magic johnson

I have long had a vaguely secretive fascination with what I'm going to call, in this post, "collective nostalgia," though I am often more inclined to call it "false nostalgia," emphasizing that the object of this nostalgia is generally something imaginary.

To scholars of nationalism and nation building, this concept is quite familiar, in principle if not in name -- the public memory that underlies national histories is characterized by a collective memory (and collective forgetting) that is selective, essentialized, and at times imagined.  Read More »