The Ruins We Live In

ABSTRACTIn recent years an interest in ‘critical heritage studies’ (CHS) has grown significantly – its differentiation from ‘heritage studies’ rests on its emphasis of cultural heritage as a political, cultural, and social phenomenon. But how original or radical are the concepts and aims of CHS, and why has it apparently become useful or meaningful to talk about critical heritage studies as opposed to simply ‘heritage studies’? Focusing on the canon of the 1980s and 1990s heritage scholarship – and in particular the work of the ‘father of heritage studies’, David Lowenthal – this article offers a historiographical analysis of traditional understandings and approaches to heritage, and the various explanations behind the post-WWII rise of heritage in western culture. By placing this analysing within the wider frames of post-war historical studies and the growth of scholarly interest in memory, the article seeks to highlight the limitations and bias of the much of the traditional heritage canon, and in turn frame the rationale for the critical turn in heritage studies.

Mapping the future trajectory of critical heritage studies, this paper provides a non-Anglophone perspective on the concept of ‘critical’ within the contemporary framework of critical heritage studies in China. It emphasises that scholarship from non-Anglophone regions should not be marginalised as a mere footnote, stereotypically portrayed as ‘the other’ in relation to Western discourse. Instead, these perspectives actively contribute to the field, engaging with global challenges. The notion of being ‘critical’ in this context is not a simple translation or appropriation of Western concepts, nor a straightforward critique of prevailing political and value systems. Rather, it represents an approach that integrates historical, transcultural, and political perspectives deeply rooted in local society and culture. These insights empower scholarship from non-Anglophone regions to enrich critical heritage studies with diverse intellectual resources, avoiding new forms of Western imperialism. In doing so, they fulfill critical heritage studies’ foundational promise of reshaping power dynamics in the realm of heritage studies.

This 'short book' (as the author himself describes it on the first page) goes a long way into making the reader reflect on the trends and ideas connected to 'critical museology'.The author J. Pedro Lorente does not rush into defining the term, however.He considers defining the term to be in contrast with critical museology as such, which advocates above all for the importance of 'personal criteria and dissent' (83).The structure of the book itself supports this process: from the 'echoes' of the first chapter to the final considerations and definitions of the last one, the author proceeds to unfold the meaning of 'critical museology' instead of defining and trying to delineate it.The book starts with a short introduction where the author situates his work in time and presents his personal stance.He sets his goal to provide 'a concise review of the conspicuous critical developments in museums and museology' (3), arguing that there is a close connection between theory and praxis, as they feed each other systematically.The argument then develops in five chapters.In Chapter 1, Lorente summarizes the milestones and legacies of 'new museology', since this is usually connected to and confused with 'critical museology'.It offers a historical outline of the development of critical museology, starting from the 'new museology' and progressing up to the current state of 'critical heritage studies'.Readers will find this review balanced and witty, appraising in a concise yet complete manner all the important literature and 'schools of thought' that led to 'critical museology'.Chapter 2 focuses on the educational services of museums, which according to the author constitute the way that critical museology is put into practice.The chapter discusses the ways museums have expressed their critical approaches.It is divided into two parts: in the first, the author focuses on institutional critique and the ways art has been used as a tool to initiate this critique.The second part focuses on interpretation and the use of questions in the interpretive approach of museums delivered mainly through texts.Examples from a variety of exhibitions following critical museology approaches are given, allowing the author to provide a wide breadth of case studies from across the world.In this 'historiography' of critical museology exhibitions and museums, a reference to what I consider one of the earliest examples of critical museological praxis combined with theory is notably missing: the exhibition having the question mark even in its title, ?Exhibition or Curator's Egg presented at the Ashmolean Museum in 1991-1992, and curated by Mary Beard and John Henderson.Chapter 3 shows how people, both visitors and museum professionals, have affected the change of paradigm in museology.In the first part of this chapter, Lorente offers a brief review of the developments in methods of display, focusing in particular on the art museum.Although I am not sure that I would agree with all of his examples of how critical museology is presented in different institutions (for example, is the New Acropolis Museum a good example of 'critical museology'?Many authors studying the museum since its opening will disagreesee for instance Plantzos 2011; Gazi 2011; Tzortzaki 2019), the author makes a compelling argument as he claims that the way we display art and offer access to it is indeed a form of interpretation and can be a critical one (or not).Critical museology may simply mean enhancing access to museums and collections, as Lorente claims on page 51, after offering examples of opening the storage spaces for special groups of visitors and the 'general public'.Opening the museum for all visitors is a choice that brings an institution to the forefront of 'critical museology'.I find Lorente's approach very balanced as he makes clear that we need to keep an equilibrium between 'winking' to our

