Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance (Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict) 3030777081, 9783030777081

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN CULTURAL HERITAGE AND CONFLICT

Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance Edited by Feras Hammami ·Evren Uzer

Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict Series Editors Ihab Saloul University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Rob van der Laarse University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, The Netherlands Britt Baillie Wits City Institute University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, South Africa

This book series explores the relationship between cultural heritage and conflict. The key themes of the series are the heritage and memory of war and conflict, contested heritage, and competing memories. The series ­editors seek books that analyze the dynamics of the past from the perspective of tangible and intangible remnants, spaces, and traces as well as heritage appropriations and restitutions, significations, musealizations, and mediatizations in the present. Books in the series should address topics such as the politics of heritage and conflict, identity and trauma, mourning and reconciliation, nationalism and ethnicity, diaspora and intergenerational memories, painful heritage and terrorscapes, as well as the mediated reenactments of conflicted pasts. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14638

Feras Hammami  •  Evren Uzer Editors

Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance

Editors Feras Hammami Department of Conservation University of Gothenburg Gothenburg, Sweden

Evren Uzer Parsons School of Design The New School New York, NY, USA

ISSN 2634-6419     ISSN 2634-6427 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict ISBN 978-3-030-77707-4    ISBN 978-3-030-77708-1 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the ­publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and ­institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: binabina / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

Across the late twentieth century, heritage offered so much to a welter of social actors. It provided planners and development officials with a means of attracting capital and claiming legitimacy. Community groups drew on cultural and natural heritage to put forth new, as well as long-standing, claims to inclusion and economic empowerment even as, too often, they found their hopes for inclusion tempered or even thwarted. Meanwhile, scholars documented claims to authenticity put forth around heritage, and in doing so they thus also questioned the political efficacy of heritage in naturalising political units, ethnic blocs, narratives of care and moral uplift, and thus unequal social relations. Meanwhile, citizens around the world fashioned individual and collective subjectivities in relation to existing categories of natural, cultural, and immaterial heritage, clamouring for inclusion in registries of community possessions and altering heritage categories in the process. At times these citizen actors forced open the doors, and the definitions, of different categories of patrimony, all of which loomed large on international and subnational agendas for the preservation, as well as commercialisation, of community possessions and human capital. But today, some two decades into the twenty-first century and in the wake of the post-war heritage fever, heritage seems to have taken on a new status, if not quite new roles and new footings. At a contemporary moment of diverse challenges to liberal democratic institutions and to a status quo too often propped up by ostensibly multiculturalist and social justice–oriented programmes—often organised to at least some extent around heritage planning—questions of truth, authority, authenticity, and the possibility of shared pasts and futures have leapt to v

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the forefront with a new urgency. This is not to say that these questions and contradictions had ever disappeared or failed to attract attention. But it is to suggest that, across the globe, the issues of community participation, expert knowledge, ostensibly authoritative histories, and vernacular questioning of what makes up the fundaments of any community or polity seem to have upended fairly standard ways of conducting politics, whether in Washington, Cairo, Johannesburg, Bangkok, or Rio de Janeiro. In today’s political and technological environment, the promises of decolonisation, like the promises of multiculturalism, that have done so much to energise heritage theorising at the national and supranational levels have morphed into something more complex, something less resolutely triumphant. Heritage, heritage planning, and their promises remain unfinished. This is the case in a present in which claims and techniques very much a part of the inventions of tradition, the celebrations of ethnic difference, and the safeguarding of skills and vernacular practice are widely recognised, and even deployed, by a panoply of competing actors who allege ‘reverse discrimination’. Such a threat to more just futures that seizes on the grammars and vocabularies of existing techniques intended to foster social justice does not mean that the fight against colonial powers, their legacies, and the sorts of discriminatory systems so much a part of many nation-states has failed, or triumphed. It suggests instead that the analyst and practitioner of heritage planning must recognise that many of the insights developed by social scientists who critique as well as put together heritage programmes now make sense in new social realms and in new areas of debate. They make sense not because heritage is everywhere and everything, which it no doubt is. Rather, they make sense mainly because the issues of expertise, temporality, and authority so central to heritage as a tool of democratic engagement are at the forefront of so many pressing struggles in diverse political arenas today. As such, languages of subaltern empowerment and social justice have migrated to new realms and new actors that are not necessarily subaltern or interested in social justice. As Ciraj Rassool makes clear in his discussion with this volume’s editors of resistance in South Africa, neither citizens nor politicians nor heritage professionals have really come to terms with what Rassool dubs the ‘fault lines’ of resistance. Whether emanating from former South African freedom fighters who participate in a kleptocratic post-Apartheid state or the actors in the contemporary United States who float dubious claims of election fraud as a part of spurious claims to ‘safeguard’ democracy,

