Imagining the Next Day

If popular culture shapes subjectivity in an individualized and collective sense, popular music heritage must affect “meaning-making” in the present. In examining the battle for meaning within music heritage displays, the author considers two things. First, how and why subversion, resistance, creative dissent, and the imaginative possibilities of identity are reconfigured within a consensual national narrative. Second, how some heritage expressions resist such containment by signaling the power of identity to facilitate both present and future rebellion.

Beyond the Nation

In this chapter the author explores the effects of the exclusive potential of heritage in culturally heterogeneous European societies and investigates initiatives that seek to make heritage more inclusive and pluralistic. How do minority groups negotiate heritage practices and discourses formulated by the dominant national population? From a war monument in South Tyrol, an Italian province inhabited by a large German-speaking minority, to the role of migrant memories in the making of national heritage discourses, the chapter focuses on processes that seek to include minority voices and contrasting heritage interpretations in what Laurajane Smith terms the “Authorized Heritage Discourse.”

Historic Preservation in Nazi Germany

This chapter offers a critical examination of historic preservationist practices to expand our understanding of the Nazi regime’s ideologies and objectives regarding historic places and national heritage. Rather than catalogue the actual techniques of historic preservation, this chapter focuses on the cultural politics animating the regime’s efforts to construct its vision of national history, heritage, and memory. To do so, the chapter surveys the Nazi regime’s efforts to “preserve” three generalized places: the city, the town, and the village

Consuming the Contested Heritage of War

This chapter looks specifically at the Somme region, which for many years has remained one of the most popular areas of the former front lines for battlefield tourists. The author begins by exploring how the complex notions of British and English national identities are bound up with tourists’ emotional attachments toward the battlefields and then moves on to discuss collective remembrance of the war and the ongoing dialectic between the need to remember and the need to forget wartime experience

Heritage as a Social Practice

A useful way of understanding heritage is through examining how specific practices generate different types of value. There are multiple practices that constitute the “nexus” of heritage-making, but this chapter focuses on two principal ones: how practices of production relate to those of “consumption,” and how these in turn link to people’s feelings of inheriting, or identifying with, a particular past

“An Inconvenient Truth”

The concept of destroying Indigenous peoples in America has often meant physical eradication. However, as time passed and genocide became less politically correct, economical, or convenient, federal policies were put in place to “destroy” by means other than physical destruction. This essay asserts that these policies had one goal: assimilation. Assimilation was to be the means by which the federal government would control American Indians by eliminating distinct cultures and heritages.

The Place of History

This chapter examines the development of heritage and tourism attractions in Derry/Londonderry, but it considers them in the context of community participation and regeneration and, just as important, as part of a renewed strategy of narrative reengagement in a postconflict society. Drawing on heritage-from-below critiques as appropriate, this chapter discusses a number of sites, some recently refurbished, some closed, some awaiting the move to new premises, but all of which have contributed to a steadily emergent heritage and tourism narrative of considerable import for the city and its citizens.

Unstable Foundations?

This chapter considers the legacy of grand narrative thinking in Mauritius, insofar as heritage management is concerned. Mauritius, an island of the southwest Indian Ocean, has a long history of colonization and marginalization. Thus the experience of heritage and heritage management there is valuable to global discussions on heritage “at the interface,” because the place provides examples of the intersection between a globalized and grand narrative of heritage management and a rapidly evolving, multicultural, and unstable space in which identity is continuously being constructed.

Religious Cultural Heritage

This chapter explores some of the convergences and divergences between religion and cultural heritage and international law’s place in attempting to mediate these tensions. I argue that, in the event of conflict, heritage values tend to prevail over religious ones, at least inasmuch as heritage is a proxy for secularism and cosmopolitanism, whereas religion can still be seen as a slippery slope toward fundamentalism and division. Thus, privileging religion is incompatible with a worldview of peace and dialogue among nations, which international law tends to privilege.

The Negotiation of Identity and Belonging in Kakadu National Park

The relationship between heritage and identity can hardly be doubted; indeed, identity has been central to the field of heritage since its inception. This is the case whether we are thinking in terms of research, policy, or popular engagements. In this chapter, the author draws from a combination of structured visitor interviews carried out on-site at two of the main rock art galleries within Kakadu National Park—Ubirr and Nanguluwurr—and in-depth, semistructured interviews undertaken with a selection of visitors some months after their initial visit. The questions participants were asked centered upon eliciting an understanding of how they understood Kakadu as an Australian heritage site, identifying in particular how they used the messages contained within the park to negotiate their own identities and shape their conduct toward others.