Time, memory retrieval, and speculative storytelling

This essay argues that the complexities of the nostalgic impulse in Hollywood cinema are inadequately described by Svetlana Boym’s particular description of Hollywood as “both induc[ing] nostalgia and offer[ing] a tranquilizer” and her highly influential general distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia. Instead, it contends that Hollywood departs in important ways from the models of both the restorative nostalgia established by the heritage cinema and Great Britain and the reflective nostalgia commonly found in American literature. Using a wide range of examples from American cinema, American literature, and American culture, it considers the reasons why nostalgia occupies a different place and seeks different kinds of expressions in American culture than it does in other national cultures, examines the leading Hollywood genres in which restorative nostalgia appears and the distinctive ways those genres inflect it, and concludes by urging a closer analysis of the more complex, multi-laminated nostalgia Hollywood films offer as an alternative to Boym’s highly influential categorical dichotomy.

Among the earliest detective stories to emerge from Argentina, Ten Years of Investigation in the Argentine Republic by Félix Alberto de Zabalía broke with the traditions of the genre. Not only were the tales explicitly Argentine in setting and character, but they also often eschewed the detective's hallmarks of urban sophistication in favour of a more wistful rurality. This article examines the stories’ evocation of a nostalgia defined not by time but by space: a spatial nostalgia. Emerging as an expression of uneven modernity in a developing nation state, spatial nostalgia was a useful tool for promoting rural migration at a time when the Buenos Aires elite had sore need to do so. Detective fiction was an ideal conduit for this messaging, as it hid its ideological posturing behind seemingly objective claims of truth and justice. Yet neither nostalgia nor justice are neutral, and the detective's reconstruction of the crime narrative mirrors the manipulative ‘restorative nostalgia’ identified by Svetlana Boym. The reader, invited to participate as the detective's follower and student, is liable to be drawn into nostalgia's idealised vision of geography and nationhood. Thus understood, spatial nostalgia illustrates the attractions of the detective fiction genre as well as its innovative evolution at the turn of the twentieth century.

‘Nostalgia’ is a major theme that runs through the works of Ilya Kabakov (И. Кабаков), a Russian painter who represents Moscow Conceptualism. In this paper, based on Svetlana Boim"s definition of the word "nostalgia", we would like to analyze how two layers of nostalgia are realized in Kabakov"s creations. The layer of "restorative nostalgia" in Kabakov"s creations is developed with the reproduction of the "disappeared Soviet" space in the back of history. ‘Reflective nostalgia’ is reproduced based on Kabakov’s personal memory, which exists separately from the grand ideological narrative that occupied Soviet space and time. Furthermore, these two layers of nostalgia do not exist singly, but often appear in the form of a coexistence of a gigantic narrative formed in a isolated special space-time called "Soviet" and a micro-narrative embedded in the cracks. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus on the aspect of coexistence: the coexistence of "restorative nostalgia" and "reflective nostalgia" in’ Kabakov"s creations, and furthermore, the nostalgia of public objects composed of grand narratives and the nostalgia dependent on private memory made up of micro narratives. Kabakov often creates a configuration in which two forms of nostalgia coexist in his work. In addition, he projects his extremely private memories of a special form of nostalgia, namely, work schedules, toilets, and public houses, which are hard to see as objects of nostalgia, suggesting the double implications of Soviet space and time. Furthermore, in Kabakov"s creations, the nostalgic narrative impulse is not limited to simply the memories surrounding an individual. This reveals the "aesthetic nostalgia" for his artistic predecessors such as Malevich and Leonardo da Vinci, and expands to overcoming the masters of art. The summoning of a master of art by aesthetic nostalgia echoes the theme of "little man", one of the essential subjects in Russian literature. Moreover, it leads to declaring that Kabakov"s creation has entered the post-Sots era beyond conceptualism and Sots-Art. Based on the above, in this paper, various layers of nostalgia embodied in Ilya Kabakov"s creation, that is, "restorative nostalgia" as an official representation of Soviet space and time, and "reflective nostalgia" as a hidden private memory of the space, and furthermore, the aspect of the manifestation of "aesthetic nostalgia" as awedness and overcoming of masters of art and their works will be analyzed. Through this, we would like to explain the form and implications of Soviet space-time reproduced through a nostalgic narrative in Kabakov"s creations, and furthermore, the method of recalling and overcoming the avant-garde and socialist realism as a part of aesthetic nostalgia.

