this paper suggests, jazz is one of several aspects of American culture which has delighted white people and inspired them to appropriate– or to steal– the music of Black people. Many of the early jazz films were built around the white swing orchestras and their followers. In the 1940s and 1950s, biopics told the stories of white jazz artists. Biopics of black artists appeared in the 1960s and later. More recently, jazz has been celebrated as an art that allows musicians and audiences to ascend to a higher plane.

This Interlude between Part 1 and Part 2 of the book briefly considers the use and delayed currency of Shakespeare in the aftermath of the Russian War of 1853–56 (also known as the Crimean War), an unpopular conflict that nevertheless did not dampen the appeal of rousing militarism in Britain or position Shakespeare as a cultural figure through whom critical perspectives about the conduct of war could be presented. The Interlude concentrates on Charles Kean’s post-war Henry V at the Princess’s Theatre, London, in 1859, a production that does not contemporize the play’s events, but rather historicizes and distances them from its own time, reflecting a Victorian nostalgia for medieval history. It shows how the conditions of war and developments in war reporting can affect (and delay) the use of theatre for immediate wartime commentary. Shakespearean productions can be as much about forgetting or displacing contemporaneity, as invoking the specific contexts of a conflict or crisis, a pattern that recurs in the second part of the book.

Histories of urban sound have often fixated on the regulation of soundscapes and sensitivities to noise – frequently on the part of a perpetually rising bourgeoisie. Using the case study of the ’news-horn’, a tubular instrument used by newspaper vendors, this chapter offers an alternative way of understanding the changing soundscapes of towns and cities: rhythm. Developing from the post-horn which had been used in England since the sixteenth century, the news-horn became a common sound on the streets of 1770s London. However, with the growth of newspaper print and news from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the intensity and frequency of the news-horns’ blasts increased. This produced an arrythmia in London’s soundscape that clashed with other street sounds, sabbath-day silence, and the busy hum of London’s commercial centres. During the 1820s this resulted in the disappearance of the news-horn from London’s streets. Looking back from the mid-nineteenth century, many writers did not celebrate the news-horn’s removal. Instead, they remembered its sound with a fond nostalgia. The news-horn was one among many casualties in the emergence of a new London soundscape that replaced a pointillist pattern of auditory information with a roaring blanket of urban noise.

Is there anyone who hasn’t heard the phrase: ‘Everything was better in the old days’? The more stressful the present feels, the greater the longing for the past becomes. The wave of Ostalgie (a play on the German words for ‘east’, Ost, and nostalgia) felt by some East Germans has since been joined by a ‘Westalgia’. Furniture and fashion venerate the retro and vintage look of previous decades, and a not insignificant number of citizens view the time before the fall of the Wall through rose-coloured glasses. In the Weimar Republic, when democracy was still in its infancy, many people longed for the return of the abdicated kaiser and his empire. The longing for a strong leader to rule the country was widespread. In 1925, it found its expression in the election of World War General Paul von Hindenburg as president, and in 1933 it was manifested in the form of Private Adolf Hitler. This chapter shows how appropriations of the past often go hand in hand with critiques of the present.

In a survey that begins by looking at the ways in which post-war Britain gradually escaped from the popular cultural domination of the USA to create a new musical empire of its own, this chapter explores the manner in which home-grown pop reflects upon and influences notions of national identity. While progressive and revolutionary through the creation of new musical styles that sought to change the cultural, social or political landscape, pop has sometimes revealed itself to be nostalgic and backward-looking. This has often resulted in the curation of an Anglocentric musical tradition celebrating national stereotypes, but this is a tradition that has more recently been contested by other sounds, other voices, writing themselves into the pop history of the UK to become an integral part of the equally evolving character of the nation.

Drawing on sources such as jestbooks, compilations of apophthegms, and treatises of wit, this chapter explores the interaction between memory and the affect of pleasure in the context of the early modern culture of jesting. The genre of the Renaissance jestbook, which owes its emergence to the humanist appetite for jokes, taps into the cultural memory of classical wit and medieval exempla as well as the collective memory of pre-Reformation festive culture. In England jestbooks proliferated as commodities on the print marketplace and were avidly consumed by social aspirants, keen to acquire wit and urbanity. Jestbooks were frequently marketed as vehicles of nostalgia for a "Merry England," a fabricated age of universal amity and concord. The jests themselves, however, often harness the legacy of agonistic wit to celebrate a form of civility in which conflict is transmuted into a contest of wit, evoking the shared pleasure of competitive play.