What Nostalgia Was: Thomas W. Dodman and David Rieff

If nostalgia today is seen as essentially benign, a wistful longing for the past, Thomas W. Dodman brilliantly argues in Nostalgie. Histoire d’une émotion mortelle, that this wasn’t always the case. Drawing on the history of medicine and psychiatry, as well as on the testimonies of Napoleonic conscripts or “African Nostalgia” studies by French colonists in Algeria, Dodman offers historical depth to nostalgia. He shows how it literally referred to “homesickness” and mainly affected soldiers, colonists, slaves or migrant workers – all expatriated from imperial wars and colonial expansion in the modern world, and sometimes led to more deaths than those caused by actual combat.

In his book In Praise of Forgetting David Rieff reflects “on our collective memories: how we remember our national histories and argue about our shared past. () Rieff contends that these collective remembrances are self-serving, often fraudulent and frequently dangerous.”* He warns that all too often, collective memory “has led to war rather than peace . . . and to the determination to exact revenge rather than commit to the hard work of forgiveness.”* Wouldn’t we be –at times– better off forgetting and getting on with our lives? wonder this acclaimed author and journalist who has covered many conflicts and humanitarian crises.

On April 24, Thomas W. Dodman and David Rieff will discuss the evolution of nostalgia (why is it no longer considered a disease? how did this pathology of space become a search for lost time?) and whether one should systematically come together as a nation to honor the memory of crimes pasted? In English. Free with RSVP.

Nostalgie. Histoire d’une émotion mortelle, by Thomas W. Dodman, traduit de l’anglais par Johanna Blayac, éd du Seuil. (What Nostalgia Was. War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion, Chicago, 2018)

Eloge de l’oubli – La mémoire collective et ses pièges (In Praise of Forgetting) by David Rieff, trans. by Frédéric Joly, Premier Parralèle.