Colonial Heritage Power And Contestation

Recent debates about the return of colonially looted heritage have furthered the discussions on decolonisation around the world, and have reignited questions surrounding “what is, and who owns, cultural heritage”. These discourses in the meaning, production and management of heritage – with a growing presence of themes that address “Latinities” – have gained greater visibility in Latin America and the Caribbean, as challenges surrounding cultural heritage arise more prominently worldwide. The attention on this region aims to contextualise the various theoretical, empirical, and critical perspectives in relation to the negotiation of decolonisation. Hence, this book focuses on the analysis of diverse modes of confronting the power underlying colonial heritage that can contribute to pushing boundaries and persuading changes in pre-established definitions of political thought and local identities. To this end, the chapters in this book focus on a wide scope of topics, ranging from the repatriation and restitution of cultural heritage, and diasporic movements to decolonial practices around monuments, museums, and education. In so doing, this volume challenges stereotypes that made Latin America and the Caribbean a space of mere reproducibility of external ideas, and instead provides a space to show current decolonial perspectives and practices developed in the region that will enrich the international debate on the contestation of colonial legacies and decolonisation of cultural heritage.

Heritage represents the meanings and representations conveyed in the present day upon artifacts, landscapes, mythologies, memories and traditions from the past. It is a key element in the shaping of identities, particularly in the context of increasingly multicultural societies. This Research Companion brings together an international team of authors to discuss the concepts, ideas and practices that inform the entwining of heritage and identity. They have assembled a wide geographical range of examples and interpret them through a number of disciplinary lenses that include geography, history, museum and heritage studies, archaeology, art history, history, anthropology and media studies. This outstanding companion offers scholars and graduate students a thoroughly up-to-date guide to current thinking and a comprehensive reference to this growing field.

Heritage practices often lead to social exclusion, as such practices can favor certain values over others. In some cases, exclusion from a society’s symbolic landscape can spark controversy, or rouse emotion so much so that they result in cultural contestation. Examples of this abound, but few studies explicitly analyze the role of government in these instances. In this volume, scholars from a variety of academic backgrounds examine the various and often conflicting roles governments play in these processes—and governments do play a role. They act as authors and authorizers of the symbolic landscape, from which societal groups may feel excluded. Yet, they also often attempt to bring parties together and play a mitigating role.

Cultural heritage is material – tangible and intangible – that signifies a culture’s history or legacy. It has become a venue for contestation, ranging in scale from protesting to violently claimed and destroyed. But who defines what is to be preserved and what is to be erased? As cultural heritage becomes increasingly significant across the world, the number of issues for critical analysis and, hopefully, mediation, arise. The issue stems from various groups: religious, ethnic, national, political, and others come together to claim, appropriate, use, exclude, or erase markers and manifestations of their own and others’ cultural heritage as a means for asserting, defending, or denying critical claims to power, land, and legitimacy. Can cultural heritage be well managed and promoted while at the same time kept within parameters so as to diminish contestation? The cases herein rage from Greece, Spain, Egypt, the UK, Syria, Zimbabwe, Italy, the Balkans, Bénin, and Central America.

This engaging reassessment of postcolonial Kenya argues that the country’s political turmoil over the last fifteen years is a continuation of repeating patterns of political contestation and conflict across Kenya’s history. When Kibaki stole the 2007 presidential election, leading to a spiral of violence that left over 1,000 people dead in the space of a month, many analysts wondered how this could happen in a country that had previously been considered an oasis of peace in an otherwise conflict prone region. Combining political economy with political sociology, in this book Rok Ajulu demonstrates that in fact authoritarianism and the predatory deployment of the state has been the predominant feature of Kenya’s post-colonial period. Focusing on how power has been mediated in the country politically and the characters of the elites in charge, the analysis shows the dominance of extra-economic political coercion in economic activity. In a context in which economic activity remains predominantly political, continued control of state-power is so crucial for the new ruling class that it must be retained at all costs. Rok Ajulu’s masterful final book is a powerful and wide-ranging contribution to studies on post-colonial Kenya and will be an important resource for researchers from across political science, economics, history, sociology and African Studies.

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This edited volume asks how governmentality and postcolonial approaches can be brought together to help us better understand specific sites and practices of contemporary postcolonial governance. The framework/approach was inspired by the recent use of governmentality approaches that emphasize how governance functions not solely through states but through multiple tactics and means that regulate the conduct of individuals and institutions through both freedom and constraint. A postcolonial approach to governance exposes the role of postcolonial sites and practices in shaping governance and the inequalities embedded within it, insofar as standards of conduct determine which subjects are privileged and excluded.Postcolonial perspectives show how governance can be both productive and repressive, functioning to impose a fixed code of conduct that objectifies (gendered, racialized, sexualized) ‘others’ as part of its project of improvement. In discussing governance, we must also consider how power is negotiated and challenged through forms of resistance and counter-conduct. This volume argues that we need to incorporate postcolonial theories and carefully examine postcolonial practices and sites, to understand how contemporary governance shapes various transnational inequalities and social divisions. The authors in this edited volume illustrate the value of postcolonial governance as a conceptual framework through empirical examples from Asia, Australia, Africa, and Europe. These cases unpack practices of governance operating within complex political landscapes.

Managing Heritage in Africa provides a wide-ranging, up-to-date synthesis of heritage management practice in Africa, covering a broad spectrum of heritage issues such as archaeology, living traditions, sacred sites, heritage of pain (slavery), international conventions cultural landscapes, heritage in conflict areas and heritage versus development. Dealing with both intangible and tangible heritage, Managing Heritage in Africa gives an informative insight into some of the major issues and approaches to contemporary heritage management in Africa and situates the challenges facing heritage practitioners.

The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny. Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.

The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics surveys the intersection of heritage and politics today and helps elucidate the political implications of heritage practices. It explicitly addresses the political and analyses tensions and struggles over the distribution of power. Including contributions from early-career scholars and more established researchers, the Handbook provides global and interdisciplinary perspectives on the political nature, significance and consequence of heritage and the various practices of management and interpretation. Taking a broad view of heritage, which includes not just tangible and intangible phenomena, but the ways in which people and societies live with, embody, experience, value and use the past, the volume provides a critical survey of political tensions over heritage in diverse social and cultural contexts. Chapters within the book consider topics such as: neoliberal dynamics; terror and mobilisations of fear and hatred; old and new nationalisms; public policy; recognition; denials; migration and refugeeism; crises; colonial and decolonial practice; communities; self- and personhood; as well as international relations, geopolitics, soft power and cooperation to address global problems. The Routledge International Handbook of Heritage and Politics makes an intervention into the theoretical debate about the nature and role of heritage as a political resource. It is essential reading for academics and students working in heritage studies, museum studies, politics, memory studies, public history, geography, urban studies and tourism.