A Paean to the Epistemological Potency of Artifacts<i>Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange</i>. By Amiria Henare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

This article highlights the potential of critical heritage studies (CHS) as a useful tool for sports historians to develop their research at the intersection of contemporary sporting culture(s), the sporting past, and power. Drawing on my research on English football fandom as cultural heritage, I argue that CHS may enable sport historians to better understand the processual and power-laden nature of historical interpretation. I show how CHS's collaborative, democratizing nature allows researchers to draw on participants of sporting cultures as organic intellectuals. In doing so, I exhibit how CHS can help historians chart the power relations embedded within sports and the interpretation of sports history, and how those power relations may impact or may be resisted by communities.

This article examines early twentieth-century European travelogues as living archives of cultural heritage with implications for intercultural education and indigenous knowledge systems. Focusing on Northern Albania, the study reconceptualizes travel literature by Erich Liebert, Karl Steinmetz, William Le Queux, and Paul Siebertz as ethnographic sources documenting practices of social order, identity formation, and cultural continuity. Through qualitative interpretive methodology anchored in cultural anthropology and critical heritage studies, the analysis demonstrates how foreign observers documented hospitality, dwelling practices, landscape relations, and moral codes as living heritage transmitted through embodied experience. The research contributes to heritage studies by theorizing these narratives as intercultural mediation, providing pedagogical resources for intercultural education and interpretive cultural tourism. In contemporary society, where cultural identities are negotiated between globalizing forces and local resistance, the indigenous knowledge systems documented offer alternative models for social cohesion, intercultural ethics, and sustainable community practices. These narratives offer a model for social pedagogy promoting empathy and intercultural cooperation.

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research. The volume provides a rounded, accessible collection of work on the nature and significance of materiality in early modern Europe – a term that embraces a vast range of objects as well as addressing a wide variety of human interactions with their physical environments. This stimulating view of materiality is distinctive in asking questions about the whole material world as a context for lived experience, and the book considers material interactions at all social levels. There are 27 chapters by leading experts as well as 13 feature object studies to highlight specific items that have survived from this period (defined broadly as c.1500–c.1800). These contributions explore the things people acquired, owned, treasured, displayed and discarded, the spaces in which people used and thought about things, the social relationships which cluster around goods – between producers, vendors and consumers of various kinds – and the way knowledge travels around those circuits of connection. The content also engages with wider issues such as the relationship between public and private life, the changing connections between the sacred and the profane, or the effects of gender and social status upon lived experience. Constructed as an accessible, wide-ranging guide to research practice, the book describes and represents the methods which have been developed within various disciplines for analysing pre-modern material culture. It comprises four sections which open up the approaches of various disciplines to non-specialists: ‘Definitions, disciplines, new directions’, ‘Contexts and categories’, ‘Object studies’ and ‘Material culture in action’. This volume addresses the need for sustained, coherent comment on the state, breadth and potential of this lively new field, including the work of historians, art historians, museum curators, archaeologists, social scientists and literary scholars. It consolidates and communicates recent developments and considers how we might take forward a multi-disciplinary research agenda for the study of material culture in periods before the mass production of goods.

Chartism, the British mass movement for democratic and social rights in the 1830s and 1840s, was profoundly shaped by the radical tradition from which it emerged. Yet, little attention has been paid to how Chartists saw themselves in relation to this diverse radical tradition or to the ways in which they invented their own tradition. Paine, Cobbett and other 'founding fathers', dead and alive, were used and in some cases abused by Chartists in their own attempts to invent a radical tradition. By drawing on new and exciting work in the fields of visual and material culture; cultures of heroism, memory and commemoration; critical heritage studies; and the history of political thought, this book explores the complex cultural work that radical heroes were made to perform.

