Introduction: the problem of nostalgia

We distrust nostalgia not only because we are wary of the seduction of sentiment, but also, and perhaps more especially, because we are suspicious of a sentimental feeling centred on home, childhood, family, the past, the community. On the one hand, we have been taught that such attachments may serve a politics of exclusion and oppression; on the other hand, we have learned that such attachments may be precluded under conditions of political oppression. Yet nostalgia persists, and what renders it interesting is precisely that it is a problem, particularly in South Africa, in the immediate post-apartheid context, where the home to which the feeling refers may be located in an impoverished black township or in an affluent white suburb, on a plot of land in a Bantustan or on a family farm in the Karoo. Within the current generation of those whose individual memory reaches back into the apartheid era, some are seen not to be entitled to nostalgia because they benefited from the politics of the past, and some are said to have little to be nostalgic about because they were exploited by these politics.