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‘resistance’ twists and turns, confusing participants and spectators alike. Is resistance necessarily resistant or even an attempt at social justice? As the editors and participants in this volume make clear, what constitutes resistance has never been clear. This is a central reason for discussing resistance at length and for the durability and utility of the concept. But it is also clear that, today, the diversity of groups that seize on languages of resistance, restoration, and even ‘democracy’ while acting in manners that curtail freedoms, democracies, and popular well-being is quite astounding. If the end of the twentieth century presented an increasingly widespread dissemination and massification of heritage techniques and objects, the first decades of the twenty-first century seem to present a burgeoning array of heritage effects. These ‘heritage effects’, as I use the term here, are much more than projects to monumentalise everyday life or, conversely, initiatives intended to open up the patrimonialisation process. They go beyond the extent to which the neoliberal marketplace seized on heritage as an alienable good set off by ‘experts’ who quite often sought to rescue historical memory and popular practice from the vicissitudes of the market. The early twenty-first-century heritage effects I call up in this foreword involve instead a bewildering hall of mirrors in which origins and popular knowledges are not in themselves origins or popular knowledges, or even easily delineable or identifiable hybrids. Or, put somewhat differently, if they are ‘popular’ they may also serve to curtail the freedoms of a broader public, even as they are invoked as democratic imperatives. At the same time, like most cultural heritage manifestations, these relations cannot be dismissed as top-down impositions or ‘fictions’ that observers may write off as nothing more than inventions. In other words, the heritage effects co-produced by multiple actors today are not simply the direct or traceable results of heritage planning as UN, IDB, and World Bank–authorised discourse. They involve instead a recognition that the monumentalised building blocks of community and political life, like the multicultural initiatives seized upon as promising emancipation for so many communities in the 1990s, are in fact much more complex entities than they seemed at first. In so many societies today, citizens are dealing with ‘heritage effects’, or social formations that carry with them traces of justice and emancipation, but these may come to be employed to shut down dissent, exclude citizenries, and curtail democratic process and rights. It is thus helpful that the editors of Theorizing Heritage Through Non-Violent Resistance eschew a single, neat definition of resistance, preferring instead to theorise