Reviewed by: Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution Michael Brian Schiffer (bio) Material Cultures, Material Minds: The Impact of Things on Human Thought, Society, and Evolution. By Nicole Boivin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xviii+269. $85. In Material Cultures, Material Minds, Nicole Boivin invites readers to rethink fundamental relationships between people and material culture. With indifference to disciplinary boundaries, her highly original synthesis shows how the material world “plays and has long played a fundamental role in shaping human thought, society and, over the long term, evolution” (p. 225). A post-processualist archaeologist trained at Cambridge University, Boivin became adept at treating material culture as a symbolic medium. Her specialty, however, is geoarchaeology, the study of soils. Through immersion in this science-heavy specialty and repeated visits to Balathal, a village in India, she came gradually to appreciate that symbolic interpretation leaves out what is material about soils—and material culture generally. This problem, she believes, is endemic in the soft side of the academy, and I agree. To most social scientists and humanists, our material life is relatively invisible. She attributes this to the deeply rooted idealism of Western intellectual culture, which has passed down from Plato the dogma that material things are mere projections of concepts and ideas. Material culture, if treated at all, is regarded as a symbolic system like language, whose underlying grammar or code can be teased out. Consequently, scholars need not confront the diverse physical interactions that take place between people and things, and most ignore artifacts altogether. Citing Joseph Corn’s analysis of articles published in Technology and Culture (which appeared in a 1996 volume edited by W. D. Kingery, Learning from Things: Method and Theory of Material Culture Studies), Boivin highlights the irony that even historians of technology seldom deal with actual objects. Boivin aims to restore materiality to material culture, arguing the likelihood [End Page 677] that the “material world . . . evoke[s] experiences that lie beyond the verbal, beyond the conceptual, and beyond even the conscious . . . [artifacts] do not necessarily symbolise anything else: their very power may lie in the fact that they are part of the realm of the sensual, of experience, and of emotion, rather than a world of concepts, codes, and meaning” (pp. 8–9). The emotive performance of material culture has an affinity with David Nye’s notion of “technological sublime,” the ability of grandiose constructions to inspire a sense of wonder, but Boivin insists that any artifact—whether religious icon or clay pot—can have emotive effects. More general still is her insistence that people, depending on their past experiences, may be engaged by artifacts in any sensory mode, from touch to taste. Clearly, the sensuous engagement of people with things—the very materiality of human life—eludes idealist conceptions. Even so, as behavioral archaeologists have demonstrated, a materialist perspective does not preclude a concern with symbolic meanings. Boivin argues that material culture also exercises agency—i.e., plays a causal role—in human affairs. To take the poignant example satirized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, we note that factory workers’ interactions are caused by the arrival of particular parts on a moving assembly line. Exploring wider implications of artifact agency while questioning social constructivism, Boivin elaborates Langdon Winner’s concept of autonomous technology, which underscores the potential of technologies to reshape society. (She does of course reject simplistic technological determinism.) Applying niche-construction theory from biology, Boivin shows how changes in material culture also affect human biological evolution. Humans create, through material culture, the niches to which they adapt as biological beings. She rehearses the textbook case of how dependence on dairy farming caused genetic change in humans. (Prior to the advent of dairy farming, adults did not drink milk and the production of lactase, needed for digesting milk sugar, diminished greatly. In societies that became dependent on dairy farming, however, adults continued to drink milk, which eventually led to genetic changes that prolonged the production of lactase.) Also, Boivin maintains, our big brain with its extraordinary executive functions evolved under the selective pressures created by tool use. Boivin believes, and I agree...

This article explores the possible relationships between critical heritage studies and interculturality. It argues that interculturality offers a call to action and normative commitments that is welcome to advance critical heritage studies. The article examines the intersections across the two fields using the ideas of normative engagement, status of the two fields in liberal political discourse, and the notions of recognition and redistribution as goals of historically oppressed groups. The article uses the examples of Indigenous and Afro-descendant heritage to connect heritage to the work of interculturality in attempting to create and promote better polities. The article then discusses some of the potentials and pitfalls of closer alignment between the fields of interculturality and critical heritage studies.

