Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture Volume 1 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780252085666)

As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories.

Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, she reveals nostalgia's capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments.

Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.

Author: Badia Ahad-Legardy
ISBN-10: 0252085663
ISBN-13: 9780252085666
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Language: English
Published: 04/12/2021
Pages: 224
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.90h x 6.00w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 02/05/2021 pg. 1