Susan Ashley

‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects, issues and publics that were more controversial in nature.

The Changing Face of Heritage at Canada’s National Historic Sites

In order for all citizens to fully belong to a nation or a community, they must have membership in that society’s institutions, systems and social relations on both the formal and everyday levels. Heritage sites are public institutions of formal cultural presentation and informal social encounters where society demonstrates community membership. But in a country such as Canada where global economics and popular culture combine with an unprecedented influx of immigrants, how a community imagines itself and articulates its heritage is changing radically. Canada’s National Historic Sites (NHS) is among the important public institutions devoted to both the presentation of heritage and demonstration of citizen membership. This paper describes how this institution is adapting to changes in imaginings about citizenship, on both the formal and informal level. It looks at how NHS is expanding the involvement of all citizens in the why, what, how and to whom of heritage presentation, evolving its practices to include ethic minorities in its imaginings of Canadianness. Using as an example a new NHS exhibit and designations related to the Underground Railroad and African‐Canadians, the paper considers how historic sites, as formal instruments of the state, can be re‐tuned as informal sites of discourse and negotiation about identity, citizenship and belonging.

Re-colonizing spaces of memorializing: The case of the Chattri Indian Memorial, UK

This article inspects the ways that spaces of war memorialization are organized and re-organized through official and unofficial meaning-making activities. It aims to contribute to the discussion of the ‘value’ of memorializing by examining a multifaceted space of remembrance and commemoration: the Chattri Indian Memorial built near Brighton, United Kingdom. The article brings postcolonial perspectives to explore how memorializing has been organized here, focusing on the activities of once-colonized people and the affective, embodied aspects of organizing practices. Built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought in World War I, the Chattri evolved from a colonial instrument to symbol and space for ethnic-Indian group activities. The study employed historical, visual and ethnographic methods to study the tangible monument and the changing nature of the memorializing activities carried out around the monument. Memorializing is conceptualized within three inter-related processes: colonizing, de-colonizing and re-colonizing to examine how forms and practices of memorialization constitute a values-laden organizing system.

Acts of heritage, acts of value: memorialising at the Chattri Indian Memorial, UK

Abstract The Chattri Indian Memorial is a public site that hosts and embodies heritage in complex ways. Standing on the edge of Brighton, UK in a once-remote part of the Sussex Downs, the Memorial was built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought on the Western Front during the First World War. As both a sacred place and a space of socio-cultural heritagization processes, the monument is an enduring testament of past values of war heroism, but also more ephemeral practices of ritual. The article documents the heritage-making at work within memorialisation at the Chattri as a case study, examining how differing ‘valuations’ of a memorial site can be enacted through time, between material form and immaterial practices, and across cultures. The article theorises participants’ current affective practices as conscious ‘past presencing’ , and analyses how their conscious acts of heritage-making affectively enacted values of morality, community and belonging.

Introduction: Heritage-Outside-In

‘Heritage’ is one social imaginary used by people to define identity in relation to ideas about the past. But global flows of people, ideas, imaginations and technologies (Appadurai 1996; Urry 2007) are challenging established group/community/national identities and the dominating systems and discourses of power that constitute heritage. This special issue offers a range of insights about those challenges to the nature and importance of heritage and identities from the perspectives of those ‘outside’ the authorised realm of heritage discourse (Smith 2006). Important to us are the power relations that constitute the shifting, contested and puzzling assumptions of difference used to define ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ positionality (Hall 1999; Littler 2005). We see ‘heritage-making’ as a process of cultural production in relation to the past by which people make sense of their world and their place within it, as well as strategically assert their voices in the public sphere. Heritage is interpreted not as an intrinsic quality possessed by objects, buildings or places or even intangible practices, but a signification or valuation of the past undertaken by all humans to give meaning to their lives. Heritage as ‘making’ is a performative act; an active and affective expression of individual and community senses of self (Robertson 2012). Performative heritage seen as an act of voice infers a more political expressing of opinion, being heard, and registering that opinion in a way that is recognised and valued in democratised world-making. Heritage expression as ‘world-making’ draws on Arendt (1958) who passionately argued for a public realm with the power to gather strangers together, mobilising both semblance and difference in order to confront the complexities and uncertainties of human life in diverse communities (Simon and Ashley 2010). In this process, peoples will seek to retain the ability to make worlds (choose, express and change their rooted identities) in ways that they control socially, economically and politically. By making heritage, ‘outside’ or minority individuals and groups represent their own cultural difference, but also articulate their relationship to the collective polity in their home/place/nation (Shryock 2004). Much international academic research about heritage and marginalised or minority peoples situates such peoples as ‘beneficiaries’ of mainstream institutional social inclusion activities (Lynch and Alberti 2010). This special issue takes the ‘outsider’ perspective, inspecting independent heritage-making actions and projects driven by ethnic, racial and other (sub)cultural groups and individuals. The research topics presented here aim to understand heritage-making activities as phenomena within globalisation and de-colonialisation, bound up in the negotiation of identities and subjectivities by marginalised or migratory peoples, thus shaped by the social, cultural and political ecologies of signification on the ground. The ‘outside-in’ approach is an essential component of critical heritage studies, which advocates a theoretically and politically informed analysis of the processes in society that produce and consume the past, often from a bottom up perspective (Smith 2012; Winter 2013; Witcomb and Buckley 2013). While heritage scholars have long included critical perspectives (e.g. Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1996), critical heritage theorists foreground power relations and invite ‘the active participation of people and communities who to date have been marginalised in the creation and management of “heritage”’ (Smith 2012, 534). This special issue looks at those multifaceted power relations that ground in transcontinental