Poststalgia for the Future
Posted in Discourse on Sun Sep 10, 06 by Kyle under Midcentury Modern and Industrious Production.
I came across a great new word recently, postalgia. A mashup of the verbal kind crossing nostalgia and the “post” prefix, as in postwar or post-Impressionism. (Notice how I so kindly declined to offer as an example the most abused “post”-ism buzzword of the late 20th century.) Fortunately, unlike some other unmentioned post-words you needn’t a postdoctoral degree to appreciate postalgia. According to the definition submitted to Merriam-Webster’s Open Dictionary by the neologism’s sci-fi writing creator Mark Shainblum postalgia is:
1. a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a projected future that never was; i.e. as promised by Disneyland and science fiction of the 1950’s.
2. a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for a future era by a time-traveller in the past.
I couldn’t have defined it better myself. I encountered this new word while listening to a podcast of A Way with Words from KPBS on my ever-so-forward-yearning iPod and couldn’t help but think how appropriate the term is considering the Mid-Century Modern revival that is now sweeping the nation. The glowing idealism and faith in material and scientific progress of that era certainly seems appealing now in a time when things seem so much more complicated, unstable, and tumultuous. Considering it was a decade when there were only five megabyte hard-drives, idyllic four-person families, three major television networks, two genders, and one distant looming enemy threatening the US with nuclear annihilation, the 1950s seems downright stress-free and unambiguous compared with the poly-obbsessed, post-everything present.
So with mawkish utopian enthusiasm, let’s take a look back at some treasured postalgic treats from the 1950s that I’ve dug up for your scopic pleasure…
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