The term nostalgia dates from the end of the seventeenth century when Johann Hofer, a nineteen-year-old Swiss physician, devised it for his doctoral thesis on the causes for the melancholic state of Swiss serving as hired soldiers in the armies of other European powers or working or studying away from their native area. Nostos in Greek means home, the homeland, while agie means longing, yearning for. As its usage became more popular from the second half of the nineteenth century in west-European languages, it gradually entered Russian, Persian, and Arabic, among other languages, even when they already had words expressing homesickness, in other words spatial nostalgia, and temporal nostalgia, a nostalgia for the past.

Public opinion in Iran was not naïve about criminality. Robbery, mugging, the occasional random murder, and murder resulting from conflicts between people who knew each other were considered a danger and unfortunate fact of everyday life resulting from socio-economic conditions or weaknesses and faults in human character. However, from the early 1960s, the mass media in the West and Iran brought to readers and viewers reports about rapidly rising rates of murder and current crime horrors in the West, such as the Moors Murders carried out by Myra Hindley and Ian Brady who in and around Manchester sexually assaulted and killed five boys and girls, aged between ten and seventeen; Dean Corll, who raped, tortured, and murdered at least twenty-eight teenaged boys; and Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower Sniper who randomly shot forty-two people, killing eleven, from the twenty-eight-storey observation deck of Austin University’s Main Building. In the West, social commentators, journalists, politicians, and public opinion increasingly spoke of ‘crime waves’.

Hassan Moghaddam in his play Jafar Khan Has Returned from the West (1921) satirically described two social phenomena: arrogant Occidentosis and nostalgic resistance to change. While it can be considered the first popularly acclaimed work describing the condition of Occidentosis-ridden individuals, it simultaneously describes an equally new phenomenon, a generation gap that began to emerge in the late Qajar period given growing contact with the West.

Crime rates and how crimes are presented to the public, specifically in the mass media, spread, and deepen individual and societal fear of crime. This fear of crime is a set of feelings which are orientated towards the problem of crime for society.

Before we step onto the path into the world of Pahlavi-era nostalgia, some context regarding the Pahlavi power structure, the trajectory leading to the establishment of the Rastakhiz Party, its ideological principles, and its position within that structure is needed, since its narratives and discourses constitute a pillar of this study.

‘Does the family [in the West] face complete collapse?’, asked Ferdowsi in 1970. Although the question was somewhat sensationally posed, in the West, from the mid-1960s, social commentators, politicians, the mass media, and trends in public opinion increasingly pointed to perceived signs of rapid family decline emerging at the top of the family structure – rising rates of divorce and deteriorating parenting as fathers and mothers became more concerned with conspicuous consumption and sexual hedonism than with child-rearing. These factors, it was argued, played a key role in the rise of youth antisocial behaviour, violent crime, sexual licentiousness, and drug addiction. These issues were increasingly discussed in Iranian popular and political spheres as Iranians again regarded tendencies in the West as bellwethers for Iran.

The emergence of Hippieism in the USA and then in Western Europe can be traced back to the end of the 1940s when Jack Kerouac introduced the term ‘Beat Generation’ to describe his social circle consisting of norm-breaking and anti-conformist youth in New York City. ‘Beat’, meaning beat down, was subculture slang from the world of those groups who saw themselves in that condition – petty thieves, hustlers, drug addicts, and other ‘down and outs’. However, for Kerouac and others within his circle, such as Allen Ginsberg, another well-known anti-conformist writer who opposed imperialism and traditional forms of sexual morality, ‘beat’ had a spiritual dimension which rejected the materialist and conformist trajectory that US society had taken after World War II. Behind this dimension were nostalgic visions of life in the USA to which society should return. The term faced distortions as it entered the public arena. In Kerouac’s response to these distortions, we get a sense of the meaning behind ‘beat culture’.

In early 1978, Towards the Great Civilization, the last pre-revolutionary book written by Mohammad Reza Shah, was published amid great fanfare. To be sure, from the early 1970s, he increasingly spoke of this ‘great civilization’ and its elements, a significant number of which are found in his first work, Mission for My Country (1961), in his trial balloon aimed at the ideologization of the monarchy, Pahlavism (1966–1967) penned by Manuchehr Honarmand, and in the ideology of the Rastakhiz Party of Shah and People founded in 1975. Expressing great optimism about Iran’s future, the shah portrayed this Great Civilization as an Iranian modernity superior to that offered by the liberal and capitalist West and the communist East.

In late 1973, around 7:30 p.m., ten-year-old Nasrin, one of four children in a family living in central Tehran, finished her homework and went to the corner grocer to buy milk. After thirty minutes, she had not yet returned. Alarm bells ringing, the family went to find her. No trace of her was found. Into the next day, they continued the search until the evening when she showed up at the house in ripped clothes. Crying and shaking, she told her parents what happened. They took her to the police station.

The wheels came off the Japanese economy in the early 1990s, throwing into question the expos that had emerged from and contributed to the previous two decades of growth. The first casualty was the Tokyo World City Expo, planned in the late 1980s and cancelled in 1995. By the end of the decade, there was a wave of nostalgia for Expo 70, as middle-aged creatives mourned the betrayal of its promises, or bemoaned its continuing hold on the present. But expos continued to have their uses. Alongside the laments, this chapter explores how the national bureaucracy and local authorities continued to use a new system and new kinds of expos to coordinate and foster development in the regions. It argues that the complicated genesis and unexpected success of Expo 2005 in Aichi, which evolved from a spur for regional development to the first eco-expo recognized by the United Nations, shows how expos remain a tool in the armory of development, even if observers in the West and intellectuals in Japan think their time has passed.

