Beschreibung

How can the paradoxical conceptual overlap of nostalgia and sustainability in cultural constructions of the present be used in order to make previously unexplored territory within the study of culture accessible?
The collection of essays and artistic contributions aims at answering this and other questions. It problematizes the relationship between past-oriented practices of sustaining and future-oriented forms of remembering. The present becomes the moment in which both notions overlap: Cultures have to position themselves, both in relation to what they have once been and to what they aspire to become.

Tom Clucas (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher in English Literature and Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen working on character and economy in 19th-century British 'community novels'.
Andressa Schröder (MA) is a PhD researcher in Cultural Sustainability. Her research interests include aesthetics, arts-based research, environmental humanities and sustainability.
Nico Völker (MA) is a PhD researcher in American Studies. His thesis examines the process of gentrification in 21st-century Brooklyn from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Robert A. Winkler (MA) is a PhD researcher in American Studies and his thesis sheds light on race and whiteness in the US hardcore punk subculture of the 1980s.

Cultures as well as individuals continually balance the demands of nostalgia and sustainability as they construct historical narratives of 'futures worth preserving'. The aim of this volume is to explore those narratives and the underlying assumptions which inform them. Drawing on a range of disciplines from the humanities and social sciences, the chapters investigate cultural assumptions about which aspects of the past deserve to be remembered and which aspects of the present should be sustained for the future. In the process, they reveal how contemporary definitions of sustainability are informed by a nostalgic yearning for the past, and how nostalgia is motivated by a reciprocal longing to sustain the past for the future.

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