A fundamental question in memory research is how different forms of memory interact. Previous research has shown that people rely on working memory (WM) in short-term recognition tasks; a common view is that episodic memory (EM) only influences performance on these tasks when WM maintenance is disrupted. However, retrieval of memories from EM has been widely observed during brief periods of quiescence, raising the possibility that EM retrievals during maintenance—critically, before a response can be prepared—might affect short-term recognition memory performance even in the absence of distraction. We hypothesized that this influence would be mediated by the lingering presence of reactivated EM content in WM. We obtained support for this hypothesis in three experiments, showing that delay-period EM reactivation introduces incidentally associated information (context) into WM, and that these retrieved associations negatively impact subsequent recognition, leading to substitution errors (Experiment 1) and slowing of accurate responses (Experiment 2). FMRI pattern analysis showed that slowing is mediated by the content of EM reinstatement (Experiment 3). These results expose a previously hidden influence of EM on WM, raising new questions about the adaptive nature of their interaction.

This chapter examines the interplay between Hartmut Rosa’s concept of “resonance” and the ideas of “nostalgia,” “Heimat,” and “trauma.” By scrutinizing Rosa’s effort to develop a non-nostalgic interpretation of Heimat, the argument underscores that the concept inherently still contains nostalgic elements. Drawing on Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, it asserts that Heimat can embody both reactive and reflective elements, all rooted in nostalgia. This distinction supports the differentiation between restorative and reflective resonance, contra Rosa. To illustrate this, the chapter analyzes the resonance in Edgar Reitz’s film series Heimat, demonstrating how it engages with viewers and addresses collective traumas, showing that resonance can be both restorative and reflective, and enriching Rosa’s theory as a critical theory of modernity.

Memory performance depends not only on effective learning and storage of information, but also on its efficient retrieval. In Drosophila, aversive olfactory conditioning generates qualitatively different forms of memory depending on the number and spacing of conditioning trials. However, it is not known how these differences are reflected at the retrieval level, in the behavior of individual flies during testing. We analyzed conditioned behaviors after one conditioning trial and after massed and spaced repeated trials. The single conditioning produces an early memory that was tested at 1.5 h. Tested at 24 h after training, the spaced and the massed protocols generate two different forms of consolidated memory, dependent, or independent of de novo protein-synthesis. We found clearly distinct patterns of locomotor activity in flies trained with either spaced or massed conditioning protocols. Spaced-trained flies exhibited immediate and dynamic choices between punished and unpunished odors during the test, whereas massed-trained flies made a delayed choice and showed earlier disappearance of the conditioned response. Flies trained with single and spaced trials responded to the punished odor by decreasing their resting time, but not massed-trained flies. These findings demonstrate that genetically and pharmacologically distinct forms of memory drive characteristically different forms of locomotor behavior during retrieval, and they may shed light on our previous observation that memory retrieval in massed-trained flies is socially facilitated. Social interactions would enhance exploratory activity, and then reduce the latency of their conditioned choice and delay its extinction.

From Ansel Adams to Carleton Watkins, Diane Arbus to Weegee, Richard Avedon to James VanDerZee, American photographers have recorded their vast, multicultural nation in images that, for more than a hundred years, have come to define the USA. In Photography and the USA, Mick Gidley explores not only the medium of photography and the efforts to capture key events and moments through photographs, but also the many ways in which the medium has played a formative role in American culture. Photography and the USA encompasses the major movements, figures and works that are crucial to understanding American photography, but also pays attention to more obscure aspects of photography's history. Focusing on works that reveal many different facets of America, its landscapes and its people, Gidley explores the ambiguities of American history and culture. We encounter images that range from an anti-lynching demo in 1934 to Dorothea Lange's poster All races serve the crops in California; an early photographic view of Niagara Falls against the painstaking detail of Edward Weston's Pepper, No. 30; a fireman's fight in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 to the Ground Zero images of 2001 by Joel Meyerowitz; an 1890s 'Wanted' image to Elliot Erwitt's shot of the Nixon-Kruschchev 'Kitchen Debate'. Organizing his narrative around the themes of history, technology, the document and the emblem, Mick Gidley not only presents a history of photography, but also reveals the complexities inherent in reading photographs themselves. A concise yet comprehensive overview of photography in the United States, this book is an excellent introduction to the subject for American Studies or visual arts students, or for anyone interested in US history or culture.

