Critical approaches to post-colonial (post-conflict) heritage

Critical approaches to post-colonial, post-conflict heritage, as defined here, typically explore the cycling, ‘re’ or otherwise, of power through heritage sites, events, practices and other heritage ‘things’ as these have moved from precolonial, to colonial, to post-colonial ownership. The key tension in these debates is the issue of post-colonial, post-conflict agency pulling against neocolonial conformity as states struggle to nation-build and make something perceived to be new and better out of something perceived to be old and tainted. In addition, as highlighted by Fontein’s (2006) analysis, these approaches may provide powerful demonstrations of the colonial pervasiveness of professional heritage discourses as a means of cultural dispossession. These are ‘critical heritage issues’ (cf. Winter, 2012) both in humanitarian terms, because they directly pertain to the successful creation of new, more inclusive and equal societies, and in anthropological terms (cf. Smith, 2012), because they provide intensely rich demonstrations of the meaning and function of heritage. Indeed, although ‘heritage issues concerning identity claims, indigeneity, rights, access, and benefits are common to most settings today irrespective of post-conflict or post-colonial status’, in these intense atmospheres of reappropriation and recycling for cultural renewal, post-colonial, post-conflict cases provide a ‘critical distillation’ (Meskell, 2012, pp. 8–9) of these matters.