Examining the Late Medieval Village from the Case at Ambroyi, Armenia

Exchanging Symbols: Monuments and Memorials in Post-Apartheid South Africa brings together eight chapters, authored by scholars from diverse disciplines. Authors consider how, why, and to what the cultural landscape must change in order to reflect the postcolonial and post-apartheid South African state. The inquiries put forth in Exchanging Symbols began at the Human Sciences Research Council, which sought to understand the performative and transformative events associated with the #RhodesMustFall Movement that took hold of the UCT campus in 2015. For many authors in this book the #RhodesMustFall Movement is a catalyst to investigate the sociopolitical climate from which it emerged.The first chapter, “Statues of Liberty? Attitudes Towards Apartheid and Colonial Statues in South Africa” situates readers within the aftermath of the #RhodesMustFall Movement. Using nationally representative public opinion polls and attitudes of adult South Africans, the research team of Sharlene Swartz, Benjamin Roberts, Steven L. Gordon, and Jarè Struwig captured some compelling datapoints about how the public regards the main goals of the #RhodesMustFall Movement. Counter to previous research, their quantitative analysis found that the younger post-apartheid generation held similar “opinions [of how] to redress the problem of colonial and apartheid statues” as the older generations (p. 23). From this grounding in public opinion, Anitra Nettleton's chapter, “By Design, Survival, and Recognition: Exploring the Contemporary Significance of Monuments in South Africa,” considers the dominant aesthetic traditions. She grapples with the paradoxical continuation of commemoration styles that are rooted in a hegemonic Western practice yet playing out in a “supposedly decolonising state” (p. 34).Nettleton's chapter stands out from the others as it provides a thorough grounding in terminology and historical context. She advances a thoughtful argument about the aesthetic baggage of monumental bronze statues of heroic patriarchs. Additionally, she provides an historical and rhetorical foundation from which all other chapters' benefit. Nettleton's essay pairs well with Nancy Dantas' chapter “This Fragile Present: Verfremdung as a Strategy of Memorial in the Works of Contemporary South African Artists.” Nettleton and Dantas are the most straight forward art historical essays in the book. Nettleton looks to the history of monument and memorial making in Western traditions and within some broader African occurrences. And Dantas considers the works of four contemporary South African artists.Dantas leverages the work of artists Leonard Tshela Mohapi Matsoso, Lungiswa Gqunta, Sikhumbuzo Makandula, and Haroon Gunn-Salie and Bevan Thornton against dominant aesthetics of monumental and triumphal commemoration practices. Dantas's selected artists that produce artworks that expand, if not dissolve, the taxonomy of commemoration in the visual arts. These artists created works that are mnemonic in nature, as opposed to the confrontational approach of Sithembile Msezane and Beezy Bailey. Msezane and Bailey are contemporary artists regarded for their “statue-troubling.” They are briefly discussed Thabo Manetsi's chapter, “Heritage Denunciation and Heritage Enunciation? A Postcolonial Discourse on State Prioritization of Heritage in South Africa.”Manetsi's chapter threads together several themes that underlie the book. One theme is the post-1994 focus on adding important figures from the liberation struggle to the cultural landscape. This additive process is generally regarded as an effective corrective to an overemphasis on White heritage within a majority Black nation. Manetsi complicates this reading by examining the hegemonic heritage and cultural framing done by the African National Congress. The political rhetoric within the nation's cultural policies tends to promote multiculturalism and celebrate the diversity of heritage within the nation. However, according to Manetsi, “to achieve multiculturalism in a political system through state prioritization of the liberation heritage will require a substantial measure of appreciation and acceptance of political and cultural difference as well as tolerance which tends to be difficult to achieve” (p. 140). The crux of the issue is that liberation heritage has been defined as ANC heritage according to Manetsi's thorough analysis. Since the ANC has maintained political dominance since 1994, they have also maintained a monopoly over national heritage projects. Heritage has been appropriated by the political, as Nettleton, Mahali, and Madida also contend in their chapters. Thus, political