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heritage ‘from below’. What that ‘below’ is changes with each of the chapters, as participants in the volume reveal how heritage may stand a thing, a discourse, and a process that is often most fascinating—and politically productive––when invoked in relation to truth and historicity. Here cultural heritage planning and analysis, in its attention to a panoply of processes and time periods as well as its practitioners’ frank admission that the past may be reconstructed, but never conjured authentically, may offer an important means of theorising what it means to, as Kailey Rocker and Jonathan Eaton put it in this value ‘act out the future’. To act out the future is to rehearse what we do not yet know, to engage in the sorts of recalibrations called for by so many actors in the world today. And it is to do so in a manner that would seem fitting even in France analysed by Marx in the 18th Brumaire—words no longer mean what they once did, actions are polyvalent, and parsing truth and reality require ever more perspicacious efforts. As analysts of cultural heritage know full well, origins—however meaningful and real they appear—are always situationally composed from successive interpretive junctures. As my invocation of Marx implies, nothing is really novel. But at the same time, much of what I am describing is indeed novel. Heritage, as a conjuring of the virtual, prepares us, as academics, practitioners, and critics, to understand more fully this paradox. Recently, across the globe, a series of mass movements, threats to democratic process, and public health challenges have done much to convince citizens in a variety of nation-­ states that something is afoot, that something is changing, or even broken, and humans must develop new models to face these threats. That something, diverse actors propose, must be put back together, or reconstructed anew as part of shifting models for recuperating the past, charting the future, and defining well-being and participation. But, of course, it can never be put back together. Here, in its attention to a panoply of processes and time periods, as well as its practitioners’ frank admission that the past may be reconstructed but never conjured authentically, cultural heritage planning may offer an important means of theorising what it means to develop diverse and even restorative and more just futures out of a past that is never really there, even as those enmeshed in its construction constantly call it into account and presence. That past, that reality, and that quotidian set of practices are, then, always there, albeit virtually. So too are ‘everyday life’, ‘nature’, ‘landscape’, and even ‘humanity’. Yet we—and I employ the inclusive, differential ‘we’ purposefully here––know that they

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are made-up categories. That is, they are made-up categories by and within which we live. To think through heritage studies at a moment of post-foundational critiques of humanism illustrates just how hard, and politically important it is, to analyse ‘the real’. Yet it teaches also how much that real arises from affective modes of apprehension that seem to emanate in turn from the forms of mediation available to telling a history or representing that post-­ Enlightenment category called ‘nature’. This emphasis on mediation, or on technologies that make material or perceivable the collective or still-­ inchoate feelings available to a public, is now a staple in analysis of right-­ wing populism and the rise of alternative regimes of factuality in the United States and Western Europe. It is also a central insight across many of the chapters in the present collection. It is thus useful to recall that prior to the rise in popularity of the internet, citizens around the world made use of the mediating techniques of heritage reconstruction. Public, lived, affectively charged spheres of historical re-collection are today a staple in most nations, and even in most regions and cities. Yes, they are reconstructions. But they are reconstructions that belong to a space, and that make that space/time belong to the people it brings into being. This has long been true for heritage planning. Perhaps for this reason Ciraj Rassool emphasises the importance of resistance as a morally polyvalent practice, which requires analysis in its singularity as well as in its transnational or affective connections, beyond the narrowly delimited space of the nation-­ state. Similarly, the editors emphasise ‘heritage from below’ as a means of uncovering alternatives to monumental mythologising histories and authorised heritage discourse. The ‘heritage from below’ perspective so much a part of the chapters in this volume responds necessarily to power and the people and institutions that wield it. It thus takes form as a viewpoint that focuses on the co-­ construction of heritage regimes, rather than a singular, resistant, optic on the powerful. Such a recognition of the hybridity and co-constructed ‘nature’ of heritage has long been central to the most sophisticated analysis of cultural and natural patrimonies. Performed carefully and in relation to the sort of methodological innovations advocated in this volume by participants like Sarah De Nardi and illustrated in the research results of multiple contributors, a focus on heritage from below attends necessarily to negotiation. How such negotiation is performed today, and in relation to what nodal points and investments, comes out clearly in the pages that follow. By eschewing a singular definition of resistance, the editors and

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contributors thus push us to look at processes and the extent to which their boundaries and contours shift along with positionality and perspective. What could do more justice to a heritage-centric approach to the world? Such a heritage-centric positionality, and thus theorising, emerges in the present volume. The volume re-inserts the academic analysis of heritage in a wider field of political struggle and possibility. To do so, it wrests heritage from earlier debates and resituates in a present whose destabilising calls on returns to origins that never existed, popular volitions made real in great part through such calls, and on challenges to social authority that have given rise to a rather bewildering present. Yet presents have long bewildered. And heritage is always put together from the present. The chapters that follow do much to trace the outlines, the political stakes, and the micro-interactions around heritage that characterise all of our presents. And the emphasis on a perspective ‘from below’—however exactly that perspective is put together—promises to push forward social critique and heritage planning in complementary manners that should improve planners’ ability to structure the space/times that do so much in turn to structure what diverse peoples must debate, and live, today. New York, NY  June 2021 14

