The Politics of Heritage

The Legacies of Race

Jo Littler, Roshi Naidoo, Jo Littler, Roshi Naidoo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134354580
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

While 'social inclusion' and 'cultural diversity' circulate frenetically as buzzwords, are we really ready to accept that ideas about 'race' and 'ethnicity', rather than being a peripheral concern, are at the core of how a nation's heritage is represented and imagined?
This book interrogates just whose past gets to count as part of 'British heritage'. Bringing together a wide range of contributors, including academics, practitioners, policy makers and curators, it examines how many different of types of heritage - from football to stately homes, experience attractions to education - deal with the complex legacies of the idea of 'race'.
Whether exploring the fallout of colonialism, the domination of 'England' over the other three nations, holocaust memorials, or the way British heritage is negotiated overseas, a recurring theme of this book is the need to accept that Britain has always been a place of shifting ethnicities, shaped by waves of migration, diaspora and globalization.
Analyzing both theory and practice, this book is concerned with understanding the processes through which changes to heritage happens, and with exploring problems and possibilities for the future.

Part I
BRITISH HERITAGE AS
INTERNATIONAL
HERITAGE

1
WHOSE HERITAGE? UN-SETTLING ‘THE HERITAGE’, RE-IMAGINING THE POST-NATION

Stuart Hall

This conference on ‘Whose Heritage?’ provides an opportunity to look critically at the whole concept of ‘British Heritage’ from the perspective of the multicultural Britain which has been emerging since the end of World War Two.¹ How is it being—and how should it be—transformed by the ‘Black British’ presence and the explosion of cultural diversity and difference which is everywhere our lived daily reality?

In preparing to say something useful on this topic, I was struck again—as many of you may have been—by the quaintness of the very term, ‘Heritage’. It has slipped so innocently into everyday speech! I take it to refer to the whole complex of organisations, institutions and practices devoted to the preservation and presentation of culture and the arts—art galleries, specialist collections, public and private, museums of all kinds (general, survey or themed, historical or scientific, national or local) and sites of special historical interest.

What is curious in the British usage is the emphasis given to preservation and conservation: to keeping what already exists—as opposed to the production and circulation of new work in different media, which takes a very definite second place. The British have always seen ‘culture’ as a vaguely disquieting idea—as if to name it is to make self-conscious what well-bred folk absorb unconsciously with their mother’s milk! Ministries of Culture are what those old, now discredited, Eastern European regimes used to have, which has altogether the wrong associations! Culture has therefore entered the nomenclature of modern British government only when sandwiched alongside the more acceptably populist terms, ‘Media’ and ‘Sport’.

This gives the British idea of ‘Heritage’ a peculiar inflection. The works and artefacts so conserved appear to be ‘of value’ primarily in relation to the past. To be validated, they must take their place alongside what has been authorised as ‘valuable’ on already established grounds in relation to the unfolding of a ‘national story’ whose terms we already know. The Heritage thus becomes the material embodiment of the spirit of the nation, a collective representation of the British version of tradition, a concept pivotal to the lexicon of English virtues.

This retrospective, nation-alised and tradition-alised conception of culture will return to haunt our subsequent thoughts at different points. However, it may also serve as a warning that my emphasis does include the active production of culture and the arts as a living activity, alongside the conservation of the past.

We spend an increasing proportion of the national wealth—especially since the Lottery—on ‘the Heritage’. But what is it for? Obviously, to preserve for posterity things of value, whether on aesthetic or historical criteria. But that is only a start. From its earliest history in western societies—in the heterogeneous assemblages of the ‘cabinets of curiosity and wonder’—collections have adorned the position of people of power and influence—kings, princes, popes, landowners and merchants—whose wealth and status they amplified. They have always been related to the exercise of ‘power’ in another sense—the symbolic power to order knowledge, to rank, classify and arrange, and thus to give meaning to objects and things through the imposition of interpretative schemas, scholarship and the authority of connoisseurship. As Foucault observed, ‘There is no power relation without the relative constitution of a field of knowledge nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute …power relations’ (Foucault 1977).

