chapter 2
nostalgia is alive
The vignette linked above, at the start of the chapter Nostalgia is Alive, captures the general sentiment that emerged in my conversations with participants when speaking about the past: nostalgia. This was often expressed in remarks such as, “Things were better during the Portuguese,” or, “The lifestyle in the Portuguese days was different; this is all a mess,” which stood in contrast to a clear awareness of what it meant to live under a dictatorship. It is based on this initial tension that I develop the argument that my participants’ expressions of nostalgia serve as a mechanism to critically engage with the present and help them find relief from life’s insecurities and contemporary political and social threats.
Time encapsulated inside Mário’s room. Still from video by the author.
In the first section, EXPRESSIONS OF NOSTALGIA, I draw on Bissell’s (2005) concept of colonial nostalgia to show that the sentiment expressed by my participants did not indicate support for Portuguese colonialism. Instead, it conveyed a longing for something irretrievably lost (226). In their case, this sense of loss was also intertwined with frustration over their exclusion from post-liberation negotiations and the unfulfilled aspiration of establishing Goa as an independent state.
In the second section, ENGAGING WITH THE PRESENT, I further develop Bissell’s (2005, 218) theory to explore nostalgia as a social practice that assembles different aspects of the past and mobilises them in response to contemporary challenges. In this sense, nostalgia can be understood as a “means of critically framing the present” (216). Applied to my interlocutors, their expressions of nostalgia enabled them to make sense of the current situation in Goa, a place they perceived as plagued by moral decay, corruption, and an outsider culture that threatened their identity. Drawing on the work of Berliner and Angé (2016), I conclude that the recurring phrase “Goa is gone” does not express a longing to return to the past, but rather represents a complex engagement with a reality they have come to accept as the inevitable outcome of changing times.
Fernando and Mary’s neighbourhood in Margão. Still from a video by the author.
Finally, in FACING MY OWN NOSTALGIA, I reflect on my personal process of engaging with and writing about my participants’ expressions of nostalgia. I came to realise that I, too, was feeling nostalgic for a place I barely knew, for the remains of a past I did not experience and had serious concerns about, and for the idea of future disappearance. Drawing on Berliner’s (2016) concept of exonostalgia, I ultimately came to embrace my own nostalgic response to the Goa I was inhabiting in the present, not as a longing to return, but as a productive mechanism through which to critically engage with and contribute to the decolonisation of Portuguese historical narratives.
references