‘Do You Know How Nostalgia Works?’ Pop Culture and the Uses of the Past

This chapter serves as an introduction to the volume, as well as setting out the book editors’ thinking on the relationship between ‘pop culture’ and the ‘past’. It engages with the concept of nostalgia, and the specific dimensions of ‘pop nostalgia’, as well as examining other potentially fruitful analytical models for exploring the place of the past in contemporary popular culture. It also lays out the parameters of the book, explaining the significances of the contemporary, the West, and pop culture as its objects of focus, and of the importance of themes of politics, lifecycles, mediations, and materialities within the subsequent individual chapters.