Nostalgia and Authenticity

Nostalgia emerged as a central theme in debates about reconstruction and war memory in the 1990s. The pro-memory group often pointed to the government's use of nostalgia as a guise for amnesia and inaction. Such attempts to pit the struggle over memory as one between realist and romanticist modes of remembering obfuscate the fact that nostalgia is a multifaceted trope operationalised equally for and against memory. As this chapter shows, the memory makers in Lebanese art and culture who dominated the campaign for public remembering and memorialisation had nostalgic notions of their own reflecting their age, political sympathies and social position in general. These different strains of nostalgia – nostalgias – and related ideas of authentic Lebanese culture can be seen as leitmotifs for war memory and nationalism and hence merit closer attention.

Nostalgic longing for an unblemished past is not particular to postconflict situations. Nostalgia and authenticity have been appropriated in nationalist representations around the world since the nineteenth century (Anderson 1991: 9–36). In the Middle East, Islamist and nationalist movements have, since the early twentieth century, pitted an authentic past against Western cultural imperialism (Salamandra 2004: 17–19). Arab cultural industries and populations have embraced various notions of authenticity and nostalgia as markers of local identity (Armbrust 1996: 25). As symbols and symptoms of postcolonial situations, such formulations stress ancient national glories and romanticised premodern virtues as moral imperatives for Arab peoples vis-à-vis Western Enlightenment and colonialism (Chatterjee 1993; Nieuwenhuijze 1997).