‘They don’t care about Crucian culture’: legitimising claims to heritage rights in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands

Abstract

ABSTRACT Rights to heritage are often understood in heritage scholarship to derive from aspects of cultural identity, such as descent or affiliation, but other registers are also available to rights claimants. Centring around a campaign to ‘save’ a museum made of a former sugar plantation in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, this article explores a different mode of staking claims to heritage rights. Attending to the discourses used by the two primary factions in conflict over the right to manage this site, the article examines legitimising arguments about care, labour, and sacrifice, as well as delegitimising arguments about exploitation. Underlain by issues of race, class, and migration, these discourses are also shaped by histories of extraction, both past and present. Taken together, they suggest a register of heritage rights claims that focuses not only on the value of heritage to a group but rather on the group’s value to heritage itself.