1st Edition
Whose Heritage? Challenging Race and Identity in Stuart Hall’s Post-nation Britain
This edited collection challenges and re-imagines what is ‘heritage’ in Britain as a globalised, vernacular, cosmopolitan ‘post-nation’. It takes its inspiration from the foundational work of public intellectual Stuart Hall (1932–2014).
Hall was instrumental in calling out embedded elitist conceptions of ‘The Heritage’ of Britain. The book’s authors challenge us to reconsider what is valued about Britain’s past, its culture and its citizens. Populist discourses around the world, including Brexit and ‘culture war’ declarations in the UK, demonstrate how heritage and ideas of the past are mobilised in racist politics. The multidisciplinary chapters of this book offer critical inspections of these politics and dig deeply into the problems of theory, policy and practice in today’s academia, society and heritage sector. The volume challenges the lack of action since Hall rebuked ‘The Heritage’ twenty years ago. The authors featured here are predominantly Black Britons, academics and practitioners engaged in culture and heritage, spurred by the killing of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement to contest racist practices and structures that support them. This fact alone makes the volume a unique addition to the Routledge Museum & Heritage Studies repertoire.
The primary audience will be academics, but it will also attract culture sector practitioners and heritage institutions. However, the book is particularly aimed at scholars and community members who identify as Black and are centrally concerned with questions of identity and race in British society. Its Open Access status will facilitate access to the book by all groups in society.
Introduction: On Stuart Hall and the Imagining of Heritage
SUSAN ASHLEY and DEGNA STONE
Part I STUART HALL’S ESSAY – CONTEXT AND IMPACT
1. Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The Heritage’ re-imagining the post-nation
STUART HALL
2. ‘The way in which we learn to sing’: The heritage of ideas behind ‘Whose Heritage?’
MATT MARTIN
3. Race equality in the cultural heritage sector: Perceptions of progress over the last twenty years and actions for the next decade
CLARA AROKIASAMY, OBE
Part II CHALLENGING ‘WHOSE HERITAGE?’ AS HISTORICAL PRODUCTION
4. Mothers milk or regurgitated fish?: Resisting nostalgia and embracing dissension in British heritage
DON P. O’MEARA
5. Beyond our system of objects: Heritage collecting, hoarding and ephemeral objects
ERROL FRANCIS
6. Historical methods implicated in the making of ‘The Heritage’
LEONIE WIESER
7. Whose Heritage? Deconstructing and reconstructing counter narratives in heritage
SANDRA SHAKESPEARE, QANITAH MALIK and EDINAM EDEM-JORDJIE
Part III CHALLENGING ‘WHOSE HERITAGE’ THROUGH ARTS & SELF-REFLECTION
8. In the shadow of Stuart Hall
DAWN WALTON
9. The Black British presence on television in Barrie Keeffe’s Play for Today (BBC1) dramas and beyond
TOM MAY
10. Narrative cannibals: who speaks for whom? Heritage, documentary practice and the strategies of power
TINA GHARAVI
11. Searching for new perspectives on heritage: The Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans
BEVERLEY PREVATT GOLDSTEIN
Part IV FINAL PROVOCATIONS
12. Brand new, second hand: production, preservation and ‘new’ diasporic forms
ETIENNE JOSEPH
13. Crisis of authority: Rebuilding the heritage narrative in Stuart Hall’s post-nation state
ROSIE LEWIS
14. The power to represent
DEGNA STONE
Biography
Susan L. T. Ashley is Associate Professor in Creative and Cultural Industries at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. Her research looks at what, how and why heritage knowledge is created, shaped, communicated and consumed in the public sphere. The collaborations that supported Dr Ashley’s AHRC research '(Multi)Cultural Heritag' stimulated the development of this book.
Degna Stone, an award-winning poet living in north east England, is currently undertaking a PhD in Cultural Studies at Northumbria University, examining visibility and expression in African, Asian and Caribbean diaspora arts and heritage in the north of England. Their poetry pulls towards the dark seam of life, raising questions about social injustice and complacency.
