This paper will explore the ways in which contemporary political subjectivities in Algeria are articulated through socially held perceptions of the recent past, specifically during the much under-researched period of nation-building in the 1970s. This period represents the longest period of stability since independence and was characterised by authoritarian state-led development and considerable regime legitimacy. The paper will posit that the emancipatory promises made by postcolonial nationalism in Algeria during the 1970s are just as important as the decolonisation struggle in understanding shifting constructions of national consciousness. In addition, the paper will unpick how this period is viewed through the turbulent identity politics of the 1980s, the violence of the 1990s and the neoliberal economics and reinforced state power of the 2000s, as well as through generational change. The paper draws on a year’s urban ethnographic fieldwork in the working-class Algiers neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued – where many of the changes in historical and social discourse in Algeria, from socialism to Islamism and beyond, have been definitively inscribed on the urban landscape. In addition, popular culture will be a main source of data. Widespread depictions of past-present disjuncture, visible in nostalgic depictions of the everyday certainties of the 1970s and socialist era sociability, express past emotional investments in the future and have multiple functions and meanings in the present for different generations. As a way of relating to the present, nostalgic practices are shaped situationally in the process of their creation and re-enactment. Such practices may be politically neutral, expressing a yearning for youth, but may be utilised by political agendas to articulate criticism of present politics or bolster political legitimacy. Furthermore, in a country in which history is routinely believed to have been ‘confiscated’ by powerbrokers, 1970s nostalgia provides a rare opportunity for consensus around a ‘safe’ past that acted as emotional refuge throughout the turbulent 1980s and 1990s.