Nostalgic

In rhetoric and communication

Kurlinkus coined the term "nostalgic other" to describe the ways in which some populations of people become trapped in other people's nostalgic stories of them, idealized as natural while simultaneously denied sovereignty or the right to change in the present. "Nostalgic others differ from other scholarly discourse in that their alterity is not primarily based in race or ethnicity", Kurlinkus wrote. "Rather, in concurrent identifications and divisions, the nostalgic other is distinguished from the rhetor by time. We live in the present; they live in the past. The creation of the nostalgic other allows mainstream populations to commodify the racial purity and stability of the past but refuses the community agency to change in the present by highlighting its negative traits."