Ludic Heritage: Supplementary School Plays, Museum Collaborations, and the Futurity of Histories in Migration

Abstract

This article introduces the term "ludic heritage" to describe how people relocate histories in migration through play. In a collaboration between the Museum of London, an Albanian supplementary school, and the researcher, play became a point of intersection between adults' and children's worlds, the museum and minority communities, and imagination, memory, and reality. UK supplementary schools set up by migrant communities teach children their cultural heritages not taught in mainstream schools or represented at the museum. Despite an estimation of 3,000-5,000 supplementary schools in London alone, they exist on the periphery of public life. In school plays performed in museum festivals children embodied the past whilst improvising cultural representations on stage, redirecting the future of heritage in migration. Framing time as technique (Bear 2016) and as an embodied mental capacity (Da Silva Sinha 2019), I observe how people construct the temporalities they inhabit through a praxis (Munn 1992) in which play—as an adaptable and malleable form of cultural heritage—reconfigures cultural identities and mobilizes a new community in diaspora. I draw attention to how different partners approached play, as research method, embodied memory, pedagogy, or museum engagement or through transient cultural artifacts that open temporal possibilities.