Childhood and nostalgia in contemporary culture

Abstract

This article explores some of the meanings and functions of childhood nostalgia in contemporary culture. It begins by linking a critique of nostalgia as idealistic and regressive to a deconstructive reading of the myth of childhood innocence, and shows how this myth has been mobilized in the heritage industry. However, it goes on to argue that childhood nostalgia remains a complex phenomenon because it is manifested not only in the narrative construction of fantasy childhoods, but in textual fragments, photographs and everyday objects that produce disjointed feelings of desire and mourning. It then examines how the nostalgia for childhood as a separate space outside of adult manipulation and control sits uneasily with the increasing constraints placed on children by political, legal and educational institutions. In this context, childhood nostalgia feeds into perennial anxieties about children as always potentially corruptible by outside influences, while also being a more specific response to new power relationships between adults and children, and changing work cultures in advanced capitalist societies.

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