“Miss(ing) Americana” And the American Dream: Modern and Postmodern Nostalgia in Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s music engages with American nostalgia culture, (mis)remembering the past. This article examines her presentation of Americana and the American Dream through Fredric Jameson’s nostalgia mode, and how it oscillates between modern, romantic longing to postmodern fetishization. I argue that Swift exemplifies nostalgia’s central paradox: she romanticizes the past, constructing an America defined by longing rather than history. This postmodern mode reflects what Nicola Sayers terms an “amnesiac culture,” which fetishizes periods marked by racism, sexism, homophobia, and war. Swift’s fetishization of the 1920s–1960s reframes elements of Americana within a fairy tale, replacing the historical with the nostalgic.