This talk will examine nostalgia's relation to the spatial imagination through a revealing case study – nostalgia for the British Mandate (1917-1948) in 21st century Israeli culture. Through an exploration of contemporary Israeli works of literature, theater and art that convey nostalgia for the mandate era, I will define two central types of nostalgia found in these narratives: cosmopolitan nostalgia, which imagines the mandate era as a time of cosmopolitan coexistence of Jews, Arabs and others, and kinetic nostalgia, which focuses on the ability to move freely in the space of the Middle East before the creation of borders. The narratives I will examine focus on one central theme – the Hejaz railway, which once connected cities in the space that is now Israel to other cities in the Middle East that have become inaccessible after the foundation of the state. I will place these nostalgic narratives and the cartographies they create and project onto the past in the context of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and argue that they function as a counter-hegemonic political force in contemporary Israeli culture. I will then ask about the critical potential of nostalgia in its ability to reimagine the spaces of the present, and demonstrate how this reimagining of past physical and social spaces through cultural narratives can eventually be aimed at creating new possibilities of imagining different futures.
