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Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi's Song of Unending Sorrow

Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi's Song of Unending Sorrow positions 10:3 Winter 2002 Nostalgia has seeped into many departments of cultural production and threatens to become a general structure of feeling. Some anecdotal instances suffice to offer a glimpse of the tremendous drive to preserve the oldies. Demolition of old city blocks for residential and business high-rises is accompanied by desperate rescue efforts to document in film, video, and photography the last vanishing vestiges of a receding era. Memoirs, reminiscences, reproduction of old artifacts, new releases in video format of films of the 1930s and 1940s as well as of revolutionary history, new films bent on romanticizing the village tucked away in a purer past, and the thriving nostalgic restaurants— all these and more seem evidence of nostalgia as a mass mentality. Nostalgia needs to be understood against the backdrop of acceleration and shocks of modern experience that, for all its excitement and adventure, also brings trauma and loss. The campaigns of nostalgia in the 1990s stemmed from the dire consequences of the blinding speed of the market economy, the rapid rise of a distorted consumer society, and the overhaul of the administrative structure stumbling on the corruption of inherited power in economic life. The consequences of http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png positions asia critique Duke University Press

Love at Last Sight: Nostalgia, Commodity, and Temporality in Wang Anyi's Song of Unending Sorrow

Wang, Ban
positions asia critique , Volume 10 (3) – Dec 1, 2002
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Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1067-9847
eISSN
1527-8271
DOI
10.1215/10679847-10-3-669
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

positions 10:3 Winter 2002 Nostalgia has seeped into many departments of cultural production and threatens to become a general structure of feeling. Some anecdotal instances suffice to offer a glimpse of the tremendous drive to preserve the oldies. Demolition of old city blocks for residential and business high-rises is accompanied by desperate rescue efforts to document in film, video, and photography the last vanishing vestiges of a receding era. Memoirs, reminiscences, reproduction of old artifacts, new releases in video format of films of the 1930s and 1940s as well as of revolutionary history, new films bent on romanticizing the village tucked away in a purer past, and the thriving nostalgic restaurants— all these and more seem evidence of nostalgia as a mass mentality. Nostalgia needs to be understood against the backdrop of acceleration and shocks of modern experience that, for all its excitement and adventure, also brings trauma and loss. The campaigns of nostalgia in the 1990s stemmed from the dire consequences of the blinding speed of the market economy, the rapid rise of a distorted consumer society, and the overhaul of the administrative structure stumbling on the corruption of inherited power in economic life. The consequences of

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positions asia critique – Duke University Press

Published: Dec 1, 2002

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