Artificial Intelligence is one of the keywords of our time, and AI systems are currently initiating numerous transformations in various areas of everyday life. How can cultural anthropology at the interface with digital anthropology contribute to understanding these transformations and to shaping social and cultural negotiation processes around AI? To answer this question, this article develops the concept of AI assemblages, which aims to illuminate the dynamics of sociotechnical relations between human and more-than-human actors or elements surrounding AI systems. Assemblage thinking allows to reflect upon and describe numerous ‘small’ transformations of everyday life connected to AI without uncritically reproducing grand narratives of sociotechnical change and upheaval. On a more general level, analyzing AI assemblages is a way to study cultures of AI, that is, to study “a whole way of life” (Williams) in which routines, relationships, and cultural orders are increasingly shaped by AI systems. Three examples illustrate this perspective: AI assemblages in memory culture (virtual survivor testimonies in Holocaust remembrance), in popular culture (social media and their algorithms), and in academic culture (generative AI in academic research and teaching).

Autobiographical remembering is a subjective experience, and whether retrieval is perceived to occur through involuntary or voluntary, direct or generative cognitive processes is also based on subjective intuition. The present study examined factors that may contribute to the subjective judgment that occurs when we perceive memories as being retrieved directly (i.e., a memory comes to mind directly and immediately) or through generative processes (i.e., recalling a memory with effort or by using additional information). We examined the hypothesis that internal awareness (interoceptive sensibility and mindfulness traits) contributes to the physical reaction and emotional impact of memories at retrieval, which then influence the subjective judgment that memories are retrieved directly. In two online experiments, participants were asked to recall specific memories following verbal cues and to judge the retrieval process (i.e., direct or generative). We demonstrated that emotional awareness, an interoceptive sensibility scale factor, consistently predicted a high probability of direct retrieval judgments independent of other predictors of direct retrieval, such as retrieval latency and cue concreteness. This effect was especially common for concrete cues. In Experiment 2 we demonstrated that emotional awareness predicted direct retrieval judgments through the mediation of retrieval impact (physical reaction and emotional impact). These results indicate the involvement of interoceptive processing in the direct retrieval of autobiographical memories. We discuss the role of interoception in memory retrieval and present interoceptive prediction error as a novel and potentially integrative account of our findings.

Nostalgia can be triggered not only by personal recollections but also by exposure to narratives or images evoking desirable pasts, more or less fictional, and inducing feelings of longing for them. We analyze the institutional and semiotic machinery involved in the cultural construction of nostalgia in Poland and its role in generating sentiments that predispose people to support populist—particularly right‐wing populist—ideology. While various political options use semiotic vehicles of nostalgia designed to engender nostalgic sentiments, we argue that there are systematic differences of content and form between politically useful invocations of nostalgia, related to the ideology of their proponents. We further posit that right‐wing populist nostalgia invokes not only national greatness but also national innocence. We also identify specific features of such nostalgic discourses. The empirical material for our four cases ranges from textual and film narratives, through images and performances, to large‐scale exhibitions and museal projects. To analyze their content and determine the form of politicization we build upon the conceptual apparatus developed by Svetlana Boym (reflective versus restorative nostalgia), Jan Assmann (communicative versus cultural memory), and Northrop Frye (low mimetic versus high mimetic narrative forms). The analysis relies on Geertzian “thick description” and the extended case study method.

The digital colourisation of historical photographs has received prominent and favourable media attention since the 2010s; several museums, heritage organisations, and publishers have adopted it. In the US and British contexts, both the selection of images to colourise and the ways in which their colourisation is discussed point to the overlooked but significant role the process plays in reinforcing racial identities and extending historical biases into the present. By examining the work of high-profile colourisers and the presentation of colourised photographs in social and traditional media, I argue that digital colourisation is a form of ‘white sight’ which sustains whiteness and its attendant powers. Operating at the intersection of a visual economy and an affective one, digitally colourised photographs generate an emotional response and foster a collective identity geared towards whiteness. In this article, I attend to the impact of digitisation on historical photographs, the sources and subject matter of digitally colourised photographs, and the language used to discuss them, in order to reveal the structures of racial and gender bias underneath – and challenge assertions that colourisation is a form of caring for the past.