In the early 2010s, Turkey’s citizens continued to contest the role of religious, ethnic, and other forms of identity in public life. This chapter traces these contests over a series of transformative episodes from a constitutional referendum in 2010 to the nationwide Gezi Park protests three years later. Two key emergent properties are identified: (i) the AKP’s illiberal turn despite ongoing “openings” toward ethnic and religious minorities and (ii) the growing popularity of a neo-Ottomanism that came in more and less pluralistic variants. These included a multicultural approach to the Ottoman inheritance, but also a Sunni majoritarian strand. Both shaped domestic and foreign policy at a time of regional upheaval with the “Arab Spring” uprisings.

We begin this chapter by outlining what constitutes a humiliating foreign policy. We then linger on a key feature in the phenomenology of political humiliation, namely the sense of being replaced. This sense manifests in a perception of being removed from importance and consequence – usually by someone not viewed as a worthy competitor. After describing the phenomenology of replacement, we point out that it is particularly important to understand this sentiment because it straddles personal and political psychology, and because a focus on the sense of replacement helps us distinguish normative and descriptive aspects of political humiliation. After discussing the phenomenology of replacement, we highlight the difference between democratic and autocratic rulers in their susceptibility to humiliation. We conclude the chapter with a discussion of the dual role of humiliation as both driver and method of war.

This chapter explores the spatial dimensions of the trope of the epic return journey (the nostos) and focuses on the physical and emotive experiences which such a journey produces. Loney first highlights dislocation as an important feature in epic, and a motivating force behind its plot: the feeling of being separated in time or space from a more ideal past or home. Under this single conception of ‘dislocation’, the chapter brings together two poetic themes which scholars have traditionally treated discretely: nostalgia and homesickness. Archaic epics, especially Hesiod’s Works and Days, rely on a narrative of decline—of temporal dislocation—from an antecedent ‘golden age’, for which internal characters and external audiences are nostalgic. Similarly, characters in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey may be spatially dislocated and homesick, motivating a return journey (prototypically Odysseus, but also at moments Achilles and Helen).

On 2 December, Sigmund Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly’s The Student Prince in Heidelberg (or The Student Prince), a romance-filled operetta that does not have a happy ending, opened on Broadway, later becoming the longest-running musical of any sort to open on Broadway in the 1920s. Set in nineteenth-century Heidelberg, its tale of a prince who must leave behind his young love, a waitress at the inn he frequents, is set to an expansive musical score that features waltzes, marches, a buoyant drinking song and more. Other musicals that followed later in the month included Betty Lee, set in Southern California with a plot concerning a footrace in which a phonograph is the prize. Revues also appeared as the year drew to a close, further emphasizing the ubiquity of the genre.

This chapter examines the departure from Egypt from the perspective of oral history and personal collections. It shows how repatriated Italians remembered their departures, and their reception and integration in Italy. It looks at how those acts of remembering connected with histories of migration from and to Italy. In doing this, it reorients our understanding of imperial nostalgia, by considering the ways by which historical experiences are knotted into the present. Repatriated Italians are the protagonists of this chapter. They narrate how departure and arrival evoked different understandings of the origins of Italian communities in Egypt and how national and regional political constellations were perceived to have transformed in the Mediterranean. Considering the effects of ‘events’ in shaping decisions to leave Egypt, the chapter examines experiences of departure and arrival. It focuses on how the abandonment of belongings and the reception as ‘refugees’ shaped forms of political membership for repatriated Italians in relation to other migrant departures to and from the Mediterranean.

This chapter draws together the book’s overarching narrative by examining the regional transformations inscribed in the social and material architecture of the Italian care home, the Casa di Riposo, in Alexandria, Egypt. The institution was founded in 1928, at the height of the community’s importance in regional politics. Designed to house over 250 individuals, its inhabitants were fewer than 20 at the time of writing. Within its halls, it contains a locked and abandoned museum, aptly named ’The Time Machine’, which displays the accumulated objects of departed Italians. Walls grew around the building in proportion to Alexandria’s expanding population. During moments of political revolt since 2011, demonstrators’ calls for new futures reverberated in the Casa di Riposo’s emptying halls. Using the Casa di Riposo as an analytical lens, this conclusion suggests that imperial afterlives, even in states of absence and entropy, demonstrate the contested nature of historical temporalities in shaping migration, empire, and decolonisation in the modern Mediterranean.

This chapter examines the print cultural history of queer pulp fiction in the 1950s, paying special attention to obscenity challenges as well as to the cultural afterlives of pulps in contemporary queer culture.

Black Rhodesian soldiers were integrated into the new Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) by Robert Mugabe’s ZANU government, contrary to widespread fears of persecution. This was highly unusual, as in the aftermath of many wars of decolonisation, the fate of those who had fought for the colonial army was dire. Mugabe government’s prime motive was to retain the RAR’s military capabilities, which it relied upon to control conflicts between the liberation armies in the tumultuous post-independence period. This chapter also discusses how black ex-Rhodesian troops played a decisive role in quelling inter-liberation army fighting in the Assembly Points (APs) and the ZNA battalions that were being integrated during 1980 and early 1981. My interviewees felt that, during the conflicts of 1980–1, their military performance demonstrated their loyalty to the ‘government of the day’ and their military skills, and thus cemented their place in the ZNA. Finally, this chapter discusses the nostalgic reminiscences of these veterans and how the hindsight of the post-2000 ‘crisis’ years has impacted their narratives.