Good Old-Fashioned Nostalgia

In his fall books preview, constituted by works he classifies as studies of “surveillance society and its discontents,” Scott McLemme of Inside Higher Ed includes Writing the World of Policing: The Difference Ethnography Makes (University of Chicago Press, October 2017) edited by James D. Wolfensohn Professor Didier Fassin, writing that it zeroes in on “social order and the forces assigned to handle its crises.” Also included is What Nostalgia Was: War Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion (University of Chicago Press, December 2017) by Thomas Dodman, Member in the School of Historical Studies. Of the work, McLemme writes, “Today the word [nostalgia] connotes poignancy more than suffering, but Thomas Dodman’s What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire and the Time of a Deadly Emotion reminds us that nostalgia once referred to a severe and potentially fatal kind of melancholy.”