Nostalgia for the past as guide to the future: Paule Marshall’s The Chosen Place, The Timeless People

Rooted in the movement of disparate peoples and cultures around the globe, both European colonization and the transatlantic slave trade it engendered were infused from the outset by a complex web of competing nostalgias. Colonizers and colonized alike held idealized conceptions of home, which were employed to varying effect in the new lands, shifting and revising as time went by. This variety of nostalgic affiliations led to scenarios where those we might least expect grew to use the nostalgic terminologies of other, seemingly opposing groups. The Caribbean author Paule Marshall makes this proliferation of nostalgic modes clear. The subversive, reflective nostalgia she ultimately champions in her novel The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969) exposes the political resonances of the seemingly personal desire for home, connecting with wider debates about the utility of nostalgia within postcolonial studies.