John F. Collins

Acknowledgements

The editors of this book are thankful to the participants of the Workshop ‘Theorizing Heritage through Resistance’ (July 2017) that the editors organized at the University of Gothenburg to generate discussions around heritage and resistance and develop the theme and content of the book. Some of the book’s ideas are inspired by the two research projects: ‘Heritage and Urban Resistance: Exploring Identity Politics, Commons and Conflicts’ (RAÄ 2014-2017) and ‘Reconciliatory Heritage: Reconstructing Heritage in a Time of Violent Fragmentations’ (VR 2017-2021). We are also thankful to Britt Baillie, Ihab Saloul, and Rob van der Laarse, the editors of the Book Series Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, as well as the anonymous reviewers, for their support and inspiring comments on the different parts of the manuscript. Our work on heritage and resistance would never be possible without the generous support by the Swedish National Heritage Board, the Swedish Research Council, and the Making Global Heritage Futures research cluster of the Centre for Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Linking Heritage to Resistance  1 Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer 2 Exercising Our Rights to Past: Emergent Heritage Activism in Istanbul 19 Evren Uzer 3 Acting Out the Future of the Albanian National Theatre: New Heritage at the Intersection of Resistance and New Media 41 Kailey Rocker and Jonathan Eaton 4 Mapping More-than-Nostalgia of the ‘Pits’: Heritage Co-production as a Creative Resistance to Deindustrialization 71 Sarah De Nardi 5 Authenticity and Struggle: Historicising Skateboarding as ‘Action Art’ on London’s South Bank 91 David Webb

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6 Imagining Heritage Beyond Proprietorship, Contesting Dispossession Beyond the Power-­Resistance Binary: Occupy-Style Protests in Turkey, 2013–2014117 Eray Çaylı 7 Fighting Denial of the Right to the Past: Heritage-Backed Bodily Resistance and Performance of Refugeeism and Return139 Feras Hammami 8 Reproductions, Excavations and Replicas: New Materialities in Response to Destruction165 David Ayala-Alfonso 9 Ethnoscaping Green Resistance: Heritage and the Fight Against Fracking185 Scott Burnett 10 The Epistemic Work of Decolonization and Restitution: A Critical Conversation213 Ciraj Rassool, with Evren Uzer and Feras Hammami 11 Methodological Insights Within the Intersection of Heritage and Resistance Research231 Evren Uzer and Feras Hammami 12 Heritage and Resistance: Theoretical Insights257 Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer Index281

Notes on Contributors

David Ayala-Alfonso  is a curator, artist, and researcher working between Mexico City, London and New York. He is a guest curator at Independent Curators International; Visiting Critic at the Ford Family Foundation Curator and Critic Tour Series; and part of the editorial collectives of Journal of Visual Culture and {{em_rgencia}. He has published books, chapters and articles on visual culture, critical heritage, art history, critical urbanism, art and education, institutional critique, and art in the public realm, and has delivered numerous international lectures. His work as an artist and curator has been showcased extensively in the United States, Latin America and Europe. Ayala-Alfonso has received various awards, including the Fulbright Grant, the AICAD post-graduate Teaching Fellowship, the ICI-Dedalus Award for Curatorial Research and the Earlyconcept Grant for Exploratory Research at SAIC. He holds a MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; a Specialization in Art Education from the National University of Colombia; and has participated in different curatorial residencies in France, Colombia, the United States and Germany. Scott Burnett  is Assistant Professor of Communications at University of Gothenburg in Sweden and a researcher in critical diversity studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. His research investigates the relationship between the (re)production of raced/gendered hierarchies in discourses of land control and ownership, with a focus on contemporary environmentalism across various country contexts. He is currently working on the transnational circulation of reactionary and far right white xv

