Guest Editor: Christa Salamandra
Nostalgia permeates literary and expressive culture in the Arab world. Exile, loss, defeat, rupture find expression in a variety of cultural forms, in song, prose and poetry, on the big and small screen, and in restaurants and cafés. Nostalgia reflects all the paradoxes and contradictions of Arab modernity. It appears as an expression of power and powerlessness. It serves as a mode of inclusion and exclusion. It links personal to social, even monumental memory. It is both urbane and pastoral. It emerges in reluctant, subversive Proustian reminiscence of childhood sweets, “like a fire that’ll never go out.” It critiques capitalism and globalization, although it is itself an idea, and a commodified practice drawn from a global marketplace. It is voiced from exile, and but also from those who never left, but feel that something crucial has left them. The following contributions explore diverse expressions of and against Arab nostalgia.
