Postcolonial Heritage Research Articles

The planning of the Beijing Legation Quarter and the multiple identities of post-colonial heritage (1950s–2010s)

ABSTRACT The planning controlling post-colonial heritage discourse has long been influenced by changing political and economic narratives. This paper documents diversified uses and narratives of colonial heritage in twelve plans of the Beijing Legation Quarter, China to investigate the influence of multiple identities in Beijing’s development. By analysing the particular spatio-temporal dynamics in eleven former legation compounds, it presents three planning strategies used in colonial heritage site regeneration (diminishment, transformation, and enforcement) and argues that the ambivalent or paradoxical discourses of colonial heritage in the Beijing Legation Quarter result from Beijing’s multiple cultural identities.

Mauritius Island Colonial and Postcolonial Heritage and Heritage Preservation Efforts

Avrupalılar tarafından 16. yüzyıldan 19. yüzyıla değin milyonlarca Afrikalının köle olarak çeşitli plantasyonlarda çalıştırılmak üzere Atlantik ve Hint Okyanusları üzerinden zor şartlar altında Amerika kıtasına taşınmasını ifade eden Transatlantik Köle Ticareti, Afrika üzerinde derin izler bırakmıştır. Kolonyal dönem olarak adlandırılan bu dönem, Britanya Yüzyılı’nın yaşanmasında etkili olmuştur. Kolonyal düzende imparatorluğun Hint Okyanusu üzerindeki en stratejik bölgelerden birisi Mauritius Adası olmuştur. Bir ikmal ve aktarma merkezi olarak görev yapan ada, aynı zamanda kolonyal dönemin sonlandırılıp postkolonyal döneme geçişte, ilk defa sözleşmeli işçilerin denendiği Britanya İmparatorluğu’nun Büyük Deney’ine de ev sahipliği yapmıştır. Bu özellikleri ile ada, kolonyal döneme, postkolonyal döneme ve bu iki dönem arası geçiş dönemine dair önemli bir miras birikimine sahiptir. Kolonyal dönemde kullanıma açılan adadaki özgün ve karma kültür, senkretik inanç ve kreol dil özelliklerini barındırmaktadır. Adada bulunan bu zengin miras birikimi, günümüzde ulusal ve uluslararası boyutlarda koruma altına alınmış birer değer olarak karşımıza çıkmaktadır. Çalışma, adanın dönemsel miras birikimini ve koruma süreçlerini incelemektedir.

Public monuments, palliative solutions? Political geographies of memory in Goa, India

ABSTRACT This article examines some of the compromises that emerge in the process of converting colonial-era material culture into ‘heritage’ claiming to foreground a critical postcolonial consciousness. Prompted by recent controversies about statuary celebrating figures who engaged in colonial exploitation and slavery, I look at how frictions inherited from the colonial period are projected onto colonialism’s physical remains. This article, however, enquires into ways in which disputes over the proper function of postcolonial heritage projects may be framed not in a militant, but in a conciliatory register, that aims to accommodate diverse representational imperatives, instead of elevating one as supreme. In postcolonial settings such as the one discussed, these imperatives awkwardly include the tourism industry's promotion of ‘colonial nostalgia’ via the restoration of ‘colonial ambiences’. Focusing on a Portuguese-era fort that served as a prison for Goa’s 'freedom-fighters', I investigate the unexplained, and subsequently contentious, display of pictures authored by the nationally-renowned artist Mario Miranda in one section of the fort. The article then recounts the contours of a public challenge to this exhibition’s legitimacy, and examines the introduction in an adjacent space at the fort of a Freedom Fighters’ Gallery. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I analyse tensions within and between each of these exhibitions, connecting them to deeper fissures in colonial experience and postcolonial memory. I argue that these fissures are best understood in their relationship to recriminations both about colonial experience and about inequalities traceable to its ‘aftermaths’, which are now consolidated in uneven political geographies.

