Placing Nostalgia: Allison Hui

''​Chapter 3 Placing Nostalgia: The Process of Returning and Remaking Home By Allison Hui
 
In Tonya K. Davidson, Ondine Park and Rob Shields (eds.) (2011) Ecologies of Affect: placing nostalgia, desire, and hope (pp. 65-84). Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press
 
This study looks at the relationship nostalgia has with place and time. It looks at the very particular way nostalgia is experienced by expatriates who move away from home and then return. A methodology used is a survey of their travel diaries. The study identifies three components to the generation of nostalgia. It describes a material house/ space, how this becomes a virtual home (when the subject travels away), and finally, it examines the act of 're-placing', when the subject returns. Re-placing means becoming reaquainted with the materiality of the place and adjusting this relationship with the nostalgic memory. Hui suggests that nostalgia is created and nurtured when this space between what is real and what is remembered is experienced.
A second method is to use ‘Linked’, an art installation, as a case study to investigate how place, space the real and the virtual, come together. This examines how nostalgic loss is felt both by those who have been displaced, and also by those who have never visited the site before.
Hui does clearly point to alternative definitions of space and place by other authors, and so reveals the personal perspective of her theory.
 
This is a key text for the development of my project, dealing as it does with the evolution of virtual place, nostalgia and memory.