Urban Nostalgia: Colonial traces in the postcolonial city of Luanda

Nostalgia has become an apt concept to elicit the examination of traces of the past upon the present. In this presentation, I am concerned with a particular kind of nostalgia, or, what I call, here, urban nostalgia. Using the city of Luanda, the capital of Angola, as a case study, I will be discussing the extent to which urban nostalgia deserves a category of its own. It is not colonial nostalgia, although it shares a great deal of its discursive field; nor is it anthropological nostalgia, or the nostalgia for the primitive and the pristine. It is more a sort of nostalgia for the future, or the future enshrined in urban forms of the past.