Disturbing Values: Historic Thematic Framework as a Tool to Deal with the Soviet Architectural Legacy

The value of cultural heritage is a constantly evolving and debated issue in heritage theory. While primarily the focus was on tangible qualities, intangible values gained more importance in the twenty-first century. However, in some cases, it can be complicated to evaluate the intangible values of specific artefacts with politically disturbing associations, such as Soviet architecture in a post-Soviet context. Based on a Lithuanian case study, the paper contributes to the debate on the value of Soviet architecture, focusing not on individual buildings but on broader themes. By using framework analysis as a conceptual background, the article analyzes the legacy of the Soviet past not as physical objects but as cultural references. Interpreting “cultural references” as containers of social and cultural meanings that are much broader than just the embodiment of the ideological system, the paper suggests that dissonance should not lead to the uncompromising delisting and probably the destruction of the built heritage of troublesome past. Although the article focuses on the evaluation of Soviet architecture in a post-Soviet context, the conceptual approach can contribute to the broader debate on postcolonial heritage globally.

The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Limits of Values-Based Conservation

ABSTRACT Marking the Aboriginal Tent Embassy’s fiftieth anniversary in 2022, this article adopts a historical perspective to examine the challenges encountered by Australian heritage regimes when attempting to recognize this site as a heritage place. First established in Canberra in 1972 on Ngunnawal land, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy reveals the material-discursive limits of Australia’s Burra Charter-derived values-based heritage regime in recognizing and respecting Indigenous rights, sovereignty, and protest. Recent attempts have been made to include the site on the Commonwealth Heritage List (2005), the National Heritage List (2008) and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Heritage List (2015). That these nominations have not yet been successful suggests that heritage regimes of governance and management express settler-colonial ideology. Consequently, heritage becomes imbued with narratives of national identity and power and becomes a mechanism in maintaining settler-colonial dominance. This article proposes centralizing Indigenous agency as an alternative way towards formulating post-colonial heritage regimes and values-based conservation.

Desiring the indigenous: affective commodification of the Sámi

ABSTRACT This paper argues that the multimodal enactment of affect plays a key role in the commodification of indigenous cultures. Departing from an understanding of affect as integral to discourse, the paper investigates how indigenous cultures are construed as an object of consumerist desire by employing subject formation, strategic perspectivation and affordance as conceptual starting points. As a case in point, affective meaning-making is studied as it is semiotically materialized in the commodification of Sámi culture by the predominant actor in marketing indigenous experiences in Sweden. By pondering the social force of affective meaning-making from the perspective of the perceived consumer, the analysis reveals that consumers are invited to affectively encounter the Sámi through curiosity, tranquility and excitement. However, the paper contends that the representations not only enable positive emotions; they also work their social force by constraining engagement in any disturbing, conflicting or uncomfortable emotions that are associated with the post-colonial heritage of the Sámi.

Tourism imaginaries and the selective perception of visitors: Postcolonial heritage in Con Dao Islands, Vietnam

Identifying the reasons why people visit places associated with death and suffering remains a key stake of dark tourism research. Such research, however, remains largely framed by Anglo-American perspectives and assumes visitors largely hail from the West. Less is known about the motivations of dark tourists from developing countries. This paper contributes to the debate by examining the case of tourism in Con Dao Archipelago, Vietnam. Once labeled as a ‘Hell on Earth’, the island is a famous site of both postcolonial and natural heritage, displaying former colonial prisons, prisoners’ cemeteries and memorials. Over the past five years, pilgrimage tours to the tomb of Co Sau, a national hero, in Hang Duong cemetery have increasingly attracted visitors from the Vietnamese mainland. Focusing on both the supply and demand sides of dark tourism, the research uses the theoretical lens of tourism imaginaries and visitors’ selective perception to investigate what attracted people to these tours. Document analysis, ethnographic observation and in-depth interviews with key informants show that a complicated set of factors (tourism commodification, geographic location, culture and beliefs) intersect to influence the emergence and transformation of penal sites’ imaginaries in Con Dao Islands. Despite being presented with three different imaginaries of Con Dao, visitors from Vietnam are engaged in a form of ‘spiritual tourism’ focused on the sacred element of the martyrs’ deaths and suffering, making this their main reason for visiting the island. The popularity of spiritual tours in Con Dao thus underlines the importance of looking at the islands’ heritages beyond Western conceptions of dark and resort tourism.

