CHANGE: Nostalgia, Fluidity, and Stagnation

I make conscious attempts to avoid identity-first declarations, for fear that personal identity is unique even within shared forms of representation. Yet the themes of nostalgia, fluidity and stagnation are central to experiences of being in the diaspora.

As an immigrant child, I had the privilege of visiting my homeland throughout the early 2000’s, a place at the time with barely a trace on the web. When I went to visit again in 2023, as an adult, I noticed a shift, both in my tongue and in my perception. The language I used was still from the ’90s and early 2000s; no one was using the colloquialisms I grew up with. This is not a standalone experience, as language, culture, and values are bound to change.

As I reflected on this phenomenon for this roundtable, I began unfolding the interconnection between nostalgia, fluidity and stagnation--exploring how time, memory, and movement shape experience, creativity, and community. There is a somatic experience in becoming a kind of time capsule: carrying values and aspirations from a former era shaped by parents who witnessed political turmoil and imagined otherwise.

For those who do not have the privilege of return, I came across the term cultural or linguistic fossilization. It describes the experience of becoming a time capsule as being less about nostalgia and more about a state of stasis, branching into something wholly its own. [1]

Humanities professor Tina M. Campt defines this idea of stasis in her book, Listening to Images, as she describes Black voyeuristic portraiture:

“What if we understand it as a tense response that is not always intentional or liberatory, but often constituted by minuscule or even futile attempts to exploit extremely limited possibilities for self-expression and futurity in/as an effort to shift the grammar of Black futurity to a temporality that both embraces and exceeds their present circumstances--a practice of living the future they want to see, now.” [2]

To stumble across such artifacts is to experience how time creates a hardening from fluidity, and a fluidity from hardening. In attempts to live the future now, Black fugitivity and stillness surface as both continual restriction and resistance. As an antidote to the hyper-consumption and post-capitalist repetition of nostalgia that political and cultural theorist Mark Fisher warns of in his concept of “the slow cancellation of the future”. [3] What remains is a cultural “slop,” a meme of a meme, where references circulate without primary sources. For example, where there was once a time of subversion in queer and deviant culture, the acceptance of these movements forgets that they began as protests against poverty–this flattening happens often because of shared identity, and sometimes in spite of it. Philosopher and writer Bayo Akomolafe warns us of being a hyper-visible, branded, and urgent culture. Once again, the antidote is slowness.

Questions to ponder:
How has media evolved to be nostalgic toward cultural “slop,” a meme of a meme, rather than toward the texture of lived, human experience?

In what ways do photography, the internet, and archival practices engage with an inquietude of stillness? (media/planned obsolescence)

What can we learn from lived, somatic experiences of ‘time travel’ such as it occurs through class, queer identity and diasporic life? (radical imagination)