Nation, race, and affect: senses and sensibilities at national heritage sites (original) (raw)
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This paper picks up from extensive literatures that have addressed the relationship of heritage to national identity. Much work focuses upon the symbolic construction of the past through heritage institutions, but in so doing it tends to underplay the affective experience of heritage sites. The paper argues that it is the felt experience and the organisation of sensibilities towards heritage which are often as important, and these have racialised modalities. The paper thus looks at attempts to foster civic inclusion and argues that they need to work through not just civic openness but felt exclusions and fears. The paper takes two canonical heritage sites to exemplify these issues. First, the British Museum was chosen as an urban national institution that is conventionally seen speaking in an unemotive, pedagogical register. The history of the museum as collecting artefacts from around the world and bringing them to London is related to diasporic communities’ feelings about the collections focusing on the Oceanic gallery. The second exemplar is the English Lake District, chosen as a rural national park that is seen to mobilise more visceral affective responses, is deeply bound up with national sensibilities but has attracted attention for racial exclusivity.
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This article posits the value in considering the affective politics in the everyday space of the British Museum with a postcolonial lens. Based on research collaborations with artist Rosanna Raymond the article argues that the gallery space becomes a theatre of pain. The museum acts as a site of materialising the pain of epistemic violence, the rupture of genocide and the deadening of artefacts. The article examines the embodied experience of encountering these galleries as for Māori visitors, the art museum becomes a mausoleum for the European eye, but which petrifies living cultures. In particular the article considers the petrification as it operates along racial lines. The museum space from critical postcolonial perspectives is presenced through Māori bodies looking at ‘self’, as ‘other’. This approach seeks to disturb the ways in which museums are read as texts, disembodied and removed from communities which are represented therein. The article argues for heritage sites as bein...
Whose Heritage? Deconstructing and reconstructing counter-narratives in heritage
Routledge eBooks, 2023
Presented in this chapter are two essays, 'Blurring Field-Box Boundaries: Documenting through Community Participation' (Malik, 2021) and an excerpt from 'The Transatlantic Slavery Connections of English Heritage Properties: Knowledge Transfer and Country House Reinterpretation, Osborne House' (Edem-Jordjie, 2021). If the political events of recent history have taught us anything about heritage, it is that the answer to the question of the heritage of Britain differs radically depending on who you ask. Malik, born in Lahore, Pakistan, is concerned with connecting to a deeper, more aware self. The value of interaction with other artists to build community is what brings her back to her practice. Edem-Jordjie holds an MA in anthropology and museum practice from Goldsmiths, University of London. The essays critically challenge the heritage sector and their imperial epistemologies that remain deeply problematic to the process and practice of decolonisation. Presented is an interrogation and disruption that actively addresses the historic repression of silenced voices in our collections and across sites of heritage. Interrogating the ideas and thinking of Stuart Hall's critique on a 'national story' (Hall, 1999), their essays offer new possibilities to inform strategies. Both essays call for a change in the hierarchies of power governing collections management, the categorisation of cultural heritage, interpretation, and representation. This call reflects my own practice with Museum X CIC and the Black British Museum Project-a direct provocation in response to the ideas expressed by Hall and a continuum of ideas of cultural identification: 'Black' and 'British'. Indeed, creating a new museum has been an opportunity to rethink, redesign, and reimagine what a decolonised museum can be in the constantly evolving narratives on cultural and nationalistic forms of identity. These essays, from the Whose Heritage? Research Residency Programme run by the Black organisation Culture&, are themselves a resistance to authority and the authoritative point of view that Hall uses as a persistent provocation in his work. It is vital to my praxis with the work I do to support emerging researchers who interrogate our own sense of self in the work that we do. The question 'why?' is crucial in the process and practice of decolonisation, the
A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage? The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect
This review examines debates situated at the intersection between heritage studies and geography, particularly those that revolve around more-than-representational theories. These theories, the review suggests, advance recent developments within the heritage field concerned with those senses of ‘the now’ so often left neglected by conventional understandings of heritage. The intellectual traditions underpinning this contribution draw primarily from the field of cultural geography, especially those that touch upon the tactile, experiential, aural, emotional and sonic. What this lends to the field of heritage studies is a vigorous and distinct way of conceptualising heritage in terms of the body, practice and performativity, together with an insistence that our engagements with it occur through a range of embodied dispositions and interactions. In other words, it insists that we, as heritage researchers, become more attentive to different possibilities for knowing and doing heritage: the ways in which it makes sense or answers back to a fuller range of people (after Thrift 2008).