challengers and opponents of the ANC are less likely to be represented in monuments and memorials.Alude Mahali's essay marks a shift to a more theoretical consideration of heritage production, trauma, and memory making and unmaking. Mahali's chapter “In Whose Name? On Statues, Place, and Pain in South Africa” theorizes why and how monuments and memorials become sites of social protest that (re)activate the site. She argues for a reading of the “corporeal qualities” of sites of memory. She claims that acts of revolt (like Chumani Maxwele's hurling of feces at the Rhodes statue on the campus of UCT in 2015) “demystify the statue” and undermine its authority while allowing for “an expression of the country's collective and individual anger, or collective and individual grief” (p. 74). Advancing the book's theoretical discourse, Sipokazi Madida's “Troubling Statues: A Symptom of a Complex Heritage Complex” advocates for an analysis of power through a lens of “critical heritage studies that probes beyond simple binaries” (p. 95). Madida carefully provides her readers with a methodological framing of “critical heritage studies” prior to proceeding with hers. Her engagement with the networks of production of heritage sites draws on the work of scholars like Leslie Witz, Gary Minkley, Ciraj Rossool, and Phindezwa Mnyaka. Madida provides readers with a detailed account of the somewhat complicated bureaucratic processes of government agencies, mandates, and heritage organizations that initiate, maintain, and/or hinder a post-apartheid heritage practice.The final chapter “Struggle Heroes and Heroines: Statues and Monuments in Tshwane, South Africa” by Mathias Alubafi Fubah and Catherine Ndinda provides a qualitative review of participants' engagement with the Greonkloof nature reserve. The reserve is an example of one of the ANC's approaches to addressing the imbalanced cultural landscape dominated by colonial and apartheid structures. This approach is an additive one in that the ANC installs heroic bronze statues of struggle leaders. As discussed in other chapters, this approach to cultural redress is problematic as the statues replicate the colonial approach to commemoration. This chapter would have worked better if had been offered as the second or third chapter in the book. Positioned earlier, it would have provided readers with a good case study of the ANC's memorialization agenda. But in contrast to the other chapters in this book, this chapter falls short of a critical engagement with the statues of struggle heroes and heroines installed at the Greonkloof nature reserve in 2015.A photo essay by artist Guy Königstein is an unexpected addition to an otherwise focused collection of essays. Königstein, an Israeli-born artist who resides and works in western Europe, scanned images from two old books that contained photographs of South African monuments and memorials. He retouched the photographs so that the image of the statue is obliterated by a white void. As a result, a stark demarcation between the people in the images and the silhouetted white mass produce an eerie sense of estrangement.Exchanging Symbols: Monuments and Memorials in Post-apartheid South Africa advances scholarly inquiry in three primary areas. First, heritage production and policy discussions are dealt with to a great extent. Second, major debates and public opinions about what to do with colonial and apartheid statues within the postcolonial and post-apartheid state are, to greater and lesser degrees, dealt with throughout. Lastly, theorizing about what constitutes an anticolonial and anti-apartheid commemorative program, and whether one is achievable given the politicization of heritage within the nation, is offered. Each chapter works independent of the others; however, readers will benefit from the totality of the book as it will provide a more nuanced understanding of the issues at play. Each author offers detailed literature reviews relevant to their topics. This diligence in contextualizing their arguments within existing scholarship will prove valuable for students and readers less familiar with the critical debates around public heritage and commemoration practices. Exchanging Symbols will prove instructive to anyone working within the cultural and heritage sectors, particularly within countries engaged in decolonizing processes and/or with a polarized populous. The timeliness of this book and the debates it presents would enhance graduate courses on public policy, heritage and preservation, art history, cultural studies, as well as fine arts programs as artists, designers, and architects would greatly benefit from the examples brought forward in this volume.

