21. Jahrhundert
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For centuries, nostalgia denoted homesickness, but current dictionary definitions indicate that these two concepts have parted ways and acquired discrete meanings. However, it is one thing to demonstrate that contemporary definitions of nostalgia and homesickness are distinct; it is another to show that the way people think about nostalgia and its characteristics corresponds to this lexicographic knowledge. In 2012, Erica G. Hepper and colleagues therefore asked laypeople to identify which features they considered most characteristic of the construct ›nostalgia‹ and found that respondents conceptualised nostalgia as a predominantly positive, social, and past-oriented emotion. In nostalgic reverie, one brings to mind a fond and personally meaningful event, often involving one’s childhood. The person tends to see the event through rose-coloured glasses and may even long to return to the past. As a result, he or she feels sentimental, typically happy but with a hint of sadness.
By using a 60s workplace as its setting, Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men (2007-2015) does not merely provide insight into historical gender and sex relations in the workplace of the 60s. It also reflects current sex and gender relations in the workplace of 21st century America (e.g. the #MeToo Movement). As Sara Rogers, leaning on Horace Newcomb and Paul Hirsch, argues, tv shows’ strength lies in their raising questions, rather than answering them. This is precisely what Mad Men, with its representation of 1960s sex and gender dynamics does. In the following blogpost I will show that Weiner’s hit show is very aware of – among others – Helen Gurley Brown’s influence on the American workplace of the 60s and that it uses its nostalgic effect for reflecting contemporary sex and gender relations in the workplace.
Marketization is a broad term with a wide range of meanings. It encompasses measures of deregulation and privatization as well as the perceived increase of an ›economic‹ logic in social relationships. For historical purposes, the term should not be narrowly defined, and nor should the concept of marketization be used in an ahistorical manner detached from contemporary usage. However, there are two questions which the historical analysis of marketization needs to address. First, what is the conceptual understanding of the market mechanism to which the term marketization is linked? Second, what is the relationship between marketization and economic theory?
Beyond Nostalgia and the Prison of English. Positioning Japan in a Global History of Emotions
(2021)
This article interrogates the history of emotions at a pivotal moment in its growth as a discipline. It does so by bringing into conversation the ways in which scholars in Japan have approached ›nostalgia‹ (and emotions more broadly) as an object of study with concepts, theories, and methods prioritised by a predominantly Eurocentric field. It argues that Anglocentric notions of nostalgia as conceptual frameworks often neglect the particularisms that underlie the way that the Japanese language communicates and operationalizes cultural norms and codes of feeling. It also examines the aisthetic work of musicologist Tsugami Eisuke to help understand historical and psychological distinctions between ›nostalgia‹ and Japanese ideas of temporal ›longing‹, working towards a global history of emotions that meaningfully embraces multilateral and multi-lingual interaction. This article thus argues for a more nuanced way of discussing nostalgia cross-culturally, transcending dominant approaches in the field which are often grounded in a specifically Euro-Western experience but claim universal reach.
By the late 1970s, it was technologically possible to manufacture microcomputers – very small, stand-alone computers for personal use – in very large quantities. Selling them, however, meant creating a mass market where none existed: conventionally, only trained professionals, and a few devoted enthusiasts, interacted directly with the machines. Designers, marketers, retailers and other promoters therefore sought to build meanings into the design and presentation of computers which would connect them with new audiences. Such meanings reflected – and might themselves modify – the prevalent hopes, fears, desires and expectations of the users’ cultures.
Tom Scott-Smith is Associate Professor of Refugee Studies and Forced Migration, Fellow of St. Cross College Oxford, and Course Director for the MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Previously, he worked as a development practitioner concerned with the education sector in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. The following interview discusses arguments and questions arising from his newest book (2020), historical and currents trends of hunger relief, important players, institutions and gender relations in the humanitarian sector – and more. It was conducted by Heike Wieters (Historical European Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and Tatjana Tönsmeyer (Contemporary History, Bergische Universität Wuppertal) in a back-and-forth conversation via E-Mail.
Laughing at the Dictator. Franco and Franco’s Spain in the Spanish Blockbuster „Mortadelo y Filemón“
(2004)
The Spanish motion picture “La Gran Aventura de Mortadelo y Filemón” (2003) is not a historical film, no matter what definition of ‘historical film’ one might use. Instead, “Mortadelo y Filemón” (M&F) is the cinematic adaptation of the most successful Spanish comic book series ever published2 its significance to Spanish popular culture reflected by the spectacular box office records achieved by its cinematic counterpart. Moreover, and in contrast to the things we usually understand as ‘historical film’ - as well to the conventions of cinematic realism -, M&F is a cartoon-like histrionic comedy like no other; characters get smashed to the ground by a falling piano, only to later be “inflated” back to life, much in the style of the Warner Brothers’ „Loony Toons.“
The newly emerging historical scholarship on the era ›after the boom‹, on the marketization of societies in the wake of the neoliberal political reforms, deregulation, and privatization starting in the 1970s, has emphasized this threshold as an epochal break that was driven by large-scale structural shifts in the global economy, in social relations, and in cultural identities. This new accentuation of the economic and social transformation has, for good reason, eclipsed older historical traditions that focused on events, discourses, specific interests, and individual actors. The marketization of social relations is thus often considered to be the result of processes beyond the reach and scope of purposeful actors that promoted specific societal changes. While this historical focus is quite right in denying independent causal status to specific agents and the self-aggrandizement of vain leaders and their intellectual entourage, it tends to obscure the historical genesis of ideas and concepts that later became critical components of political leadership, and the specific constellations of interests, knowledge and actors that did prefigure and originally promote the marketization of economic and political institutions.
Since the 1950s, cycling policy in China has gone through three phases: from active encouragement (1955–1994) and systematic discouragement (1994–2008) to neglect and ambivalence (since the 2010s). Parallel to the expansion of automobility, the country has been unique in its development of innovations in electric-powered two-wheelers and a vibrant e-cycling practice since the 1980s. Electric bikes have given over 300 million low-status commuters and peddlers access to jobs and housing, even though planners have dismissed them as a problematic ›floating population‹ and remnants of the past. Given China’s current urban sustainable mobility challenges and ambition to become the world’s first ›Ecological Civilization‹ (2013), China’s bicycle industry, e-vehicle manufacturers, and the e-commerce sector may offer an alternative to the US-based ›car civilization‹ if ecological (e-cycles) and social (low-status workers) sustainability are brought into one analytical frame.
As much as war is about armed military conflict, it is also fundamentally about mass displacement, broken lives, and lost futures. This simple truth has become way too obvious in large parts of Poland, where providing food, clothes and shelter to strangers, and collecting donations to help refugees from neighboring Ukraine have become common practices among “ordinary” people. Much of the efforts of this grassroots mass mobilization to help those escaping their war-torn country falls on the shoulders of various parts of society, including individual activists and non-activists as well as civil society organizations.
What is perhaps less visible in this civil society mobilization and its media coverage are the efforts of migrant and minority communities that do their share in offering relief to those fleeing from Ukraine.