International student migration and the postcolonial heritage of European higher education: perspectives from Portugal and the UK

Whilst the presence of international students from so-called ‘developing’ or ‘newly industrialised’ countries has become a ubiquitous phenomenon in European higher education, few scholars have explored the underlying postcolonial trajectories that facilitate student migration to many European countries today. In this article, we seek to narrow this gap by critically engaging with the postcolonial heritage of European higher education and the ways in which it informs much student migration in today’s era of neoliberal globalisation. We propose a three-fold approach to reading this postcolonial heritage of higher education which comprises its historical, epistemic, and experiential (or ‘lived’) dimensions. Whilst such an approach requires a close examination of existing postcolonial theory in higher education studies, we also draw on qualitative research with student migrants in Portugal and the UK to show how the postcolonial heritage of European higher education is negotiated in everyday contexts and may become constitutive of students’ identity formations.

Preservation and tourism in Tunisia: on the colonial past in the neocolonial present

ABSTRACT Historic built environments of the modern colonial era survive in cityscapes of former colonies the world over, often featuring largely in the projected urban identities of cities in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Tunisia is no exception. The complex relationships between extant architectures of colonialism and current users, designers, and preservationists there are shifting within the context of contemporary globalization. Though ties between Europe, France, and Tunisia are less overt than they once were—now taking the form of international development loans, professional and educational exchanges, tourism programmes, popular culture and the media—they are nonetheless significant in their sustained influence. This article explores the nature and products of neocolonialism in postcolonial heritage management and tourism practices, using several case studies from Tunis including curated medina walking tours, the renovation of the Avenue Bourguiba, and expansion of the renowned Bardo Museum. Rather than dismissing contemporary preservation and tourism management practices, the article invites further debate regarding the influence of foreign actors, conservation approaches, and potential alternatives for the future of heritage management in a rapidly changing Tunisia.

Learning from Taiwan’s post-colonial heritage conservation

Informed by the concept of subsidiarity, this paper is a preliminary study of the efforts undertaken by the Taiwanese Government to conserve some historical areas of Taipei. While the state’s primary concern was to foster the cultural identity and historical value of these places, it has also brought about the conservation and promotion of “old street shops”, leading to a growth in tourism. Therefore, this role of the Government in innovative planning fits a version of the allegedly libertarian Coase Theorem, which holds that the state can play an important role in expanding a market.

The Tragedy of Forestland Sustainability in Postcolonial Africa: Land Development, Cocoa, and Politics in Côte d’Ivoire

Tropical countries are often blamed for not managing their natural resources sustainably. But what if overexploitation is inherent in political structures and policies—rooted in foreign colonial order—and is consistently detrimental in the contemporary use of forestlands? This article argues that post-colonial land development policies and related political interests seriously impede the sustainability of forest ecosystems in Côte d’Ivoire. Methodologically, the study builds on a historic contextualisation of forestland use policies in Sub-Saharan Africa, with Côte d’Ivoire serving as a case study. The results indicate that the increasing development of so-called rent crops clearly follows the historical dynamics of ‘land grabbing’ and a post-colonial agrarian model. This situation benefits agribusiness entrepreneurs and, more recently, sustainability standards. The study discusses the findings based on recent literature and empirical evidence. In conclusion, the post-colonial heritage and the manipulation of the related patterns by elites and policy-makers largely explains the present-day unsustainable forestland conversions in Côte d’Ivoire.

Japan and Korea in the mirror of Cinema: Selfness and Otherness between mutual understanding and recurrent nationalisms

The mutual representations and understanding of Korea and Japan can be approached by means of a socio-historical framing of the relationships between the two countries in the last decades, stemming from the tragic turmoil of World War II and the postcolonial heritage, including the comfort women’s issue and the problems of the Korean minority in Japan, to the spreading of Japanese pop culture in South Korea and the “Korean Wave” during the 1980s and the 1990s in Japan. Though nowadays resurgent nationalisms in both countries seem to highlight the limits of soft power in mutual acceptance, popular culture can be used as a privileged resource to investigate reciprocal representations between both societies. This paper aims to retrace the above-mentioned issues in a few selected recent Japanese and Korean movies, whose reception in Japan and Korea is connected to the audience sensitivity to the “Self and Other” representations. The topic of the Korean minority in Japan is addressed through Hiroki Ryūichi’s Sayonara Kabukichō ( Kabukicho Love Hote l, 2014), partially shot on locations in Shin-Ōkubo, Tokyo’s Korea Town. On the other hand, the rediscovery of Korea’s colonial past, linked to the “comfort women” issue, is seen through the lens of Choi Dong-hoon’s Amsal ( Assassination , 2015) and Cho Jung-rae’s Kwihyang ( Spirits’ Homecoming , 2016). Japanese and Korean contemporary filmography seems to reflect people’s present worries about a significant Other, geographically and historically linked to the Self, as well as to portray the ethnic and national identity rebuilding through a retelling of history.

