When the future was infinitely open: on absence and presence of nostalgia in Hannah Black’s Tuesday or September or the End

This article engages with the question of nostalgia through analyzing Hannah Black’s speculative novella Tuesday or September or The End (2021). In her book, Black describes how subjects living amid temporal stagnation and crises of future-making seek relief through participation in an uprising that aims to bring down a neoliberal government and turn the city of New York into a commune. Thinking with Mark Fisher’s (2012) work on hauntology and Bernard Stiegler’s (1998 [1996]) writing on protentional temporalities, I set out to develop ways to attend to Black’s interest to underpin specific forms of nostalgia, or the lack thereof, that intensify projections into the imminent future. I show how Black operationalizes her own nostalgic attitude towards an unsuccessful revolt to construct a working model of future-hauntology and shift away from the looping nostalgia for cultural and social forms of the past that impede future-making.