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hetero-masculinities online. His intersectional and decolonial approach to social difference is grounded in postfoundational approaches to discourse analysis, oriented within an anti-racist ­politics. His doctoral dissertation, “Giving back the land: whiteness and belonging in contemporary South Africa,” was completed in 2018. Eray Çaylı  has a PhD from the University College London (2015), and he studies the material and spatial legacies of political violence in Turkey anthropologically. His current research concerns how these legacies shape and are shaped by contemporary imaginaries of disaster and resilience. Çaylı is Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow (2018–2021) at the London School of Economics and Political Science where he also teaches the postgraduate course Imaging Violence, Imagining Europe. Forthcoming publications include Çaylı’s monograph titled Victims of Commemoration: The Architecture and Violence of “Confronting the Past” in Turkey, a volume he co-edited titled Architectures of Emergency in Turkey, and a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture he edited under the theme of “Field as Archive/Archive as Field.” Çaylı is a co-founder of Amed Urban Workshop, an independent academy for critical spatial research based in Diyarbakır, where he also undertook a residency at the artist-run space Loading in summer 2019. Sarah De Nardi  is a Lecturer of Heritage and Tourism at Western Sydney University in the School of Social Sciences, part of the Humanitarian and Development Research Initiative. Her research and practice explore the ways people enact place through memory, the imagination, and storytelling practices. She conducts participatory visualization practices that channel sense of place from the perspective of transnational communities and in communities affected by conflict and disaster. She is active as a cultural justice advocate in Italy, Pakistan, and Australia. Her 2019 book, Visualising Place, Memory and the Imagined, traces the experiences and memories of communities “caught up” in places imbued with historical unrest or upheaval. Jonathan  Eaton is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. His dissertation research seeks to understand the affective engagements among people, heritage, and hazards within the multilayered temporalities of disaster in Vancouver and the interior of British Columbia. His current and previous research has been funded by the Social Science

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and Humanities Research Council Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, the Fulbright Foundation, the American Councils Title VIII program, and the UBC Public Scholars Initiative. Jonathan also has years of experience working as a heritage practitioner in Albania and across the Balkans with the non-profit organization Cultural Heritage without Borders. Feras  Hammami  is Associate Professor of Conservation, placed at the Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg. His research concerns the politicization of cultural heritage, and the opportunities heritage might provide for fighting injustices in cities. He is currently working on ideas of “hopeful,” purposeful and reconciliatory approaches to heritage. He previously conducted research in relation to sites located in Palestine, Botswana, and Sweden. Ciraj  Rassool is Professor of History and director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He was the chairperson of the District Six Museum and council chairperson of Iziko Museums of South Africa, and was also on the councils of the National Heritage Council and the South African Heritage Resources Agency. He is a board member of the South African History Archive, and is also a member of the South African Advisory Committee on Restitution and Repatriation. Kailey Rocker  is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) and a socio-­ cultural anthropologist whose work is based in Eastern Europe. Her current research focuses on the application of transitional justice mechanisms and the construction of historical memory in Albania. In particular, she investigates the role that civil society and the first post-socialist generation play in imagining, realizing, and evaluating projects that deal with the socialist past nearly 30 years following the collapse of the country’s communist dictatorship. Her current and previous research has been funded by the Fulbright Foundation, the American Councils Title VIII program, the UNC Center for European Studies, and the UNC Center for Global Initiatives. Evren Uzer  is an NYC-based educator, urban planner, and community practitioner working on civic engagement in planning and design. Her current research focuses on activism, critical heritage studies, and feminist spatial practices. She is Assistant Professor of Urban Planning in Parsons School of Design at The New School and also holds a researcher position

