Repeating beats: The return of rave, memories of joy and nostalgia between the afterglow and the hangover

Abstract

The British rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s is widely remembered as a moment of elation and bliss. Contemporary cultural representations position the Second Summer of Love of 1989 – when thousands of young people attended illegal parties, experienced the hypnotic beats of house music and had their first brush with the drug ecstasy – as an object of nostalgia. I argue that rave nostalgia is suspended between two dispositions: the afterglow and the hangover. Whereas the former involves happiness, reversibility and continuity, the latter is defined by melancholia, irreversibility and discontinuity. On this basis, I consider two texts that creatively combine these dispositions in their evocation of rave: the music video for The Streets’s ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody in the Place. Finally, I assess how the euphoria associated with rave nostalgia helps to augment and advance the recent turn to joy in memory studies.

A Recreation Mechanism for Refugee Memories to Get through the Betrayal and Trauma in The Hungry Tides by Amitav Ghosh

“…This paper looks at how the author represents trauma through memory and how memory is used as a tool to avoid trauma as in one of Daukšaitė's works, Susana Vega-Gonzalez observes that the -passing on of [...] forgotten stories, giving them a voice in the novel's discourse, is the only hope for eternity and remembrance‖ (Daukšaitė, 2013(Daukšaitė, ,p.2549. In The Hungry Tides, we could see a lot of incidents where the memories of the characters bring their traumatic past memories -positive memories are less significant than negative memories, particularly with regard to questions of historical justice‖ (Davidson, 2022). Negative memories or memories that remind us about any tragic event would remain in us and haunt us throughout as trauma.…”

Marginalized female in two song lyrics, Tragedi Cinta: textual-metaphoric representations

“…Memories are always beautiful, and so are the two song lyrics under study. They can, for sure, bring back past events which seemed to occur just yesterday (Cady, 2023;Davidson, 2023). The two song lyrics, highlight the unfortunate destiny of a girl whose boyfriend left her upon illegal sexual encounters, leading to pregnancy.…”