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Can there be a progressive nostalgia? Layering time in pride's retro-heritage

Can there be a progressive nostalgia? Layering time in pride's retro-heritage
Can there be a progressive nostalgia? Layering time in pride's retro-heritage

Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. By combining nostalgia, retro, and heritage, Pride manifests an artistic practice I refer to as temporal layering, which draws attention to how any single moment implies potential relationships with numerous interacting others. I use this notion to understand both the role that the 1984-5 miners' strike assumes in cultural revisions of the 1980s, and the kind of cinematic past that Pride presents. This past can be understood as a development in the heritage genre appropriate to reimagining modern British history, especially that of the 1980s, that could be called retro-heritage. By paying attention to the varied temporal layers thus present in Pride, a new perspective is offered on how nostalgia's presumed conservatism sits alongside the 'left-wing melancholy' (Traverso, 2017) that has dominated in the era of defeats since the 1980s. My ultimate aim is to ask what potential nostalgia may have when envisaging a different future.

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Bayman, Louis
4ac4c78c-a62e-43a4-aa70-497ab56dcad4
Bayman, Louis
4ac4c78c-a62e-43a4-aa70-497ab56dcad4

Bayman, Louis (2019) Can there be a progressive nostalgia? Layering time in pride's retro-heritage. Open Library of Humanities, 5 (1), 1-30. (doi:10.16995/olh.324).

Record type: Article

Abstract

Pride is notable for its dynamic treatment of time, which is key both to its appeal as a film and to its presentation of the processes of political change. By combining nostalgia, retro, and heritage, Pride manifests an artistic practice I refer to as temporal layering, which draws attention to how any single moment implies potential relationships with numerous interacting others. I use this notion to understand both the role that the 1984-5 miners' strike assumes in cultural revisions of the 1980s, and the kind of cinematic past that Pride presents. This past can be understood as a development in the heritage genre appropriate to reimagining modern British history, especially that of the 1980s, that could be called retro-heritage. By paying attention to the varied temporal layers thus present in Pride, a new perspective is offered on how nostalgia's presumed conservatism sits alongside the 'left-wing melancholy' (Traverso, 2017) that has dominated in the era of defeats since the 1980s. My ultimate aim is to ask what potential nostalgia may have when envisaging a different future.

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Published date: 11 March 2019

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 431024
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/431024
PURE UUID: 60b70964-b30c-4b27-ada5-5487e276cf43
ORCID for Louis Bayman: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-4780-2057

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Date deposited: 22 May 2019 16:30
Last modified: 06 Jun 2024 01:54

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