Elizabeth Bronwyn Boyd on Nostalgia

One of the many memories I have of living and teaching at a boarding school in Mobile, Alabama (1998-2000) is seeing a student show up one day wearing a bright purple hoop skirt accompanied with a bonnet and umbrella. She was one of Mobile’s Azalea Trail Maids. It was distinctly “southern” and something that I had absolutely no frame of reference to understand.

It was the clearest indication that I was no longer in New Jersey.

I’ve been thinking about that experience as I make my way through Elizabeth B. Boyd’s book, Southern Beauty: Race, Ritual, and Memory in the Modern South (2022). The introduction offers a thorough and engaging overview of how notions of southern womanhood and femininity have helped to define regional differences and maintain racial hierarchies.

The following passage is one of the best descriptions of nostalgia that I have come across.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. As much as it may seem wrapped up in the past, it is also always about the present. Nostalgia thrives on transition, on the rude discontinuities of history, on dislocation of all sorts, on cultural trauma and social shock. Disappointment in the present improves the view of the past.

An endangered sense of identity in particular prompts the wistful backward glance. When events or ideas in the present rock the very foundations of identity—especially those time-honored understandings of the past that define our place in the world—nostalgia rushes in. Promoting reconnection with an ideal past (while brushing aside the issue of its authenticity), nostalgia restores the cornerstone of identity.

But nostalgia is as much about forgetting as remembering, as much a product of collective amnesia as of recalling in common. Muting or filtering our unpleasant parts of the past and swaddling what is left in a tender, redeeming aura, nostalgia eliminates the shame, guilt, or embarassment that can come with frank remembering. Paradoxically, an idyllic past comforts so effectively because it is irrevocably past—impossible to recreate or resurrect. the disappointed, nostalgic soul longs not to recreate the past in actuality but to momentarily connect with it in reverie. Such longing for something absent—something far away or presumably present in an earlier age—is thus in the end surely harmless.

Or is it? (pp. 31-32)

I found this to be incredibly helpful in distinguishing between memory and nostalgia. If memory is an intellectual act, nostalgia is the set of emotions or needs that infuses memory with content.

Here is Dr. Boyd discussing her book if you want to learn more.

I highly recommend it.