Introduction - The heritage and decoloniality nexus: Global exchanges and unresolved questions in sedimented landscapes of injustice

Abstract

More than ever, heritage narratives, policies and objects are being questioned because of the colonial legacies that still permeate public spaces (e.g. Knudsen et al. 2022). From the eruption of protests and claims to heritage objects, places, and monuments in former colonial powers, to the emergence of Indigenous Peoples’ heritage curatorship, land and resources activism, new efforts are challenging racialized social orders and persistent exclusionary regimes. Protests echo long-running questions about social structure, voice, and ability to shape lives and the future, linking heritage to broader questions of rights, resources, and redistribution. Both academic scholarship and grassroots politics prompt us to interrogate the entrenched politics of representation, socio-material interactions and the unfinished business of decolonizing heritage institutions and practices. This conversation started within the framework of a networking seed grant project promoted by the University of Geneva and the University of Exeter1. The project aimed to broaden the conversation on the intersections of cultural heritage, identity and landscape sustainability by bringing together scholars addressing different configurations of heritage regimes, discourses and practices from various regions of the world (Figure 1). Focusing on the connections, as well as contradictions, which characterize social spaces caught up between local and global policies and practices, this led to a powerful interdisciplinary and comparative outlook on the complexities of decoloniality. The anthropologically informed multi-regional focus enabled us to explore the entanglements between place-based research, long-term practices of inhabiting and remembering, and the transnational valuations and expectations underpinning official heritage management (see Dominguez 2017). The complexity of “authorized heritage discourse”, as originally defined by Smith (2006), is arguably augmented in contemporary frictional spaces of developmentalism, from the widening of global extractive frontiers on natural, cultural and intellectual resources, to the spaces into which Indigenous peoples and ethnic or rural minorities are pressured to conform to international organizations’ and state-sponsored development models (e.g. Coombe and Baird 2016, Larsen et al. 2022). The collective effort, as this dossier reveals, led to the identification of unexpected commonalities as well as new horizons for collaboration across disciplines, areas of practice, and diverse perspectives.