Since the eighteenth century, collections of cultural artefacts and works of art have also been closely associated with informal public education. They have become part, not simply of ‘governing’, but of the broader purposes of ‘governmentality’—how the state indirectly and at a distance induces and solicits appropriate attitudes and forms of conduct from its citizens. The state is always, as Gramsci argued, ‘educative’. (That is what New Labour means by ‘culture change’). Through its power to preserve and represent culture, the state has assumed some responsibility for educating the citizenry in those forms of ‘really useful knowledge’, as the Victorians put it, which would refine the sensibilities of the vulgar and enhance the capacities of the masses. This was the true test of their ‘belongingness’: culture as social incorporation.

It is important to remember that the nation-state is both a political and territorial entity, and what Benedict Anderson has called ‘an imagined community’ (Anderson 1989). Though strangers to one another, we form an ‘imagined community’ because we share an idea of the nation and what it stands for, which we can ‘imagine’ in our mind’s eye. A shared national identity thus depends on the cultural meanings, which bind each member individually into the large national story. Even so-called ‘civic’ states, like Britain, are deeply embedded in specific ‘ethnic’ or cultural meanings, which give the abstract idea of the nation its lived ‘content’.

The National Heritage is a powerful source of such meanings. It follows that those who cannot see themselves reflected in its mirror cannot properly ‘belong’. Even the museums and collections apparently devoted to surveying the universal rather than national achievements of culture—like the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum in New York—are harnessed into the national story. Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach have argued that these institutions ‘claim the heritage of the classical tradition for contemporary society and equate that tradition with the very notion of civilisation itself (Duncan and Wallach 1980:451). Much the same could be said about the museums of Modern or Contemporary Art in terms of the way they have colonised the very idea of ‘the modern’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ as exclusively ‘western’ inventions.

Heritage is bound into the meaning of the nation through a double inscription. What the nation means is essentialised: ‘the English seem unaware that anything fundamental has changed since 1066’ (Davies 1999b). Its essential meaning appears to have emerged at the very moment of its origin—a moment always lost in the myths, as well as the mists, of time—and then successively embodied as a distilled essence in the various arts and artefacts of the nation for which the Heritage provides the archive. In fact, what the nation ‘means’ is an on-going project, under constant reconstruction. We come to know its meaning partly through the objects and artefacts which have been made to stand for and symbolise its essential values. Its meaning is constructed within, not above or outside representation. It is through identifying with these representations that we come to be its ‘subjects’—by ‘subjecting’ ourselves to its dominant meanings. What would ‘England’ mean without its cathedrals, churches, castles and country houses, its gardens, thatched cottages and hedgerowed landscapes, its Trafalgars, Dunkirks and Mafekings, its Nelsons and its Churchills, its Elgars and its Benjamin Brittens?

We should think of The Heritage as a discursive practice. It is one of the ways in which the nation slowly constructs for itself a sort of collective social memory. Just as individuals and families construct their identities by ‘storying’ the various random incidents and contingent turning points of their lives into a single, coherent, narrative, so nations construct identities by selectively binding their chosen high points and memorable achievements into an unfolding ‘national story’. This story is what is called ‘Tradition’. As the Jamaican anthropologist, David Scott, recently observed, ‘A tradition…seeks to connect authoritatively, within the structure of its narrative, a relation among past, community, and identity’. He goes on to argue that,

A tradition therefore is never neutral with respect to the values it embodies. Rather a tradition operates in and through the stakes it constructs—what is to count and what is not to count among its satisfactions, what the goods and excellences and virtues are that ought to be valued… On this view…if tradition presupposes ‘a common possession’, it does not presuppose uniformity or plain consensus. Rather it depends upon a play of conflict and contention. It is a space of dispute as much as of consensus, of discord as much as accord.

(Scott 1999)

The Heritage is a classic example of the operation of what Raymond Williams called the ‘selective tradition’:

Theoretically a period is recorded; in practice, this record is absorbed into a selective tradition; and both are different from the culture as lived … To some extent the selection begins within the period itself… though that does not mean that the values and emphases will later be confirmed.

