I'll never forget: remembering of past events within the Silent Generation as a challenge to the political mobilisations of nostalgia

Nieland, Sue; Mahendran, Kesi and Crafter, Sarah (2021). I'll never forget: remembering of past events within the Silent Generation as a challenge to the political mobilisations of nostalgia. Culture & Psychology, 29(1) pp. 67–80.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1354067X211066815

Abstract

The political mobilisation of nostalgia is increasingly preoccupying social and political psychologists. A key concern is with rising populism and the use of an imagined golden past to foster threat through anti-EU and anti-immigrant sentiment. This article introduces two key concepts, anemoia - imagining a past not experienced – and prolepsis – how the past influences actions in the present aligned to future goals – to argue that actual recall of past biographical events potentially counters the influence of nostalgic rhetoric designed to influence political decision-making. The focus of this article is a single Scottish case study, Rachel, a member of the Silent Generation of citizens aged over 75 years, who have a living memory of World War II and its aftermath. A dialogical analysis was carried out identifying key I-positions and chronotopic analysis of the dialogical self, relating to experienced extreme childhood poverty and deprivation, anti-Semitism and limited mobility. This demonstrated how living through a historic event and its repercussions, rather than imagining a past not experienced, mitigates against nostalgia. This raises the question of how much mobilisation of the events of a glorious past and anxieties about the future rely upon the unexamined silence of those who recall those same events.

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