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Aanchal Vij

Aanchal Vij is a PhD candidate at the University of Sussex where she researches American comics and graphic novels, nostalgia, and race and disability studies. She is currently working with Bloomsbury Academic as part of a CHASE placement, and is funded by SAGE Publishing to work as a ÔHive ScholarÕ with her universityÕs doctoral school.

Watchmen and Hunters: Reading Nostalgia, Repair, and Heroism in American Historical Fiction

    Watchmen (2019 and Hunters (2020) are both TV shows that engage with a deep sense of nostalgia and reparation: whether it is their counterfactual worldmaking with an ‘American god’ or a group of Jews who are on the ‘hunt’ to kill Nazis in post-war America, they both demonstrate how a longing for a different personal or historical past is inextricable from a desire to ‘repair’ the linear course of time. The insistent attempt to re-create personal and collective histories against the pervasive and overwhelming myth of American exceptionalism is symptomatic of a particular kind of cultural longing. Svetlana Boym’s useful categorisation of nostalgia into two kinds, restorative and reflective, along with her understanding of nostalgia as a longing for a home that ‘may or may not have existed,’ is central to the re-construction of a lost past both TV shows attempt (in their counterfactual worldmaking).[i] They speak back […]