This paper explores the dynamics of historical memory through the example of the Israeli short film “The Story of Aharon Barak: A Holocaust Story” (2021), which is dedicated to one of the episodes of the Holocaust: the escape from the Kaunas ghetto and the rescue of a Jewish boy who later became the President of the Supreme Court of Israel. The process of representing the memory of this episode goes through several stages: the personal memory of Aharon Barak, recorded in his speeches and interviews, the mediation in the mass media, when it becomes part of the collective communicative memory, and, finally, the remediation in the film. In the process of remediation, the audience expands: firstly, at the expense of children, to whom the film is primarily aimed, and secondly (after its translation into English) – at the expense of the English-speaking audience. The film uses several media (feature film, documentary newsreel, personal and historical photographs, animation, video reports, video message), which contribute to a diverse, including visual and emotional, perception of the story being told. Also of great importance in the process of remediation are the ethical aspects emphasised by Aaron Barak himself. Overall, the film considered to be a part of the process of creating a cultural (in J. Assman’s terms) memory of the Holocaust.

The cinema audience has in the past not been given a lot of room in film theory; insofar Annette Kuhn’s book ‘An Everyday Magic, Cinema and Cultural Memory’ (2002) fills a rather large gap. Kuhn explores how cinema-going affected people’s everyday life and how the film text became part of people’s personal memory. Cinema, Kuhn claims in her book, is an integral part of formation of identities, especially for the generation who were young in the 1930s and for whom going to ‘the pictures’ was their favourite leisure activity. Why were the 1930s so special? What kind of audience are we dealing with? When considering how popular it was to visit the cinema at the time we are inclined to think of cinema as mass entertainment, even just in reference to the sheer numbers - but what significance did cinema-going have and what role did the culture that surrounded cinema play in 1930s British society?

In recent years, the historical centre of Ankara has undergone remarkable processes of restoration and renovation. New shops, cafés, restaurants, hotels and museums have been opened, while the city’s historic neighbourhoods are being (re)discovered by tourists and local residents alike. These new tourist sites are characterised by neo-Ottomanist cultural practices, neoliberal economic activities and Turco-Islamic connotations. The restoration and transformation of Ankara’s historic neighbourhoods constitutes a spatial embodiment of the ruling elite’s cultural politics. The representations of Ottoman heritage are intended to signify the ruling elite’s power, as well as a new notion of public memory. They are profoundly influenced by Turkish popular culture, and especially by popular TV series on different periods of Ottoman history. In this way, however, the authenticity of these new historic sites is implicitly called into question. Ankara’s new urban culture appears as the perfect example of restorative nostalgia, which Svetlana Boym has defined as a nostalgia that promises to rebuild a lost past and fill gaps in the popular memory with new constructions. This chapter is based on field research which investigates the (re)created nostalgia culture of Ankara’s historic Hamamönü and Hamamarkası neighbourhoods.

Like consciousness and language, human memory is acquired through communication, socialization, and acculturation. It is, therefore, about both one’s brain and one’s social and cultural relations and comprises three dimensions: the personal, social, and cultural. Human memory is “embodied” in living personal memories and “embedded” in social frames and external cultural symbols (e.g., texts, images, and rituals) that can be acknowledged as a memory function insofar as they are related to the self-image or “identity” of a tribal, national, and/or religious community. Whereas the social or “collective” memory comprises knowledge commonly shared by a given society in a given epoch, cultural memory in literate societies includes not only a “canon” of normative knowledge but also an “archive” of apocryphal material that may be rediscovered and brought to the fore in later epochs. The formation of a canon of “classical” or sacred texts requires techniques of interpretation to keep accessible the meaning of the texts that may no longer be altered or multiplied. At that stage of cultural evolution, cultural memory changes from ritual to textual continuity. Cultural memory becomes complex, splitting into the “classical” and the “modern,” the “sacred” and the “secular.”