Paper short abstract:

What has the term “heritage” historically addressed? Does it affect how we can “unmake” or “remake” it today? This presentation interrogates the term’s European genealogy, and uses experiences with Taiwanese heritage to assess what may promote or inhibit heritage democratization and diversification.

Paper long abstract:

Everyday conceptions of practices covered by the term “heritage” – authorized, discursive, or not – are often celebratory, and even when part of critical heritage studies, may leave implicit to what the term refers. If heritage must be democratized, do we want to remake its pasts, its locations of expertise, its audiences, or something else in the social relationships it forged in the course of its globalizing career? If so, what of its legacies do we want or need to “unmake”? This presentation of the term’s genealogy provides a sketch of the shifts in the materials, practices, audiences, scales and temporalities that “heritage” was made to address, in an effort to assess what kinds of “unmaking” of heritage are possible, and how this may promote or inhibit forms of “remaking” heritage in more democratic and diverse ways today. The first part of my presentation departs from the European origins of the term, and its peculiar shift from 19th-century nationalist origins, through 20th-century “World Heritage”, to 21st-century forms of (sometimes, but not always, decolonial) “unmakings” of the term’s referents in museums and other authorized heritage institutions. The second part provides alternative views by drawing on my recent introduction to heritage practices in post-WW2 Taiwan and what it suggests about excessive monuments, the forging of “national” identity, and their relation to a history of colonialism, human rights abuses, and the recognition of indigenous minorities.