Critical heritage studies and the legacies of the late-twentieth century heritage canon

ABSTRACT

In recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenomenon. But how original or radical are the concepts and aims of CHS, and why has it apparently become useful or meaningful to talk about critical heritage studies as opposed to simply ‘heritage studies’? Focusing on the canon of the 1980s and 1990s heritage scholarship – and in particular the work of the ‘father of heritage studies’, David Lowenthal – this article offers a historiographical analysis of traditional understandings and approaches to heritage, and the various explanations behind the post-WWII rise of heritage in western culture. By placing this analysing within the wider frames of post-war historical studies and the growth of scholarly interest in memory, the article seeks to highlight the limitations and bias of the much of the traditional heritage canon, and in turn frame the rationale for the critical turn in heritage studies.     

Gallantry on the Shankill road: the British ‘soldier-hero’ and state-media relations in Northern Ireland, 1969-1979

ABSTRACT

The study of the British ‘soldier-hero’ as a political and cultural icon after 1945 has been largely confined to literature concerned with the memory of historical figures. Rarely have scholars considered how post-war military deployments not only created contemporary soldier-heroes, but also transformed their place within politics and society as the moral interrogation of these wars threatened to encroach upon the prestige of these icons. This article examines how the soldier-hero interacted with one of Britain’s most contentious deployments, Northern Ireland, and how politicians sought to control narratives surrounding this figure to avoid public relations controversy in unusual political conditions.     

Affective politics and colonial heritage,Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the spatial entanglement of colonial heritage struggles through a study of the Rhodes Must Fall student movement at the University of Cape Town and the University of Oxford. We aim to shed light over why statues still matter in analyzing colonial traces and legacies in urban spaces and how the decolonizing activism of the RMF movement mobilizes around the controversial heritage associated with Cecil Rhodes at both places – a heritage that encompasses statues, buildings, Rhodes scholarship and the Rhodes Trust funds. We include a comparative study of the Facebook use of RMF as it demonstrates significant differences between the two places in the development of the student movements as political activism. Investigating in more detail the heritage politics of RMF at UCT we fledge out what we call an affective politics using non-representational bodily strategies. We argue that in order for actual social movements to mobilize in current political controversies, they need to put affective tactics to use.     

Saul and Cultural Memory

ABSTRACT

In recent years a number of biblical scholars have shown that the Hebrew Bible contains both the collective memory and amnesia of ancient Israel. The differences between the portrayals of Saul in the books of Samuel and 1 Chronicles have long been explained in terms of redaction history, inner-biblical exegesis and other intertextual reading strategies. Using the insights from the fields of sociology and psychology cultural memory theory suggests that it was the dynamics of structural amnesia that made it necessary to suppress the memories of Saul that were not useful to the reconstruction of the past, and that the new “master narrative” in the Book of Chronicles may be seen as a post-trauma solution to the Israelites’ painful retrieval of memories of guilt and trauma.     

Marginal or mainstream? Migrant centres as grassroots and official heritage

Abstract

Migrant heritage, as a grassroots practice seeking to commemorate pre- and post-war migrant communities and their contributions, emerged in Australia from the 1980s. Since that time, its appeal has continued to grow. It now receives, in some form, state sanction and is policed by the same state and national legislation as other cultural heritage, both tangible and intangible. This article seeks to complicate understandings of migrant heritage as a marginal practice, specifically by interrogating the use-value of particular narratives in the Australian context – that is, how do individuals, communities and other groups (the grassroots) draw on sanctioned and publicly circulating narratives to mark their site as heritage-worthy? Ideas of what constitutes official and unofficial heritage can be mutually inclusive – a dialectical process. I analyse this in relation to the commemoration of former post-war migrant reception centres in Australia.     

MEMORY OF BARRACKS: World War II German ‘Little Berlins’ and post-war urbanization in Northern Finnish towns

Some 220,000 German soldiers were stationed and fought in northern Finland during World War II. These troops required huge amounts of supplies that were provided by supply encampments in several locations, including the towns of Oulu and Tornio. In this paper the authors consider how the memory of these German-built sites has shaped post-war urban heritage. They review and challenge the authorized history of the post-war urbanization of the northern towns.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

Unchanging boundaries: the reconstruction of Skopje and the politics of heritage

This study discusses the politics of urban planning and heritage in the city of Skopje, Macedonia. I compare three phases of urban reconstruction under three political systems: the inter-war Kingdom of Serbs Croats and Slovenes, the communist regime and present-day ‘democracy’. I show that the ambiguous marginalisation of Ottoman heritage has been a continuous practice, despite today’s reading of communist planning as ‘open’. Through a discussion of Yugoslav politics towards religious and national ‘minorities’, I show that Ottoman heritage has been preserved only insofar as it fits within the state’s definition of power. I specifically detail how the construction of ‘European’, ‘secular’ public space has worked as a tool through which state/nation building established new hierarchies of power. I show how this is reflected most clearly in the specific politics of heritage by discussing the creation, regulation and management of ‘?ar?ija’, the ‘old Turkish’ neighbourhood of Skopje.     

