Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Popular Culture and Nostalgia, Sept 2020

This article considers the proliferation of nostalgic aesthetics in Instagram poetry (‘instapoetry’). Though often overlooked, the relationship between the platform and the poetry itself is a vibrant entry point into debates about the handwritten, analogue and vintage styles of instapoetry. Connecting modernist and postmodernist arguments about nostalgia, this article provides a critical and conceptual lens with which to analyse the visual aspects of nostalgic aesthetics – referred to as ‘nosthetics’ – characteristic of instapoetry, investigating how and why the genre impersonates the pre-digital, analogue past. Combining scholarship on platforms, nostalgia and instapoetry shows how the concept of nosthetics can be used as a framework for literary and visual analysis of instapoetry. The theoretical framework proposed recommends three developments for those researching nostalgic aesthetics in instapoetry. First, greater attention should be paid to the platform. Second, engagement with scholarship on popular culture and nostalgia is needed. Finally, it is insightful to return to the notion of space at the heart of Johannes Hofer's original definition of nostalgia.

This article explores vaporwave’s appropriation of the past and future to constitute a (non)-site for the displacement of the present. In doing so, vaporwave – an electronic music genre that samples sights and sounds from 1980s and 1990s popular culture – masquerades itself as a radical project that decentres the subject’s location within the linear matrix of time (Tanner 2016) and houses the potential to oppose the humanistic territorializations of late capitalism (Killeen 2018; Whelan and Nowak 2018). I argue that these arguments focus too closely on vaporwave’s style and aesthetic dimension without considering its maintenance of various structures of oppression and appropriation indicative of globalized capitalism. The result is a misattribution of transgressive potential to vaporwave that ignores its incredibly conservative undertones. To engage with vaporwave then demands a bifurcation of its outward, rhizomatic veneer and the codes, conventions and axiomatics that underwrite it. I make this argument by drawing upon Jean Baudrillard’s (1981, 1993, 1994, 2010) scepticism of any accelerationist and technologist politics of subversion to mount effective sociopolitical change. Additionally, I make use of many feminist and critical race approaches to highlight the affinities between vaporwave’s appropriate style and the logics of late capitalism.

Using the music of the Final Fantasy game series as our case study, we follow the music through processes of transmediation in two very different contexts: the Netflix series Dad of Light and music transcription forum Ichigo’s Sheet Music. We argue that these examples reveal transmediation acting as a process of ‘emptying’, allowing the music to carry its nostalgic cargo of affect into new relationships and contexts. This study’s theoretical combination of transmediation with Bainbridge’s object networks of social practice frame challenges normative definitions of nostalgia. The phenomenon of ‘emptying’ we identify reveals a function of popular culture nostalgia that differs from the dominant understanding as a triggering of generalized emotional longing for (or the desire to return to) the past. Instead, this article uncovers a nostalgia that is defined by personal and communal creative engagement and highlights the active and social nature of transmediated popular culture nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a necessary element of Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008–20) and the ‘new’ Star Wars comics (Marvel, 2015–19), recent serial narratives in the ever-expanding transmedia Star Wars universe. The anticipation (and consequential reception) of these works is, in part, driven by nostalgia: the original Star Wars film, A New Hope, was released in 1977 and as the series has expanded in the decades since, in film and other media, nostalgia has become ingrained within the fandom as audiences are invited to repeatedly return to ‘a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away’. As a result of decades of content, there is a sense of ‘ownership’ amongst the fandom and, at times, a resistance to new content that attempts to ‘weaponize’ nostalgia as a marketing tool, such as in the ‘Sequel Trilogy’ (2015, 2017, 2019). The Clone Wars, first mentioned in A New Hope, is set between two Star Wars (Prequel) films that feature key events in the overall saga, while the Star Wars comics take place between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back (1980). The Clone Wars and the Star Wars comics succeed where the sequels (and prequels) arguably do not because they use nostalgia to serialize and capitalize on transmedia, allowing the audience to revisit characters and narrative events that have already been established for decades. Both works allow for character and narrative development between two fixed (cinematic) points in the story canon, with the spaces in between and around those points that frame their place in the Star Wars universe allowing for rich exploration.

