The Rolt Memorial Lecture 2015: Defining the Vintage Car: L.T.C. Rolt,the Vintage Sports Car Club and the Rise of Motoring Heritage

This paper examines the role played by the engineering historian, biographer and pioneer of canal and railway preservation, L.T.C. Rolt, in the development of an appreciation of motoring heritage. It concentrates on his involvement with the Vintage Sports Car Club in the 1930s, in which he played a key role in defining what a vintage car was. It examines the way in which this helped develop many of the themes that ran throughout his writing and gave him the practical skills needed in his later campaigning for the preservation of industrial heritage.

It also looks at the way in which Rolt's views on the car's impact mirror those held by others, and at the difficulties this posed to someone who was passionate about engineering and yet was horrified by the consequences of industrialisation. His advocacy of the vintage car was the beginning of his lifelong campaign to uphold craftsmanship and skills and to commemorate the role of the engineer and the craftsman in Britain.     

Assembling nostalgia: devices for affective captation on the re:heritage market

This article builds on the current rethinking of nostalgia in heritage studies and an increasing amount of research that explores the formatting of customer – producer relationships in terms of ’market attachments’ to analyse how nostalgia is performative on the market for retro, vintage and second hand, what we call the re:heritage market. Based on a multi-sited study including offline and online ethnographic observations, photography and qualitative interviews with shop owners and staff at a selection of central streets in Gothenburg, Sweden, the article explores the way shop owners work with nostalgia in order to attract, or ‘captate’, the public, through engaging affective market devices. Our particular contribution is to show how the re:heritage market contribute to our understanding of an alternative of cultural heritage, through configuring exchange and value, and details how ‘affective captation’ adds conceptual strength for understanding the emotive and sensate pull of certain market-based heritage practices. Staging nostalgic encounters involves practices of selecting, collecting, displaying and preserving for the future: practices that are vital for all heritage-making. A variety of actors are involved in this unconventional of heritage at safe a distance from traditional heritage practices.     

White gloves,feminist fists: race,nation and the feeling of ‘vintage’ in femme movements

This article raises the question of how the cultural politics of race and nation manifest within contemporary queer femme movements, performances and aesthetic practices. Focussing on the feeling of ‘vintage’, I specifically examine symbols, icons and aesthetics used in projects to queer femininity that invoke ‘the 1950s’. Grounded in femme-inist multi-sited ethnographic research in a movement to which I also belong, I draw on interviews and participant observation in queer subcultural spaces and analyse two examples of ‘vintage’ iconography within contemporary femme organizing where ‘vintage’ is a form of archival activism that also relates to a broader cultural imaginary of racialized femininity. Then I turn to an example of queer performance where ‘vintage’ is used as a critique of imperialism and whiteness. In closing, I discuss how the feeling of ‘vintage’ relates to whiteness and to a form of imperialist nostalgia.