Aid and Reconstruction of Heritage in the Context of Post-Conflict Societies

Reconstruction of destroyed heritage has been an important interest in the expenditure of international aid funds when confronting post-conflict situations. Prevention of destruction has also been of concern but with less success in the international conflict scene. However, when aid and reconstruction are the main objectives, the targets seldom agree with the realities of post-conflict politics and the rather slow process of societal restructuration. The often speedy need for “reconstruction” tends to be negative for the actual architectural heritage of a given society, and, as I underline here, often transgresses the delicate process of social healing. In this paper I will present problems and successes incurred in reconstruction strategies in post-conflict periods in Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In sum, I will underline the strong correlation between interest and willingness to consider preservation of heritage and the solution to social, political and economic conflicts in post-war settings.     

How ‘creative’ is remembering? Culture-led regeneration and the politics of memory in Bogota,Colombia

ABSTRACT

Recently, Colombia’s post-conflict transition has experienced strong international attention. In Bogota, commemorative politics of the conflict insert themselves in complex processes of place branding: employing culture to rescale the city image from unsafe and violent to culturally vibrant. However, how to reckon with the country’s violent past in the culture-led renaissance of Bogota? Based on the author’s four-month of in-depth qualitative fieldwork on the main street Avenida 26 – at the center of both branding strategies and politics of memory – this paper shows the failure of institutional efforts to promote a brand of Bogota as a ‘City of Memory’. Socio-political divisions over the interpretations of the country’s past result in multi-scalar conflictive negotiations between politics and practices on the street: they reveal the tight link between memory, social justice, and urban segregation while denouncing the exclusionary visions of citizenship bared in political efforts to display memory as a territorial mark.     

The long shadow of apartheid: a critical assessment of heritage transformation in South Africa 25 years on

ABSTRACT

Based on insights gained from two decades of research on South African heritage and monuments, this paper critically reflects on the status quo of heritage transformation in South Africa 25 years after the end of apartheid. It assesses new directions in national heritage policy and government strategy in relation to recent developments around post-apartheid heritage and the popular demand for a removal of ‘colonial statues’, which gained impetus from the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign. It is argued that the government’s approach to heritage transformation and most notably its treatment of white minority heritage, dominated by the ‘juxtaposition model’, has had limited success. The paper illustrates how heritage and the memory of the past are entangled with socio-political and economic realities in the present, which in turn is overshadowed by the long-term effects of apartheid and impacted by global or transnational considerations, such as foreign investment and tourism.     

Fragmentation and forgetting: Sarajevo’s Vijećnica

In this article I argue that the crisis of common collective heritage in Bosnia and Herzegovina is negatively affecting continued peace building processes in the country through an examination of the reconstruction of Sarajevo’s Austro-Hungarian city hall – the Vije?nica. Without a state-level ministry of culture, heritage that attests to a common cultural past uniting the three major ethno-religious groups in the country has suffered immeasurably, especially in comparison to ethnically specific cultural heritage. After the Second World War, the Vije?nica began to embody shared collective memories through its function as the National and University Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Nacionalna i Univerzitetska Biblioteka Bosne i Hercegovine). The building’s destruction during the Siege of Sarajevo cemented its place within the Bosnian psyche as a collective memory institution, but its reconstruction is transforming the discourses surrounding the building and the collective memories it embodies. By investigating the reconstruction process and the post-war separation of the National and University Library from the Vije?nica, I show that common collective heritage matters for peace building, and that in Sarajevo, the decay and neglect of such institutions not only mirror the splintering dynamics of ethno-religious nationalism, but also perpetuate them.     

Martin Luther King,Jr, and the Possibilities of Democratic Politics

Abstract

This essay moves beyond the limits of the post-September 11 debate over national security versus civil liberties to consider again the possibilities of democratic politics. It briefly surveys three Protestant interpretations of American democracy that have dominated recent debates. These interpretations leave us with the dilemma of having to choose between democratic dissent and the political pursuit of the good. Such a dilemma begs for other interpretations. Martin Luther King, Jr, stands as an obvious but neglected resource. His interpretation of democracy reconciles the pursuit of the good, a substantive politics, with diversity and dissent. This argument requires the retrieval or reconstruction of King's interpretation, which involves an examination of King's religious convictions as well as his engagement in and reflection on the political arena. The essay concludes by suggesting how King's interpretation informs contemporary debates and shapes Christian practice.     

