New Canaan Library is pleased to welcome Professor Penny Von Eschen, University of Virginia, who will speak about the cold war and post-cold war era through the lens of her book, Paradoxes of Nostalgia: Cold War Triumphalism and Global Disorder since 1989. The live webinar will take place on Thursday, March 17 at 7 PM EST. Please register at newcanaanlibrary.org for Zoom sign in.
Professor Penny M. Von Eschen offers a sweeping examination of the cold war’s afterlife and the lingering shadows it casts over geopolitics, journalism, and popular culture. In Paradoxes of Power, Von Eschen shows how myriad forms of nostalgia across the globe—from those that posit a mythic national past to those critical of neoliberalism that remember a time when people believed in the possibility of a collective good—indelibly shape the post-cold war era. When Western triumphalism moved into global South and former eastern bloc spaces, many articulated a powerful sense of loss and a longing for stability.
Penny M. Von Eschen is a William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Studies and Professor of History at the University of Virginia and author of Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War and Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937–1957.