Bangla Rock: exploring the counterculture and dissidence in post-colonial Bengali popular music

This paper is an attempt to explore the politics and the poetics of vernacular music in modern Bengal. Drawn from extensive and in-depth research into the current “scene” (as popularly referred to in the musician and music lover circles), this paper delves into the living histories of musical and linguistic revolutions in a part of India where the vernacular literature has been historically rich, and vastly influenced by the post-colonial heritage. The popular music that grew from these political and cultural foundations reflected its own pathos, and consecutively inspired its own form of oral tradition. The linguistic and musical inspirations for Bangla Rock and the eventual establishment of this genre in a rigidly curated culture is not only a remarkable anthropological case study, but also crucial in creating discourse on the impact of this music in the creation of oral histories. This paper will discuss both the musical and the lyrical journey of Bengali counterculture in music, thus in turn exploring the scope of Bangla – as in the colloquial for Bengali, and Rock – the Western musical expression which began during the 50’s and the 60’s (also populist and political in its roots). The inception of this particular political populist narrative driven through songs and music, is rooted in the Civil Rights movement, and comparisons can be drawn in the ‘soul’ of the movements, though removed both geographically and by time. Thus this paper engages with the poetics of Bangla Rock, to understand the marginal political voices surfacing through alternative means of expression.

Local heroes: notes on the highway statues of Colta, Ecuador

A series of seven statues commissioned by the mayor of the Canton of Colta in 2007 represent an emerging aspect of public art in the Andes: municipal statuary sponsored by Indigenous communities. The figures chosen for these statues represent Colta to the world, and embody a postcolonial heritage in which figures from Juan de Velasco’s eighteenth century Historia del Reino de Quito mix with local twentieth century heroes, in a medium directly descended from the Andean urbanism of the Liberal nineteenth century.

Tourism experiences, visitability and heritage resources in Saint Louis, Senegal

ABSTRACTThis paper studies heritage tourism experiences in the postcolonial World Heritage Site of Saint Louis, Senegal. Based on fieldwork and archival research, it shows the complexity and discrepancy linked with heritage presentation and design from the experiential realities encountered on the ground. The argument put forward is that colonial heritage, although it is simplified and controlled to meet specific tourist expectations by official authorities, appears to be dynamic, performative and subject to multiple interpretations from visitors, tourist guides and local residents. It further suggests that social and economic conditions of the communities living in the site affect the heritage space and shape vicariously or directly tourists’ experiences, despite professionals’ efforts of keeping the heritage visible in certain ways. The article extends its discussion to adjacent topics of power and gender issues, demonstrating how heritage tourism in postcolonial African context is intimately intertwined with the changing everyday realities of the communities.

La exhibición del otro: tradición, memoria y colonialidad en museos de México

Este artigo parte da noção de “complexo expositivo” sobre a função pedagógica clássica do museu ocidental (histórico e etnográfico), e a revisa em contextos latino-americanos contemporâneos, especificamente mexicanos. O texto contrasta o trabalho etnográfico em museus comunitários com certos aspectos das salas de etnografia do Museu Nacional de Antropologia do México. A tese central que procura demonstrar é que a atual retórica do património em ambientes pós-coloniais e de “diversidade cultural” continua a utilizar a lógica do complexo expositivo, mas com um mecanismo e finalidade diferente da noção clássica do início do século XX. século. Não se trataria mais de expor os feitos da ordem moderna e da construção nacional, mas de uma poética do retorno. A tradição não mais se fixaria para sempre no museu nacional da capital, mas se instalaria na distância espacial da cidade ou vila: aqueles que foram objeto do museu e da exposição tornam-se sujeitos da produção de um olhar e de uma ordem . Por fim, pergunta: os mecanismos que definiam e mantinham a autoridade cultural sobre o patrimônio realmente foram deslocados?

