Bloomsbury Coming Back Stronger: 90s Nostalgia in Contemporary Media Culture

Through sixteen diverse case studies, this collection examines the influence of the 1990s in contemporary film, television, and internet culture. We live in an age of crisis: war, pandemic, political chaos, financial meltdowns, extreme inequality, and the acceleration of climate breakdown define our era. We also live in the online age of constant connection and media saturation, where our social realities are overdetermined by screens, notifications, anxieties about fake news, and endless content on demand. In response, digital detoxes and other coping mechanisms are on the rise, and a significant amount of media content is marked by a turning away from the horrors of the future and the horrors of the present to look firmly back to the past, in ways that mobilise a range of ambivalent nostalgic modes and affects. One of the most striking trends in 21st-century Western media culture is the rise of nostalgia for the 1990s: a period that is often characterised as the last period before social media ruined authentic relationships and, for many, the last hopeful period before the world started falling apart. Over the last decade, the trend of re-makes and sequels of original 90s film and television texts, reformations of dissolved 90s rock bands, and rebirths of 90s celebrity icons suggests that the 1990s serves as a crucial touchstone for thinking about our contemporary milieu. This volume examines the influence of the 1990s in contemporary screen media, problematising simple notions of sentimentality for the past, and paying close attention to both the continuities and the ruptures between the 1990s and the present day.