Advancing Critical Heritage Studies: the Next 10 Years, which focuses on the growth of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) since 2012, and the development of and challenges facing critical heritage studies in general. The special issue is a collection of short articles that, rather than present academic debates written in expected academic uses and conventions, offers a glimpse into the discussions that define the growing field of heritage studies today. Minimally referenced but rich in archival information, the contributions are records of past and present motivations, solutions, and oversights that drove the first ten years of work by different members of the ACHS Executive Committee, ACHS Chapters, and other contributors. As the issue’s editors, we offer these discussions as a companion to the growth of critical heritage studies, and to encourage both support and critique for the ways in which an organization navigates the complicated landscapes of heritage expertise.

Looked at again and again half consciously by a mind thinking of something else, any object mixes itself so profoundly with the stuff of thought that it loses its actual form and recomposes itself a little differently in an ideal shape which haunts the brain when we least expect it. (Virginia Woolf 38) From briefcases to drugs, and from boxing rings to tower blocks, this issue of M/C Journal turns its attention to the diverse materialities that make up our social worlds. Across a variety of empirical contexts, the collected papers employ objects, structures, and spaces as lenses onto corporeality, extending and unsettling habitual understandings of what a body is and does. By exploring everyday encounters among bodies and other materialities, the contributors elucidate the material processes through which human corporeality is enacted and imagined, produced and unmade.That materialities “tell stories” of bodies is an implicit tenet of embodied existence. In biomedical practice, for example, the thermometer assigns a value to a disease process which might already be felt, whereas the blood pressure cuff sets in motion a story of illness that is otherwise hidden or existentially absent. In so doing, such objects recast corporeality, shaping not only experiences of embodied life, but also the very matter of embodiment.Whilst recognising that objects are “companion[s] in life experience” (Turkle 5), this issue seeks to go beyond a sole focus on embodied experience, and explore the co-constitutive entanglements of embodiment and materiality. The collected papers examine how bodies and the material worlds around them are dialectically forged and shaped. By engaging with a specific object, structure, or space, each paper reflects on embodiment in ways that take account of its myriad material dynamics. BodiesHow to conceptualise the body and attend to its complex relationships with sociality, identity, and agency has been a central question in many recent strands of thinking across the humanities and social sciences (see Blackman; Shilling). From discussions of embodiment and personhood to an engagement with the affective and material turns, these strands have challenged theoretical emphases on body/mind dualisms that have historically informed much thinking about bodies in Western thought, turning the analytic focus towards the felt experience of embodied being.Through these explorations of embodiment, the body, as Csordas writes, has emerged as “the existential ground of culture” (135). Inspired by phenomenology, and particularly by the writings of Merleau-Ponty, Csordas has theorised the body as always-already inter-subjective. In constant dynamic interaction with self, others, and the environment, the body is both creative and created, constituting culture while being constituted by it. As such, bodies continuously materialise through sensory experiences of oneself and others, spaces and objects, such that the embodied self is at once both material and social.The concept of embodiment—as inter-subjective, dynamic, and experientially focussed—is central to this collection of papers. In using the term corporeality, we build on the concept of embodiment in order to interrogate the material makings of bodies. We attend to the ways in which objects, structures, and spaces extend into, and emanate from, embodied experiences and bodily imaginings. Being inherently inter-subjective, bodies are therefore not individual, clearly bounded entities. Rather, the body is an "infinitely malleable and highly unstable culturally constructed product” (Shilling 78), produced, shaped, and negated by political and social processes. Studies of professional practice—for example, in medicine—have shown how the body is assembled through culturally specific, sometimes contingent, arrangements of knowledges and practices (Berg and Mol). Such arrangements serve to make the body inherently “multiple” (Mol) as well as mutable.A further challenge to entrenched notions of singularity and boundedness has been offered by the “affective turn” (Halley and Clough) in the humanities and social sciences (see also Gregg and Siegworth; Massumi; Stewart). Affect theory is concerned with the felt experiences that comprise and shape our being-in-the-world. It problematises the discursive boundaries among emotive and visceral, cognitive and sensory, experiences. In so doing, the affective turn has sought to theorise inter-subjectivity by engaging with the ways in which bodily capacities arise in relation to other materialities, contexts, and “force-relations” (Seigworth and Gregg 4). In attending to affect, emphasis is placed on the unfinishedness of both human and non-human bodies, showing these to be “perpetual[ly] becoming (always becoming otherwise)” (3, italics in original). Affect theory thereby elucidates that a body is “as much outside itself as in itself” and is “webbed in its relations” (3).ObjectsIn parallel to the “affective turn,” a “material turn” across the social sciences has attended to “corporeality as a practical and efficacious series of emergent capacities” which “reveals both the materiality of agency and agentic properties inherent in nature