Paria la Viexa and an expanding empire: Provincial centers in the political economy of the Inka Empire (a.d. 1440–1532)

Abstract

The fastest growing and largest territorial empire of the Americas was the Inka Empire. At the time of its emergence in the 14th century, the empire lacked an urban network, a developed division of labor, a sophisticated craft industry, and an exchange network like that of most pre-industrial states. The emerging Inka state had to create the social and economic institutions that would ensure its growth and long-term operation. Data from Paria la Viexa, an Inka provincial center in Bolivia, illustrates how the Inka Empire created the necessary conditions for its expansion and operation through a network of provincial centers it had called to life.     

A cultural justice approach to popular music heritage in deindustrialising cities

ABSTRACT

Deindustrialisation contributes to significant transformations for local communities, including rising unemployment, poverty and urban decay. Following the ‘creative city’ phenomenon in cultural policy, deindustrialising cities across the globe have increasingly turned to arts, culture and heritage as strategies for economic diversification and urban renewal. This article considers the potential role that popular music heritage might play in revitalising cities grappling with industrial decline. Specifically, we outline how a ‘cultural justice approach’ can be used within critical heritage studies to assess the benefits and drawbacks of such heritage initiatives. Reflecting on examples from three deindustrialising cities – Wollongong, Australia; Detroit, USA; and Birmingham, UK – we analyse how popular music heritage can produce cultural justice outcomes in three key ways: practices of collection, preservation and archiving; curation, storytelling and heritage interpretation; and mobilising communities for collective action.     

Integrating Archaeological Heritage into Towns and Settlements

ABSTRACT

This article explores factors concerning the urban integration of archaeological heritage in towns and settlements. Archaeological heritage refers to visible, immovable archaeological remains (such as the remains of buildings or structures), sites, and areas (larger complexes). As part of the multidisciplinary process of archaeological heritage management, based on understanding the significance of a site and the goal of enhancing and preserving archaeological heritage in situ, urban integration and its determining factors have not been the subject of systematic research. The present study is derived from the application of deductive research based on theoretical assumptions validated by a qualitative survey. Research has identified 17 factors as the basis for the urban integration of archaeological heritage in towns and settlements. These factors represent a theoretical and practical contribution not only to urban planning but also to archaeological heritage management.     

Editorial

Abstract

The Fiestas de Astures y Romanos (The Festival of Astures and Romans) is a thriving historical re-enactment performed in the town of Astorga, in north-west Spain. The objective of our research has been to explore the complex interactions between politics, the public, and heritage management, and to evaluate their impact upon archaeology as a discipline. We draw on a participant ethnography carried out during the 2011 event. The concept of ‘Celtic-Barbarian Assemblage’ enables us to understand how different usages of the pre-Roman past condition identity politics and heritage policies at the local level. Finally, we reflect upon our findings and suggest potential lines of action to tackle what we perceive to be the increasing gap between public and academic archaeology in Spain, whose long-term consequences can be detrimental for the discipline as a whole.     

The international heritage doctrine and the management of heritage in Sarajevo,Bosnia and Herzegovina: the case of the Commission to Preserve National Monuments

Since the formal end to the conflict of dissolution of Yugoslavia in 1995, cultural heritage has been given a central role in post-war recovery and reconstruction, and in the development of sustainable peace in the region. This role reflects the pivotal function accorded to heritage in post-conflict settings within the international heritage doctrine, while re-assessing the crucial role of culture in ‘building peace in the minds of men and women’ (UNESCO) and in creating ‘greater understanding of one another among the peoples of Europe’. I will present and analyse the current formal/legal system of heritage construction and reconstruction in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), its relations with the international heritage doctrine and its implications on the local process of memorialisation of armed conflict. As I will argue, one fundamental pitfall of the international heritage doctrine fashioned by UNESCO and the Council of Europe is that it implicitly relies on the nation-state as the carrier and developer of collective cultural memory and identity, overlooking settings where the primary mode of group identification and legitimisation occurs at different (lower) levels, as in BiH.     

All that we are – heritage inside out and upside down

Abstract

This article explores how the axis between heritage on the ‘inside’ and heritage on the ‘outside’ is imagined and produced, theoretically, politically and institutionally. It asks which outsider narratives are privileged and which are contained, and what the management of these boundaries inadvertently tells us about the politics and anxieties of the ‘inside’. It offers reasons for the pervasiveness of the border despite various initiatives to invite the outside in.