pastify

present singular third person pastifies · participle present pastifying · participle past pastified · past pastified

1. ambitransitiveto make something appear to belong exclusively to the past

   Augustus’ Forum is thus an impressive example of what has been aptly characterized as “‘pastifying’” the present (Assmann 1999: 4).

   2010, The Emperor and Rome, page 16

   4 more examples

   By declaring punk ‘dead,’ Corré acted to ‘pastify’ it: to position it out of the realm of the now and into a past that has fully passed, where it can be imagined as self-identical to its first iteration, uncorrupted and pristine, certain of its revered status.

   2017, Mad Dogs and Englishness, page 8

   As Jason Arthur writes in Violet America, local color “is a genre whose job it is to verify the imminent disappearance of its subject” (xi). Late-nineteenth-century representations of New Orleans, particularly those publised in Scribner’s/Century, however, go further by actually being set in the past (at the time of Louisiana Purchase, for instance, or during the Reconstruction era) and, hence, completing the process of “pastifying” regional cultures that regionalist writings from e.g., New England, the Midwest, and the Appalachians, most of which are set in the present (see Brodhead, Cultures 120; Foote 6), had merely begun. Half a century before the first New Orleans Comprehensive Zoning Ordinance (1929) declared the city’s French Quarter a “special historic district” and thus used urban planning to “pastify” or musealize Creole culture (see Klopfer 319), “Scribner’s Illustrated New Orleans” employed both fictional and non-fictional writing, as well as illustrations, to depict the city’s past as French and the city’s French as past.

   2020, Florian Freitag, Popular New Orleans

   Let us look more closely: the present cannot pass except by becoming the “before” of a for-itself [pour-soi] that thereby constitutes itself as “after”. There is therefore just one phenomenon: the arising of a new present that “pastifies” [passéifiant] the present that it was and, in the wake of the pastification [passéification] of a present, the appearing of a for-itself for whom that present will become the past.

   2021, Suffering Time, page 96

   As I will demonstrate through close examination of Hopkins’s novels, the texts intervene in the dominating revisionist and pastifying discourse and narratively presentify America’s antebellum past by illustrating slavery’s lasting effects on a post-Reconstruction present.

   2022, JoAnn Pavletich, Yours for Humanity: New Essays on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, page 154

   Antonyms: presentify