Good Nostalgia/Bad Nostalgia

ABSTRACT In “Good History/Bad History” (1991), Tibor Kalman, J. Abbott Miller, and Karrie Jacobs identified critical issues in graphic design history while denouncing imitations of modernist works. At the time, modernists and postmodernists fiercely debated historiography and historical reference, but designers in both camps dismissed nostalgia. In this rewriting of “Good History/Bad History,” I use a historical argument to critique the persistence of canonical histories while drawing on critical theory and decolonial thought to argue that nostalgia can create space for historically marginalized actors. Kalman, Miller, and Jacobs rightfully found fault with design history’s exclusions as well as the indiscriminate copying of its forms, but they did not identify historical quotation as a strategy for rerouting narratives. By using their essay as the armature for mine, I attempt to create a palimpsest of thought that revisits their polemic with an examination of nostalgic impulses that continue to this day.