(Williams 1963)

Like personal memory, social memory is highly selective. It highlights and foregrounds, imposes beginnings, middles and ends on the random and contingent. But equally, it foreshortens, silences, disavows, forgets and elides many episodes which—from another perspective—could be the start of a different narrative. This process of selective ‘canonisation’ confers authority and a material and institutional facticity on the ‘selective tradition’, making it extremely difficult to shift or revise. The institutions responsible for making the ‘selective tradition’ work develop a deep investment in their own ‘truth’.

The Heritage inevitably reflects the governing assumptions of its time and context. It is always inflected by the power and authority of those who have colonised the past, whose versions of history matter. These assumptions and co-ordinates of power are inhabited as natural—given, timeless, true and inevitable. But it takes only the passage of time, the shift of circumstances, or the reversals of history to reveal those assumptions as time- and contextbound, historically specific, and thus open to contestation, renegotiation, and revision.

This is therefore an appropriate moment to ask, then, who is the Heritage for? In the British case the answer is clear. It is intended for those who ‘belong’—a society which is imagined as, in broad terms, culturally homogeneous and unified.

It is long past time to radically question this foundational assumption.

It is, of course, undeniable that Britain has been in recent times a relatively settled society and ‘culture’. But as something approaching a nationstate, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (subsequently ‘and Northern Ireland’) is in fact a relatively recent historical construct, largely a product of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Britain itself was formed out of a series of earlier invasions, conquests and settlements—Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, Normans, Angevins—whose ‘traces’ are evident in the palimpsest of the national language. The Act of Union linked Scotland, England and Wales into a united kingdom, but never on terms of cultural equality—a fact constantly obscured by the covert oscillations and surreptitious substitutions between the terms ‘Britishness’ and ‘Englishness’ (Davies 1999a).

The Act of Settlement (1701) secured a Protestant ascendancy, drawing the critical symbolic boundary between the Celtic/Catholic and the AngloSaxon/Protestant definitions of the nation. Between 1801 (the date of the Act of Union which brokered Ireland into the Union) and Partition in 1922, the national story proved incapable of incorporating ‘Irishness’ into ‘Britishness’ or of integrating Irish Catholic migrants into an imagined Englishness. Their culture and presence remains marginalised today.

Though relatively stable, English society has always contained within it profound differences. There were always different ways of being ‘English’. It was always fissured along class, gender and regional lines. What came to be known, misleadingly, as ‘the British way of life’ is really another name for a particular settlement of structured social inequalities. Many of the great achievements which have been retrospectively written into the national lexicon as primordial English virtues—the rule of law, free speech, a fully representative franchise, the rights of combination, the welfare state—were struggled for by some of the English and bitterly resisted by others. Where, one asks, is this deeply ruptured and fractured history, with its interweaving of stability and conflict, in the Heritage’s version of the dominant national narrative?

The British Empire was the largest imperium of the modern world. The very notion of ‘greatness’ in Great Britain is inextricably bound up with its imperial destiny. For centuries, its wealth was underpinned, its urban development driven, its agriculture and industry revolutionised, its fortunes as a nation settled, its maritime and commercial hegemony secured, its thirst quenched, its teeth sweetened, its cloth spun, its food spiced, its carriages rubber-wheeled, its bodies adorned, through the imperial connection. Anyone who has been watching the Channel 4 series on The Slave Trade or the ‘hidden history’ of the West India Regiment or the BBC’s The Boer War will not need reminding how deeply intertwined were the facts of colonisation, slavery and empire with the everyday daily life of all classes and conditions of English men and women. The emblems of Empire do, of course, fitfully appear in the Heritage. However, in general, ‘Empire’ is increasingly subject to a widespread selective amnesia and disavowal. And when it does appear, it is largely narrated from the viewpoint of the colonisers. Its master narrative is sustained in the scenes, images and the artefacts which testify to Britain’s success in imposing its will, culture and institutions, and inscribing its civilising mission across the world. This formative strand in the national culture is now re-presented as an external appendage, extrinsic and inorganic to the domestic history and culture of the English social formation.

