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List of contents
Preface Andrea Witcomb 1. Introduction: Affecting Heritage Section I: Feeling Heritage 2. The Habit of Heritage: not looking at, but being with3. Visitor Encounters and Experience: the gap between the body and the pictured4. Twenty-First Century Innovations and Practices: the promise of digital and new communities of encounter Section II: Affect/Emotion at Heritage Landscapes 5. Being with/in Aboriginal Landscapes: connecting with plural time-spaces6. Visitor Encounters and Experience: postcoloniser feelings7. Twenty-First Century Innovations and Practices: feeling the power of Aboriginal Time-Space Section III: The Geopolitics of the Museum Cabinet 8. Being In the Artefact: the pain of separation 9. Visitor Encounters and Experiences: exclusion, violence and rape at the museum10. Twenty-First Century innovations and practices: the postcolonial body curating the archive and museum 11. Conclusions
About the author
Divya Tolia-Kelly is a Reader in Geography at Durham University.
Emma Waterton is an Associate Professor and DECRA Fellow based at the University of Western Sydney in the Institute for Culture and Society.
Steve Watson is Professor in the Business School at York St John University, UK.
Summary
Representing national culture is embedded within our museum and heritage practice. Yet, what underpins ‘nation’ or ‘culture’ is often occluded in interpretation and other representational practices associated with visitor engagement and tourism. Yet feeling cultural connections at or in heritage spaces keeps them viable and relevant.
This book conceptualises heritage in ways that cannot be encompassed through re-envisioning or ‘new representational practices’, but that need to be considered through embodied experience, encounters and accounts of feelings, affective and non-hegemonic collective senses of heritage values. The book represents a moment of political challenge, arguing for an account of heritage studies that enables both political inclusion for visitors and inclusion for those communities previously ‘edited out’ of the narratives. This book emphasises the political value of affective accounts of heritage, and the performative experience of heritage, to recast the representational practices that have ossified at the heart of heritage. Using research from Australasia and Europe, the question of affective power, value and grammars is considered from a much broader perspective than the framing of heritage in its conventional form.