itself” (Coole and Frost 20). This renewed attention to the “stuff” (Miller) of human and non-human environments and bodies has complemented, but also challenged, constructivist theorisations of social life that tend to privilege discourse over materiality. Engaging with the “evocative objects” (Turkle) of everyday life has thereby challenged any assumed distinction between material and social processes. The material turn has, instead, sought to take account of “active processes of materialization of which embodied humans are an integral part, rather than the monotonous repetitions of dead matter from which human subjects are apart” (Coole and Frost 8).Key to this material turn has been a recognition that matter is not lumpen or inert; rather, it is processual, emergent, and always relational. From Bergson, through Deleuze and Guattari, to Bennett and Barad, a focus on the “vitality” of matter has drawn questions about the agency of the animate and inanimate to the fore. Engaging with the agentic capacities of the objects that surround us, the “material turn” recognises human agency as always embedded in networks of human and non-human actors, all of whom shape and reshape each other. This is an idea influentially articulated in Actor-Network-Theory (Latour).In an exposition of Actor-Network-Theory, Latour writes: “Scallops make the fisherman do things just as nets placed in the ocean lure the scallops into attaching themselves to the nets and just as data collectors bring together fishermen and scallops in oceanography” (107, italics in original). Humans, non-human animals, objects, and spaces are thus always already entangled, their capacities realised and their movements motivated, directed, and moulded by one another in generative processes of responsive action.Embodied Objects: The IssueAt the intersections of a constructivist and materialist analysis, Alison Bartlett’s paper draws our attention to the ways in which “retro masculinity is materialised and embodied as both a set of values and a set of objects” in Nancy Meyers’s film The Intern. Bartlett engages with the business suit, the briefcase, and the handkerchief that adorn Ben the intern, played by Robert De Niro. Arguing that his “senior white male body” is framed by the depoliticised fetishisation of these objects, Bartlett elucidates how they construct, reinforce, or interrupt the gaze of others. The dynamics of the gaze are also the focus of Anita Howarth’s analysis of food banks in the UK. Howarth suggests that the material spaces of food banks, with their queues of people in dire need, make hunger visible. In so doing, food banks draw hunger from the hidden depths of biological intimacy into public view. Howarth thus calls attention to the ways in which individual bodies may be caught up in circulating cultural and political discursive regimes, in this case ones that define poverty and deservingness. Discursive entanglements also echo through Alexandra Littaye’s paper. Like Bartlett, Littaye focusses on the construction and performance of gender. Autoethnographically reflecting on her experiences as a boxer, Littaye challenges the cultural gendering of boxing in discourse and regulation. To unsettle this gendering, Littaye explores how being punched in the face by male opponents evolved into an experience of camaraderie and respect. She contends that the boxing ring is a unique space in which violence can break down definitions of gendered embodiment.Through the changing meaning of such encounters between another’s hand and the mutable surfaces of her face, Littaye charts how her “body boundaries were profoundly reconfigured” within the space of the boxing ring. This analysis highlights material transformations that bodies undergo—agentially or unagentially—in moments of encounter with other materialities, which is a key theme of the issue. Such material transformation is brought into sharp relief by Fay Dennis’s exploration of drug use, where ways of being emerge through the embodied entanglements of personhood and diamorphine, as the drug both offers and reconfigures bodily boundaries. Dennis draws on an interview with Mya, who has lived experience of drug use, and addiction treatment, in London, UK. Her analysis parses Mya’s discursive construction of “becoming normal” through the everyday use of drugs, highlighting how drugs are implicated in creating Mya’s construction of a “normal” embodied self as a less vulnerable, more productive, being-in-the-world.Moments of material transformation, however, can also incite experiences of embodied extremes. This is elucidated by the issue’s feature paper, in which Roy Brockington and Nela Cicmil offer an autoethnographic study of architectural objects. Focussing on two Brutalist

How have imperialism and its after-effects impacted patterns of cultural exchange, artistic creativity and historical/curatorial interpretation? World Art and the Legacies of Colonial Violence - comprised of ten essays by an international roster of art historians, curators, and anthropologists - forges innovative approaches to post-colonial studies, Indigenous studies, critical heritage studies, and the new museology. This volume probes the degree to which global histories of conflict, coercion and occupation have shaped art historical approaches to intercultural knowledge and representation. These debates are relevant to contemporary artists and scholars of visual, material and museological culture in their attempts to negotiate imperial and colonial legacies. Confronting the aesthetics of Abolition, Fascism and Filipino independence, and re-thinking relationships between colonised and coloniser in Cameroon, North America and East Timor, the collection brings together new readings of Primitivism and Aboriginal art as well. It features discussions of touring exhibitions, popular media, modernist paintings and sculptures, historic photographs, human remains and art installations. In addition to the critical application of phenomenology in a fresh and contemporary manner, the volume’s ‘world art’ perspective nurtures the possibility that intercultural ethics are relevant to the study of art, power and modernity.