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Badia Ahad-Legardy in Conversation with Natalie Moore

Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture

A MIDWEST ADDRESS Author Literary Lunchbreak Virtual Event, co-sponsored with Bookends & Beginnings. Badia Ahad-Legardy discusses her book Afro-Nostalgia with WBEZ reporter and author Natalie Moore.

Badia Ahad-Legardy, an associate professor in the Department of English and Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs at Loyola University Chicago, is a scholar of contemporary African American literature and culture whose research examines affective sentiments that are generally overlooked with respect to the inner lives of African Americans (leisure, nostalgia, love). She is also the author of Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture. 

Natalie Moore, WBEZ radio's reporter covering Race, Class and Communities, is the author of The South Side: A Portrait of Chicago and American Segregation, winner of the 2016 Chicago Review of Books award for nonfiction and a Buzzfeed best nonfiction book of 2016. Natalie writes a monthly column for the Chicago Sun-Times. Her work has been published in Essence, Ebony, the Chicago Reporter, Bitch, In These Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.

About Afro-Nostalgia: Feeling Good in Contemporary Black Culture:

As early as the eighteenth century, white Americans and Europeans believed that people of African descent could not experience nostalgia. As a result, black lives have been predominately narrated through historical scenes of slavery and oppression. This phenomenon created a missing archive of romantic historical memories. Badia Ahad-Legardy mines literature, visual culture, performance, and culinary arts to form an archive of black historical joy for use by the African-descended. Her analysis reveals how contemporary black artists find more than trauma and subjugation within the historical past. Drawing on contemporary African American culture and recent psychological studies, Ahad-Legardy reveals nostalgia’s capacity to produce positive emotions. Afro-nostalgia emerges as an expression of black romantic recollection that creates and inspires good feelings even within our darkest moments.

Original and provocative, Afro-Nostalgia offers black historical pleasure as a remedy to contend with the disillusionment of the present and the traumas of the past.

"If you’ve been waiting for a book that steps out of trauma-time and the perpetual present of slavery clear-eyed and with its critical faculties alight, you’ve found it. Badia Ahad-Legardy breathes gentle and sweet-smelling fresh air into stale corners in her book on Afro-nostalgia, which cogently analyzes and affectively affirms black cultural producers and chefs who treat the past less as an ongoing traumatic wound and more as a surrealistic space of black historical regenerative possibility and happiness. A gem."--Avery Gordon, author of Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

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