Effects of Nostalgia: The Discourse of Decline in Periya MēỊam Music of South India

Abstract

Anthropologist Renato Rosaldo refutes the often-assumed notion of nostalgia as personal, pure, and therefore innocent yearning for the past. In his essay, Rosaldo describes nostalgia as a particularly appropriate emotion to invoke in attempting to establish one's innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed [R0sALDO1989: 108], which he calls imperialist nostalgia. He then argues that the pose of innocent yearning in this type of nostalgia not only captures people's imagination but it also conceals its complicity with domination. Although Rosaldo's observation pertains most immediately to the kind of nostalgia which agents of (Western) imperialism embrace toward the very forms of life they intentionally altered or destroyed, the effect of nostalgia in drawing attention away from the fundamental asymmetry of power, or rendering them less visible, seems to have much wider application.'

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