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at School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg. She holds a PhD (Cultural Heritage at Risk) in Urban and Regional Planning from Istanbul Technical University, Turkey. She has an ongoing research project on “Manipulating Dissent: Exploration of activism in NYC” funded by The New School (2017–ongoing) which explores activism and feminist spatial practices and “Community engagement” project which looks into ethical community academia partnerships in relation to design education. Evren’s practice is currently split between community engagement, planning and design work at Collective for Community, Culture and Environment-CCCE, and her artistic practice at roomservices. David Webb  is Senior Lecturer in Planning in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, England. His interests lie in the discourses and political ideologies which drive urban development and the means by which these ideas are translated into practical outcomes. Recent research focuses on the institutional challenges associated with the pursuit of social justice and democratic inclusion and critically considers how actor-network theory can prompt reflection on governmental pressures associated with the pursuit of knowledge and “impact.” Ongoing work considers the need for a closer examination of the connection between planning practices and political theory as well as focusing on the potential of tactical urbanist approaches to influence place futures.

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 4.1 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2

This map depicts the historic core of central Tirana. The black outline marks the boundaries of the historic zone defined in 2000, while the shaded area marks the reduced zone as of 2017. The U-shaped theatre complex, depicted near the center of the map, is noticeably left out of the 2017 boundaries. (Source: Map produced by the authors on OpenStreetMap’s base map licensed under the Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 2.0 license (CC BY-SA 2.0)) 50 Protestors gather in the plaza between the two arms of the National Theatre to celebrate it and call for its protection. This photo was taken in August 2018. (Source: The authors) 53 The 13th edition of the digital fanzine Sputnik, published April 2018. (Source: Ergin ‘DiverSanti’ Zaloshnja) 61 An anonymous street artist pasted a poster of skyscrapers on trees to the side of an abandoned public building in central Tirana. This photo was taken in September 2018. (Source: The authors)62 Visualizing elements of the cinema and its surrounds as remembered and reenacted by community members 81 Twentieth Century Society artists impressions 95 More art for more people 97 More art by more people 98 Nor Zartonk’s symbolic gravestones set up at Gezi Park, June 2013, Sayat Tekir 120 Satellite image indicating the former Armenian cemetery (blue) and military barracks (pink) in relation to today’s Gezi Park and its environs, Eray Çaylı 125 xix

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List of Figures

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

Fig. 8.4 Fig. 9.1 Fig. 9.2 Fig. 9.3 Fig. 9.4 Fig. 9.5 Fig. 9.6 Fig. 9.7

A sign was rooted by a local activist making the location of his house in Iqrit. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission) 148 The graffiti on the corrugated sheet says, ‘We would never remain refugees, we would return’. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission) 152 One of the summer workshops in Iqrit. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission) 153 Celebrating Easter holiday in Iqrit. (Source: ActiveStills through Iqrit’s Facebook page, used by permission) 153 Israel Land Authority and police demolishing the restored ruins, removing the additional structures, and arresting activists. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission) 154 Daniel R. Small, Excavation II (2016). Installation view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in the context of the exhibition ‘Made in L.A. 2016’. (Courtesy the artist) 167 Gala Porras-Kim, Untitled (2016). Installation view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in the context of the exhibition ‘Made in L.A. 2016’. (Courtesy the artist) 176 Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist— Seated Nude Male Figure, Wearing Belt Around Waist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series) (2018). Installation view at the Eli & Edythe Broad Museum in East Lansing, MI, in the context of the exhibition ‘Never Spoken Again’. (Courtesy David Ayala-Alfonso) 179 Ulrik Lopez, Summon Song I (2018–2019). Sketches and contextual images from the project. (Courtesy the artist) 181 ‘They hang the man + flog the woman…’ (UK046) 193 Greg Hunt as a Chinese stooge (AU060) 196 Karoo sunset (SA036) 200 Equivalence between present and former land holders (AU053) 202 Copyright of the land (SA045) 203 Poster from COP17 in Durban (UK037) 205 Winona LaDuke’s recurring meme 207

