Paper long abstract:

The residence of Leo Trotzky in Coyoacan is perhaps the most immediate place that comes to mind when visiting Mexico City. Yet in almost every tourist guide I read it is mentioned as one of the more or less obligatory places to visit (mostly in tandem with the house of his former lover and artist Frida Kahlo). The residence in which one of socialist Russia's most famed revolutionaries spent the last four years of his life (1936-1940) commemorates not only the life of Trotzky as an important historical figur but also the promise of revolutionary hope and change, including its failure. In my talk I am interested in longings for a pst that generate nostalgia as both their affective and temporal condition. Rather than looking at nostalgia as an always already unfulfilled historical condition, I am more interested in what it tells us about the temporal dimensions of this now and its fulfilled and unfulfilled possibilities. The real and imagined tourist in this talk is a also a socialist history bufff for whom Trotzky's residence has become an intentional memorial for once grandiose, now dashed dreams. Working through the topography of Trotzky's former residence, now converted into a museum, I seek to unearth the mnemonic traces that produce both a nostalgia for the past while simultaneously acting as reminders of a desire for different historical futures.