White Nostalgia. The Politics of Home and Belonging

Nostalgia matters. Movies, tv-series and the retro industry feed nostalgic yearnings for bygone times and places. Marketing the past may make people miss what they never had, and hence cannot have lost.

Politicized nostalgia contrasts the uncertainties and anxieties of the present with the imagined happiness of an idealized past, and are used in nationalist campaigns to “Make the Nation Great Again”.

Centered on monoculturalism, nativism, and the politics of home and belonging, politicized nostalgia has made an inroad in Swedish politics too.

In its wake, radical nationalist ideas, ideals, and practices long considered “extreme” are being “mainstreamed”, i.e., recontextualized and embraced as acceptable by mainstream actors and significant parts of the population. A main avenue to communicate nationalist nostalgia is cultural production, literature, art, and music.

Carl Larsson, John Bauer, Björne and Evert Taube may be as important to get the radical nationalist message across as any party program.

Yet this material is typically overlooked by scholars of radical nationalism who rarely even meet those he or she seeks to understand. The purpose of this project is twofold.

Firstly, to produce critical knowledge on how white nostalgia is produced and disseminated in and by radical nationalist cultural production, and, secondly, to trace the possible impact of politicized white nostalgia and radical nationalist sentiments on mainstream political culture and public discourse.