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 5.1

Key events in the timeline of the National Theatre protests (March-­October 2018) Arts and cultural policy discourses on the south bank

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Linking Heritage to Resistance Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer

We began to write about heritage and resistance in 2013, moved by waves of resistance and other social movements that challenged governments worldwide. At that time, both of us were based in Sweden, when social and political debates explored the riots that sparked in Stockholm’s socially disadvantaged suburban neighbourhood, Husby, following police brutality. Five days of rioting took place on 19 May 2013, with cars, schools, youth centres, local shops, a kindergarten, and a police station set on fire (Thörn, 2013; Mayer et al., 2016; Holdo & Bengtsson, 2019). We witnessed how these protests revealed and related to questions pertaining to social justice and identity politics in cities, and connect to other forms of social movements across borders. Similarly, the decentralized political and social movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) emerged in response to racially motivated police brutality

F. Hammami Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] E. Uzer (*) Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_1

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against black and brown people in 2013, the same year as the Husby riots. BLM gave rise to a range of other movements against and debates about social inequality and racism, with widespread visibility during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in North America, spring 2020. In some cases, these protests revealed the forcefully erased histories of places; in others, their mobilization shed light on contested heritage and conflict issues (Forest & Johnson, 2019; Hasian & Paliewicz, 2020). Meanwhile, in South Africa the post-apartheid era has witnessed the emergence of different forms of resistance against the grand narrative of nation-building and national movement. Among others, social historians sought to rebuild South Africa’s history from below by recovering and foregrounding the subaltern experiences and the oppressed and exploited layers of South African society, into formally recognized historical narratives (Murray et al., 2007; Witz et al., 2017). Recently, South Africa has seen protests against shared grievances around urban land, housing, and the provision of essential services, in addition to waves of commemorating protests such as the Purple March. Shepard Fairey’s 2019 Mural in Johannesburg brings the slogan of ‘The purple shall govern’ from the 1989 anti-apartheid protest, reviving a threshold moment embedded in the history of apartheid resistances. In 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement was mobilized to decolonize education, following a student protest in 2015 against the presence of Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town (Rhodes Must Fall, 2018; Knudsen & Andersen, 2019). Quickly the protests spread to other campuses in South Africa and then to Oxford University, calling for the removal of the statue due to its symbolic representation of imperialism and racism. Similar protests against statues viewed to embody histories of racism erupted in the USA, following the brutal murder of George Floyd in May 2020 by police as they subdued him. Alongside the protests, many confederate monuments, symbols of racial injustice, and markers of white supremacy have been targeted. In Richmond, some confederate monuments were planned to be removed by the city; the protests accelerated the process, when they removed a few statues that were located in public parks. Some of these efforts revealed laws that guaranteed the presence of such monuments; in Georgia and North Carolina, decisions to remove them were blocked by laws that prevent such monuments from being moved to areas of lesser prominence (Mullins, 2021). Indeed, the protests were not against the monuments per se but against the racist history that

