Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture by Badia Ahad-Legardy (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture by Badia Ahad-Legardy
• Brittney Michelle Edmonds

Badia Ahad-Legardy. Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2021. 224 pp. $26.95.

In Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture, Badia Ahad-Legardy disrupts a cultural truism so commonplace as to seem absolute: [End Page 257] that historical nostalgia for Black people is an impossibility. On the monograph’s opening pages, Zadie Smith announces plainly, “I can’t go back to the fifties because life in the fifties for me is not pretty, nor is it pretty in 1320 or 1460 or 1580 or 1820 or even 1960 in [the US], very frankly” (2). Smith’s relatable understanding of nostalgia—as longing for a lost or for-gone era of the past—and her concomitant belief that a timeless antagonism exists between her, a Black woman, and her socioaffective ability to relate to historical memory, extends from a dominant but narrow and racialized conception of the psychological phenomenon.

Ahad-Legardy sets out to marginalize that dominant conception, arguing that it renders agential relation to historical memory the exclusive province of whites. Afro-Nostalgia instead develops a more capacious definition of nostalgia to emphasize how contemporary Black cultural workers engage with historical memory to enact affective transformations, to stage political critiques, and to enact various forms of community. The study departs from the observation that nostalgia is not a “race-neutral mode of positive memory,” but instead extends from scientific histories that presumed Black intellectual and psychological incapacity (5). Ahad-Legardy traces the history of nostalgia back to its seventeenth-century conception, when it was first conceived as a cerebral ailment prompted by the material loss of one’s homeland, to the eighteenth century, when pioneering scientists suggested that Black people were perhaps the most substantially afflicted by the ailment, to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when nostalgia was no longer conceived as ailment but as sentiment, as the sometimes overwhelming desire for a lost home or object or symbol of some better, more glorious past.

Against the backdrop of renewed and virulent nostalgic sentiment in contemporary US politics and civic life, Ahad-Legardy turns to Black expressive culture—to literature, music, web media, visual arts, sculpture, and the culinary arts—to situate nostalgic feeling, specifically Afro-nostalgia, beyond conservative frames. Rather than a coping mechanism or maladaptive response to to an undesirable present, rather than a sentiment that eschews progressive politics in favor of fantastical regression, Afro-nostalgia seeks to “[look] back to feel good” without retreating into an idealized past (20). At its most simple, Afro-nostalgia is a set of strategies for relating to the past and reclaiming it as a site of and for pleasure. Even so, Ahad-Legardy is careful to delineate between forms of nostalgia that obscure or erase or revise history and the careful, imaginative play of the practitioners she examines. Afro-nostalgia is neither a barrier to informed, critical relationships to the past, nor is it absent political consciousness. Across four chapters, Ahad-Legardy conceptualizes Afro-nostalgia: its ability to act as a form of historical redress, to disrupt pervasive forms of white nostalgia, to cultivate well-being and pride among Black people and others, and to strategically reclaim various forms of culture-making and self-fashioning.

In chapter one, “(Nostalgic) RETRIBUTION: The Power of the Petty in Contemporary Narratives of Slavery,” Ahad-Legardy reads contemporary narratives of slavery to demonstrate how cultural workers reckon with the antebellum past. Through retribution, contemporary Black artists psychically reconcile with the traumatic history of slavery. In contradistinction to prevalent [End Page 258] forms of white nostalgia that seek to preserve an imagined, fast-receding past through acts of violence and racial chauvinism, Afro-nostalgic retribution instrumentalizes the “emancipated voice of the contemporary black subject” to imagine enslaved subjects and subjectivities anew (33). While such a tendency has been under much scrutiny by scholars, Ahad-Legardy emphasizes that this tendency is nonetheless a prime example of the Afro-nostalgic imagination. Offering readings of Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World, James...