Despite all this, the idea of Heritage has had to respond to at least two major challenges. The first we may call the democratisation process. Increasingly, the lives, artefacts, houses, work-places, tools, customs and oral memories of ordinary everyday British folk have slowly taken their subordinate place alongside the hegemonic presence of the great and the good. The inclusion of domestic vernacular architecture and the agrarian and industrial revolutions, together with the explosion of interest in ‘history from below’, the spread of local and family history, of personal memorabilia and the collection of oral histories—activities witnessed to in, for example, Raphael Samuel’s memorable celebration of the ‘popular heritage’, Theatres of Memory—have shifted and democratised our conception of value; of what is and is not worth preserving (Samuel 1994). A few courageous if controversial steps have been taken in our direction—the Liverpool Museum on the Slave Trade, the Maritime Museum’s re-hang. However, by and large, this process has so far stopped short at the frontier defined by that great unspoken British value—‘whiteness’.

The second ‘revolution’ arises from the critique of the Enlightenment ideal of dispassionate universal knowledge, which drove and inspired so much of Heritage activity in the past. This has to be coupled with a rising cultural relativism which is part of the growing de-centring of the West and westernoriented or Eurocentric grandnarratives. From the Magiciens de la Terre exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in the 1980s, on through the Te Maori exhibition from New Zealand at the Metropolitan Museum of New York, the Paradise exhibition from New Guinea at the Museum of Mankind, The Spirit Sings exhibition of Canada’s ‘first peoples’ at Calgary, the Perspectives: Angles on African Art at the Centre for African Art in New York, and on and on, the exhibiting of ‘other cultures’—often performed with the best of liberal intentions—has proved controversial. The questions—‘Who should control the power to represent?’, ‘Who has the authority to re-present the culture of others?’—have resounded through the museum corridors of the world, provoking a crisis of authority.

These two developments mark a major transformation in our relation to the activity of constructing a ‘Heritage’. They, in turn, reflect a number of conceptual shifts in what we might loosely call global intellectual culture. A list of these shifts would have to include a radical awareness by the marginalised of the symbolic power involved in the activity of representation; a growing sense of the centrality of culture and its relation to identity; the rise amongst the excluded of a ‘politics of recognition’ alongside the older politics of equality; a growing reflexivity about the constructed and thus contestable nature of the authority which some people acquire to ‘write the culture’ of others; a decline in the acceptance of the traditional authorities in authenticating the interpretative and analytic frameworks which classify, place, compare and evaluate culture; and the concomitant rise in the demand to re-appropriate control over the ‘writing of one’s own story’ as part of a wider process of cultural liberation, or—as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral once put it—‘the decolonisation of the mind’. In short, a general relativisation of ‘truth’, ‘reason’ and other abstract Enlightenment values, and an increasingly perspectival and contextrelated conception of truth-as-interpretation—and of ‘truth’ as an aspect of what Michel Foucault calls the ‘will to power’.

Each of these developments would take a whole lecture on their own to elaborate. But I take them here as together marking an unsettling and subversion of the foundational ground on which the process of Heritageconstruction has until very recently proceeded. We see it reflected in different ways: in how the texts supporting art works and framing exhibits are written by museums; in the attempts to make explicit the ‘perspective’ which has governed the selection and the interpretive contextualisation, so as to make it more open to challenge and re-interpretation; in the exposing of underlying assumptions of value, meaning and connection as part of a more dialogic relationship between the cultural institutions and their audiences; and in the tentative efforts to involve the ‘subjects’ themselves in the exhibiting process which objectifies them. These are only some of the manifest signs of a deep slow-motion revolution in progress in the practices of cultural representation.

They have taken hold, but are certainly not yet extensively or ubiquitously deployed in the institutional complex of the British Heritage ‘industry’ as a whole. Their appearance is at best patchy, more honoured in the breach—in profession of good intentions—than actual practice. Nevertheless, the question, ‘Whose Heritage?’, posed in the context of the current ‘drift’ towards a more multicultural Britain, has to be mounted on the back of this emerging turn. I take the appearance of ‘cultural diversity’ as a key policy priority of the newly restructured Arts Council, its greater visibility in statements of intent by the Government and the Ministry of Culture, Media and Sport, the recent efforts by the British Council to project a more ‘diverse’ image of British culture abroad, and even the much-delayed declaration of a ‘Year of Cultural Diversity’—two years after Amsterdam, but much to be welcomed nevertheless—as potential but uncertain harbingers of change.

Suppose this were to turn out to be a propitious moment. What would those new constituencies who feel themselv...