The Global Rise of Populist Nostalgia: Lessons from Collective Memory

Yagmur Karakaya, Yale University

Propelled by the questions of migration, globalization and postcoloniality, in the first decade of the 2000s the field of collective memory had a transnational, and cosmopolitan turn. The field diagnosed that memories became decentralized as the nation-states lost their status to be the sole arbiter of the past. Benedict Anderson’s “imagined communities,” and Hobsbawm’s “invented traditions,” which ascribed nation-states the power to define and construct mnemonic narratives gave way to Erl’s travelling, Rothberg’s multinational, and Levy and Sznaider’s cosmopolitan memories. Theorists predicted the possibility of building prosthetic memories—having empathy for groups outside of ours as a result of knowledge about their difficult pasts. Yet, populist nostalgia movements observed in China, Turkey, India, the United Kingdom and the United States, in the second decade of 2000s seem to counter these openings and theoretical predictions. Rather than a multicultural, cosmopolitan, travelling memory paradigm, we witness an inward looking, state-centered memory movement that demarcates clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders. In this review article, by relying on the abovementioned empirical cases I make sense of this reversal by using Jeffrey Alexander’s societalization thesis. Accordingly, the cosmopolitanization of the memory sphere which we witnessed in the early 2000s relied on civil sphere actors who wanted to push for alternative narratives as opposed to the nation-state’s uniform and top-down story. The populist-nostalgic move is the non-civil actors’ attempt to turn the clock-back—a backlash effort to return to homogeneous memory regimes. But, if the societalization thesis is correct, we are destined to see better memory days. The question is how long this cycle of backlash will take.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 173. Power and Normativity in Society and History IV: The Contested Cultures of Political Modernities