CfP: “Pop Nostalgia: The Uses of the Past in Popular Culture” (London, Deadline: 30.6.2016)

Pop nostalgia, we are told, is everywhere. Our current golden age of television—from Mad Men to VinylDownton Abbey to Call the Midwife—lovingly recreates earlier periods of the twentieth century, while club nights devoted to the 1980s or 1990s allow us to return to our youth. What is more, popular culture is, in the words of music journalist Simon Reynolds, addicted to its own past. It not only reminisces, it revives, reissues, remixes earlier forms and styles instead of coming up with genuinely new. Finally, our most modern technologies are always also time machines: producing sepia-coloured images of the present for an anticipated nostalgic recollection in the future.

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