Ryan Trimm

Taking you back: Region, industry and technologies of living history at Beamish:

Many critics have linked the rise of heritage with a loss of primary manufacturing, an association particularly resonant for industrial living history museums such as Beamish. In the context of pastoral heritage representations, the museum develops competing modernizing and industrial strains in English identity. Through its incorporation of industry, Beamish cuts against the suggestion that people and culture organically spring from native soil. Framing itself as ethnographic, the museum supposes a gap between the culture presented and those of its visitors. Yet this presentation inscribes comforting accounts of class and modernity. Through living history museum techniques, Beamish appeals for its visitors to identify with the represented past so as to suggest more firmly a gulf between present and industrial past. As a result, Beamish is less concerned with presenting the past then shoring up a notion of the present as advanced stage of modernity.

Heritage as trope: conceptual etymologies and alternative trajectories

Abstract The theorization of heritage must necessarily examine the impact of its often concealed status as a metaphor, a figuration framing our use of the term as well as those things described as heritage. Describing elements of the past as heritage is a trope as the past does not leave a testament. This figuration singularizes past, present, and legacy (concealing differences within these terms), as well as ascribing intentionality to the past. These resonances often lend a conservative charge to heritage; however, they might also be viewed as offering a critique of the present. The theorization of heritage should also examine specific histories of how this trope arose. In Britain, John Ruskin’s influential articulation of cultural heritage, for example, drew on the way inheritance featured in political writings of John Locke and Edmund Burke. Theorization of heritage can also be broadened by considering how inheritance is employed in other disciplines, such as its use in phenomenology and poststructuralism, an arc encompassing work by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Bernard Stiegler. These investigations help expand the conceptual dimensions of heritage.

The Ministry of Nostalgia

connection to elite social class. As a subject of academic study, sports museums have often been associated with presenting a history which is largely celebratory and uncritical, and in the chapters that follow in this section this theme is picked up and addressed in various ways, including via the tensions between commercial imperative and social function of museums and through the insight revealed by museum professional Honour Godfrey in her exploration of the development of the new Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Museum. The final section of the volume, introduced by Jason Wood, emphasises how sport heritage permeates some of the fundamental issues affecting identity, memory, sense of place and cultural meaning. The role of sport history and heritage as a positive force is passionately argued by Wood and to an extent across several of the final chapters in the volume, yet despite the academic study of sport and heritage gaining more visibility, there is frustration and disappointment that this ‘agenda’ is not being listened to by those with political power. The London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and Olympic ‘legacy’ is one example used to argue this point. Because of the volume’s structure and the interconnections that flow throughout it, readers can dip into and out of the book and still get a sense of what many of the key theoretical and practical issues guiding the study of sport and heritage are – for example the connection between sport and intangible heritage and the ongoing debates around what distinguishes sport history and sport heritage. This is one of the book’s strengths, and subsequently it would be of value to readers looking for an introduction to what is an increasingly accepted but still under explored area of study. At the same time, those more familiar with the intersections between heritage and sport will find stimulating reflections on questions such as whether nostalgia plays an important social function, and the nature of the role of sport in the urban and rural environment over time. By contrast, possible omissions from the volume relate to how sport, history and heritage intersect with issues of global development, inequality and gender. The importance of all of these are hinted at, for example: tropes of masculinity and the development of rugby in Chapter 2 by Smith, discussions of class in Chapter 10 by Vamplew, but more overt and sustained engagement with these subjects may have allowed for a broader intellectual focus. Sporting heritage, as Ramshaw and Gammon (2015) suggest, is ubiquitous and has the potential for broad appeal due to its mass media coverage and relevance to living memory. Sport is also highly cyclical in nature offering numerous opportunities for reflection on the past, present and future. Now, four years after this volume was published, we are once again in an Olympic year, in Rio 2016. One of the key functions of this volume is as a tool for reflection on the academic study of sport, history and heritage, and on how this area of study has evolved and continues to engage with notions of critical heritage.

Rhythm Nation: Pastiche and Spectral Heritage in English Music

ABSTRACT Peter Ackroyds 1992 novel English Music offers a conflicted take on heritage. Appearing in the midst of debates about national heritage, the novel foregrounds legacies, both familial and cultural. The novels allusions and intertexts suggest an ethnically restricted version of heritage; however, the novels stress on pastiche and counterfeits suggest an alternative mode of conceiving legacy, one framed as a type of possession. This revised version of heritage offers a past open to those who might lay claim to it, a more fitting model for a multicultural society.

Carving Up Value: The Tragicomic Thatcher Years in Jonathan Coe

Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! lifts its title from a campy 1960s horror film, a slasher comedy the 1994 novel raids to satirize the economic and social cuts of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership. The Thatcher years targeted the postwar consensus on social welfare and nationalized industries and services. These transformations were aimed at stimulating enterprise and finance sectors but severely impacted the lower and middle classes. Coe’s novel uses its generic source to offer furious indictment of the prime minister and the impact her economic slashing had on Britain. The novel personalizes these wounds through the complex relations between novelist Michael Owen (Carve Up’s narrator) and the aristocratic Winshaw family. Owen is hired to chronicle the Winshaws, whose Conservative members lead a vast array of Thatcherite projects in politics, finance, the media, industrial agriculture, and trade in art and arms. As Owen discovers, these projects, manifestations of Conservative slashing, are indirectly responsible for personal wounds he suffers—most especially the deaths of loved ones that bring home the realities of Thatcherism. The novel’s censure of the Winshaws condemns Thatcher’s policies and the social, economic, and cultural climate she brought into being.