Legacies of prejudice: racism, co-production and radical trust in the museum
Museum Management and Curatorship, 2010
Museums have been complicit in the construction of physical and cultural hierarchies that underpinned racist thought from the Enlightenment until well into the twentieth century, in marked contrast to the inclusionary role that many now seek to fulfil. In Revealing Histories: Myths about Race (2007Á2009) at the Manchester Museum, UK, a team from within and beyond the museum tried to address this uncomfortable history. They faced challenges and raised many questions: how to present such material honestly but sensitively? Could other voices be included without jeopardising the credibility of the museum? How can post-colonial arguments be made with a collection based on the spoils of empire? And, finally, how are museums to escape the legacies of prejudice? Although well intentioned, the actions of museum staff in realising the project Á the authors included Á exhibited unanticipated vestiges of institutional racism. Drawing on race and international development studies, this paper concludes that a more radical trust may be called for if UK museums are genuinely to collaborate with other groups on projects like this; to become spaces for democratic exchange, and to face up to their legacies of prejudice.
An Introduction to Heritage in Action
Academics did not create heritage, but they disciplined it, so to speak, in the late 20 th century. Heritage was already happening in the context of multiculturalism and globalization as " people all over the world … turned to ethnic and cultural identity as a means of mobilizing themselves for the defense of their social and political-economic interests " (Turner, 1993, p. 423). It was also happening via the mechanisms of UNESCO's World Heritage List, which were beginning to operate as early as 1978, and as mass tourism opened up new horizons for that industry. Indeed, cultural heritage was – and is – on the move: heritage is in action. One clear demonstration of this is the " overproduction " of heritage. Whether it is the expansion of the World Heritage List (1,031 inscriptions as of 2015 with no end in sight/sites, if we may be permitted the pun), the proliferation of museums, individual and community heritagizing actions, business sector appropriations of heritage discourse and imagery, the new European Heritage Label, or heritage-justified internal and international ethnic strife—it seems that everything and anything is being declared, contested and/or performed as heritage. Moreover, heritage now travels with a mobile population – temporary, permanent and along a scale between those extremes – and it (re)creates and reconfigures itself in its destinations. Heritage is produced and mobilized by individuals and communities in any number of actions, including remembering, forgetting, generating, adapting and performing. Heritage shapes and reshapes people's sense of place, sense of belonging and cultural identities locally and nationally. Clearly, then, heritage does " work " (Smith, 2006). And as work, cultural heritage is a tool that is deployed broadly in society today. It is at work in indigenous and vernacular communities, in urban development and regeneration schemes, in expressions of community, in acts of memorialization and counteracts of forgetting, in museums and other spaces of representation, in tourism, in the offices of those making public policy and, all too frequently, in conflicts over identity and the goals of those politics of identification. Thus, heritage is not simply an inert " something " to be looked at, passively experienced or a point of entertainment; rather, it is always bringing the past into the present through historical contingency and strategic appropriations, deployments, redeployments, and the creation of connections and reconnections. It implicates how memory is produced, framed, articulated and inscribed upon spaces in a locale, across regions, nationally and, ultimately, transnationally. It enables us to critically engage with contemporary social and political issues of grand import while also being a familiar prop drawn upon to make sense of more mundane processes of negotiating self, place, home and community.