Drawing on the notion that nostalgia enables a continuity of identity, this article explores how the aesthetics of the Disney+ lynchpin property, The Mandalorian (2019–present), facilitate a return to, and continuity of, masculine heteronormativity in the face of rapid and widespread change within the Star Wars cinematic franchise. Focusing on the excess of style, the reduction in scope and scale of the narrative aesthetics, the role of the star as an agent of the past, the conceptualization of hypermasculine fatherhood and the role of the feminine in the articulation of narrative, this article reveals how The Mandalorian constructs a narrative concerned with fatherhood. Moreover, this article demonstrates how, by appropriating nostalgia in the restorative mode to allow a continuity of idealized masculine identity, The Mandalorian is positioned as the would-be masculine heir to the legacy of the original trilogy.

Television is historically a generative site for examining media nostalgias. Within the ever-widening landscape of reboots, remakes and revivals across genres and platforms in the post-network era in the United States, an impulse to ‘redo’ live programming on network television has also emerged in the on-going battle for consumer attention. Steadily gaining momentum over the past decade, this article questions the roles that nostalgia plays in structuring the surprising return of fictional event-based television. The evolution of this phenomenon is traced by first examining the wave of live network musical productions (2013–19), followed by the restaging of Norman Lear’s classic sitcoms in Live In Front of a Studio Audience (ABC 2019). Nostalgia’s connection to positive emotion is a powerful marketing tool that is manipulated across industries, and specifically leveraged through airing reperformances of these popular and identifiably nostalgic texts. However, despite reaching new levels of nostalgic indulgence, the live televisual remake opens-up new opportunities for collectivity and critical reflection for viewers in the digital age.

When it comes to food as a cultural entity, its importance as part of our communities of interaction goes well beyond its function as mere physical nourishment. It seems virtually impossible to talk about food and memory without talking about taste and smell. The connection between food, memory and the senses relies on the understanding that particular elements of the past are embedded in our identities and sense of self. Closely related to their food counterparts, drinks have also been at the centre of ongoing scholarly attention. Wine, in particular, has been the focus of debates surrounding notions of taste, provenance, storytelling, branding, habit and memory. As far as both food and drink are concerned, however, the remembrance of the senses – and the sociocultural experiences connected to them – is often shrouded in a layer of nostalgia, which inevitably complicates how we perceive experiences, as either authentic or (re-)constructed. Taking this idea as a point of departure, this article focuses on the connections between the sensorial experience of food and drink and the construction of memories in Joanne Harris’s novel Blackberry Wine (2000). Specifically, the article explores how Harris portrays the experience of wine-drinking – with a focus on taste, smell and the notion of terroir – as interdependent upon both cultural knowledge and familiar sensorial experiences. The discussion also exposes how these are eventually tacitly (and perhaps inadvertently) connected in the novel to the problem of consumerist exploitation, and how nostalgia is channelled in order to render products desirable to prospective customers.

From SARS to H1N1, and most recently COVID-19, global disease outbreaks have defined the past several decades. For many, we are living in what can only be described as a pre-apocalyptic moment. Indeed, we are currently facing a global pandemic outbreak – a situation that had been previously described as imminent and perhaps even long overdue. Consequently, the publication of pandemic narratives has increased exponentially, which exposes a heightened social concern about the risk of viral outbreak. But instead of speaking to these growing anxieties and providing models to interpret our current position, a growing body of popular culture post-apocalyptic fiction remains deeply entrenched in a dangerous nostalgia that undermines the construction of hypothetical models that could appropriately respond to these threats. I argue that these texts can therefore be read as degenerate utopias, Louis Marin’s term for the false utopian myths that circulate within a society. A degenerate utopia is thus not really a utopia at all, but rather an ideology that elevates the past to a false state of perfection. My article examines the construction of degenerate utopian realities through collective memory in Emily St John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars.

Review of: Queerbaiting and Fandom: Teasing Fans through Homoerotic Possibilities, Joseph Brennan (ed.) (2019)

Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 296 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-60938-671-9, p/bk, AUD 70