‘European’ and ‘Asian’ approaches to cultural landscapes management at Borobudur, Indonesia in the 1970s

The early 1990s saw a move against European-dominated discourses of heritage and the concept of authenticity in the World Heritage system, with the development of the Nara Document. The Document, now in its twentieth year from inception, articulated a developing Asian approach to authenticity, recognising the ways and means to preserve cultural heritage with community participation and different understandings of heritage that existed outside Europe. Meanwhile, there was another significant development and split in ideas around cultural landscapes in the 1990s that has broadened wider interdisciplinary debates in heritage studies. Through the case study of the Borobudur Temple, which was the focus of large-scale interventions by UNESCO and the Japanese during the 1970s, this paper explores the dichotomy between European monument-centred heritage approaches against the cultural landscapes concept developed in Japan. Overall, this paper finds that at the time of the site’s nomination for inscription on the World Heritage List, the obligatory use of World Heritage criteria meant that the Indonesian authorities followed European ideas of heritage value. This resulted in continued post-colonial monument-centred heritage conservation and held back the shift of heritage management to community involvement and the practice of wider landscape protection.

Heritage in Palestine: Colonial Legacy in Postcolonial Discourse

This essay addresses the need to look into ‘postcolonial’/‘post-Oslo’ Palestine heritage discourses and practices to uncover commonalities and divergences. These practices and discourses, I claim, tell a story about hidden codes of subjectivity while revealing the setbacks of postcolonial heritage discourses in a ‘postcolonial era’. I show that the Palestinian ‘postcolonial’ heritage polices and preservation practices echo colonial discourses in terms of approach, legal framework and end results. My premise is built on a long engagement with governmental and non-governmental heritage organisations as well as the literature on the topic that shows heritage discourses and practices implicated within the specific narrative that they are destined to (re) produce. I claim that postcolonial approaches to the material culture, consciously and unconsciously, reproduce the colonial situation and while the impetus towards preservation itself is a symptom of postmodernity, it is still carried out in a modernist spirit. Throughout my analysis, I show that what spills out from the heritage discourses, as well as the unintended consequences of heritage practices are worth considering in any analytical approach of heritage discourses.

Heritage

This article examines the changing relationship between museums and heritage using a number of Dutch cases. It argues that if heritage was once defined as being museological in character, this order of precedence is under revision as museums themselves are recursively transformed by heritage dynamics. Such dynamics include the display of renovation work-in-progress; the enhancement of historical collections by relocation to prominent new sites and buildings; the transformation of old industrial sites into new art and public spaces; and a mutual reinforcement between the urban landscape setting and the institutions that compose it by virtual means. Postcolonial heritage practices worldwide enfold museums in a further set of transformatory dynamics: these include claims on cultural property that was removed in colonial times, but also the strategic transformation of cultural property into heritage for didactic purposes. Museums are subject to the recursive dynamics of heritage, which are turning them inside out.

From a colonial reinvention to postcolonial heritage and a global commodity: performing and re-enacting Angkor Wat and the Royal Khmer Ballet

It is a commonplace that cultural heritage is not only a highly contested concept of modern times, full of nationalistic undertones, cultural stereotypes and essentialist topoi such as past grandeur and enduring cultural purity. Cultural heritage has also become the easiest and most profitable prey for today’s global tourism industry. These observations apply with particularly dramatic consequences to young emerging, postcolonial nation states with a rich repertoire of built (tangible) and performed (intangible) culture – especially if elements of this repertoire are branded ‘UNESCO World Heritage’ without considering their contested formation histories. Few other iconic heritage sites are more instructive in showcasing these observations than the temple site of Angkor, by charting the transcultural trajectories of Cambodia’s heritage construction through the processes of French colonial reinvention, postcolonial/nationalist essentialisation, and global commodification. This paper focuses on the ‘Royal Khmer Ballet’ as cultural performance and heritage re-enactment in combination with the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat as architectural stage. References to similar ‘heritagisation’ processes in the (post)colonial Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) will help to anchor this transcultural enquiry.