HERITAGE IN MULTICULTURAL TIMES
I universal discourses. Two issues come to the fore in this purpose: first, the J historicization of heritage; and, second, the disentanglement of the perverse J union of heritage with the law. Historicization is well known to anthropology, where it has taken the form of introspection. Rabinow (1986) called it to -T 'anthropologize the West'; Chakrabarty , 'provincializing Europe'. The J purpose is the same: to situate a practice, a relationship, a meaning geohistor-I ically and geopolitically; to show how they come to be, their happening. That f ÿÿ j we can do with heritage: to bring it back to its place of origin; to pluralize it; to | take it away from the experts and from the possessive embrace of the state; to | unveil the fetishist operation, its naturalizing intention.2 Historicizing heritage J means bringing home what appears to be removed, afar; pointing to its famil-I iarity; locating and questioning the apparatus that fetishized it and reified it. | To be sure, heritage does not fetishize or reify itself. Someone does it: museum J officials; archaeologists; historians; legislators and their decrees; tourism and 1 the market; transnational promoters of humanism. f And then there is the issue of the entanglement of heritage with the law, J its utter complicity. Indeed, a fetishized and reified heritage (our heritage, the j éá
The Multivocality of Heritage – Moments, Encounters and Mobilities
The notion of ‘superdiversity’ has emerged as a keyword in the writings of, especially, European social scientists and sociolinguists to describe the ‘extraordinary complexity of contemporary social configurations due to post-cold war migration patterns and the digital revolution’ (Blommaert 2015). The term has also been used, albeit in a more contested way, by scholars working in the post-colonies of the global South where ‘extraordinary complexity’ has arguably been a feature for centuries (Deumert 2014, Silverstein 2014, Stroud 2015). The complexities of diversity – whether new or long-standing – have effects on how we, as scholars and lay-people, understand and conceptualize the very notion of heritage. In this chapter I will argue that heritage is not about the possession and presence of material objects or cultural artefacts (including so-called ‘heritage languages’), but should instead be seen as ‘a process of engagement, an act of communication and an act of meaning’ (Smith 2006: 1). In other words, similar to sociolinguists who have argued that it is useful to think of ‘language’ as a verb (languaging), heritage scholars have suggested that heritage too is a process of human action and agency (thus proposing the verb heritaging; Harvey 2001). An understanding of heritage as process, as communication, remembering/memory, performativity and performance (sometimes even spectacle), as lived and experienced, as shot through with dissonance and a multiplicity of voices, stands in opposition to wide-spread governmental, institutionalized and hegemonic views of heritage. This ‘authorized heritage discourse’ (Smith 2006) defines who the legitimate spokespersons for the past are, aims to construct broadly consensual views of heritage, and proceeds from the assumption that heritage can be mapped, managed, preserved and protected (a view which emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century, alongside discourses of nationalism and ideas of ‘trusteeship’ over the past). However, what happens to these traditional, governmental approaches in contexts of persistent or growing diversity: Whose heritage will be protected? Whose voices will be heard? And whose voices will be silenced? Who decides? And how should we deal with the fact that ‘all heritage is uncomfortable to someone’, and thus always and necessarily contested (Smith 2006: 81)? In this chapter I suggest that the idea of ‘moments’ or ‘encounters’, which has been core to sociological work on mobility (and in turn links to the idea of superdiversity), is helpful in conceptualizing heritage as a social practice. That is, our experience and engagement with the past is often fleeting, it ‘slips and slides’ in and out of focus, is ‘here today and gone tomorrow, only to reappear the day after tomorrow’ (Law and Urry 2004: 403), and, consequently, gives rise to forms of ‘minimal conviviality and temporary cohesiveness’ (Blommaert 2015: 23; also Li Wei 2011). This chapter explores heritage-as-doing-remembering-in-the-moment through two South African case studies: (a) the ‘revival’ of Tsotsitaal, a language practice associated with Sophiatown in the 1950s, in online discourses; and (b) the politics of racist nostalgia in online spaces, where heritage is used to silence difference and diversity.
Heritage, the power of the past, and the politics of (mis)recognition
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 2022
Heritage sites and places are often mobilized to represent a group's identity and sense of place and belonging. This paper will illustrate how heritage and museum visiting, as a leisure activity, facilitates or impedes recognition and redistribution in direct and indirect ways. Drawing on extensive qualitative interviews with visitors to 45 heritage sites and museums in the USA, Australia, and England, the paper demonstrates the importance of emotions in mundane struggles over recognition and misrecognition. How emotions uphold or challenge investments in heritage narratives are examined. The paper argues that heritage and heritage-making is a valuable focus of analysis that reveals the nuances of how people sustain or impede claims for recognition and redistribution.