Postcolonial Nostalgias

<p>This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition — nostalgia a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national historical and personal boundaries. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul J.G. Ballard Doris Lessing W.G. Sebald and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie as well as versions of Bushman song Walder pursues the often wayward ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond but also within Europe so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and by implication the future.</p>