In her impressive study, The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym argues that the rise of nostalgia in politics and culture since the 1960s is not without a certain utopian quality. “The twentieth century began with a futuristic utopia and ended with nostalgia,” she writes. “Nostalgia itself has a utopian dimension, only it is no longer directed toward the future.” Even as the predominant Zeitgeist of the century shifts from optimism to nostalgia, however, a utopian impulse identified with modernity remains. This continuity endures despite the fact that nostalgia in the latter half of the twentieth century so often rose out of dissatisfaction with modernity and its vision of linear, progressive time. Nor is Boym alone in attributing a utopian quality to nostalgia; even thinkers who label nostalgia as a “social disease” share this perception. Susan Stewart, for example, writes that “Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.” Boym and Stewart share a sense that nostalgics cling to an idealized world even as they retreat from the future. And given that this perception is so widely shared, the question of utopianism will almost inevitably arise with respect to this study, even though utopia has not figured as a central term in my analysis.