Monochrome Memories: Nostalgia and Style in Retro America

(Hardback)

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Explores nostalgia as a cultural style in 1990s America. Through a series of engaging and interlinked case studies on the news magazine, Hollywood film, brand advertising, and movie colorization, this volume examines the resurgence of the black and white image in the 1990s. At a time when American culture was undergoing both diversification and demystification, the black and white image became the expression of nostalgia as a cultural style and was strategically used in the media to visualize a sense of American memory, heritage, and identity. Challenging the current definition of nostalgia as a mood connected to longing and loss, the author presents it as a cultural mode that commodifies and aestheticizes memory. By examining the politics of stylized nostalgia, this volume provides new insight into the construction, representation, and preservation of American national memory at the turn of the 20th century.

Reviews

"I have not myself come across anything like it. Monochrome Memories is scholarly, interesting, well-presented and as far as I am aware breaks new ground in a number of ways. Aside from the intrinsic value of its analysis of an historically specific mode/style/fashion, the book is valuable for its discussion of loss, nostalgia and the retro style, and for a way in which it resists easy theory-led generalizations."-Steve Neale Sheffield Hallam University
"This book is striking for its originality, and for its capacity to make connections among apparently disparate objects so as to illuminate the uses of nostalgia in the contemporary media. It skillfully intercuts theoretical analysis with specific considerations of popular cultural material, and as such it should be of interest to a wide range of readers."-Paul Giles Cambridge University
"Grainge effectively sets up his analysis as a challenge to existing nostalgia theories, grounded in notions of loss and amnesia, contributing to and widening the debate on cultural nostalgia and the politics of memory."-Journal of American Studies
Grainge effectively sets up his analysis as a challenge to existing nostalgia theories, grounded in notions of loss and amnesia, contributing to and widening the debate on cultural nostalgia and the politics of memory.-Journal of American Studies

Author Bio

PAUL GRAINGE is a lecturer in the Institute of Film Studies at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. He has published scholarly articles on global media and contemporary American culture.