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brought these monuments into being and enabled racist attitudes to embed and remain visible in contemporary societies. In Turkey, a surge of demonstrations began in 2013 against the neoliberal economic development plan for Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park. Protests grew due to the violent police response and inspired the mobilization of different subaltern groups to join them to protect the park. The presence of Nor Zartonk, a group of Istanbul Armenians, was particularly notable as they pointed to the contested history of the park, carrying traces of its past as an Armenian cemetery. Although their support for Gezi Park was celebrated by many as a representation of the protest’s diversity, this erasure didn’t gain much publicity, similar to other erasures of civil architecture and components that signify the presence and contribution of Armenian communities of Istanbul. The police forces quickly cleared the makeshift museum of protest that contained protest ephemera and ad hoc memorials to the lives lost and injured during the Gezi Protests (Whitehead & Bozoğlu, 2016; Uzer; Çaylı, this volume). Such memorialization efforts, as Margry and Sánchez-Carretero (2011) alluded to, not only commemorate but fulfil a broader function as sites for the performance of social protest and action. Every year in Palestine on 15 May, people march through the streets to reclaim their right of return to their original homes and lands, from which they were expelled in 1948. Although the right of return has become a question of great public significance, the expulsion and other forms of displacement haven’t stopped, increasing the number of expelled Palestinians (Abdo & Masalha, 2019; Khalidi, 2020). A series of anti-­ government social movements have engulfed several countries in the Middle East and other regions since the ‘Arab Spring’. While calling upon governments to democratize their regimes or leave office, protesters in, for instance, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria, attacked the material culture that bears witness to these governments’ legacies. These attacks included the destruction of monuments, statues, and other grand architecture that represent the authority of the respective governing regimes (Munawar, 2017). These diverging forms of social movements are purposeful, with all possible interpretations of construction and destruction. People organize themselves to create change, resist change, reverse change, or subordinate power (i.e., provide a political voice to those otherwise disenfranchised). What interests us in this book is ‘change’ or, more precisely, how heritage-­ related forms of change occur from below. Heritage is the context and

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topic we focus on in this book, and resistance is brought into conversation with heritage to explore new means for inducing change from below. In principle, we are interested in exploring the role that heritage plays in resistance and other social movements, and how working at the intersection of heritage and resistance offers new insights on social conflict management and change. We believe that heritage has the potential to enable and legitimate conflicts. It can also become targeted or utilized to weaponize the struggle against ‘the Other’. Many other examples could be highlighted here to explain the direct involvement of heritage in resistance and conflict. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the demolition of medieval buildings and neighbourhoods during the modernization movement that took place in several European countries sparked resistance and social unrest. Similar protests erupted during the 1960s and 1970s when governments of several (Western) countries demolished many former working-class neighbourhoods, to make way for neoliberal urban development and architecture (Thörn, 2013; Mayer et al., 2016; Hammami & Uzer, 2018). In both cases of urban change and protest, the demolition was justified through not only praising that which was protected, but also naming and shaming the demolished areas and buildings as being dysfunctional, insignificant, aesthetically unappealing, out of context, outdated, lawless, dirty, and a home for various illegal life practices (Herzfeld, 2006; Lees et al., 2015). We also saw similar cases of destruction caused by commercial development such as Dakota Access and Keystone Pipeline’s impact on Native American sites, ancestral burial grounds, and other heritage areas of significance in the USA (Dijkstal, 2019) assuming these sites as insignificant in the face of economic development and profit. Other cases of neoliberal economic development backed by national interest in world heritage can be drawn from John Collins’ thesis Revolt of the Saints, in which he investigated the contested removal of the Afro-Brazilian history from the historic Pelourinho district of Salvador de Bahia, Brazil. The combination of blind market forces and national competition led to a violent process of displacement, guided by deeply structured relations of class, race, and gender, yet justified by a celebrated process of heritage making (Collins, 2015). Heritage has in many cases been a battlefield for power struggles over authority, superiority, and identity, and exposed to a range of actions that include the re-framing of narratives, vandalism, looting, reconstruction, and destruction, to mention but a few (Tunbridge & Ashworth 1996;

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Witz et al., 2017; Hammami & Uzer, 2018; Mozaffari & Jones, 2020; Ristic & Frank, 2019). Examples of ethnically and religiously laden conflicts can be drawn from different parts of the world. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, a wide range of tangible and intangible aspects of Soviet heritage have been targeted by different protest groups, demanding their removal or using them to deliver political messages. Among other welldocumented examples is the Soviet Army Statue in the city of Sofia—built on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the liberation by the Soviet Army—which has been repeatedly vandalized, with social commentary on the government’s past and present foreign policies. The Bronze Soldier Statue was relocated in 2007 from a site of war graves in a central area of the city of Tallinn to Tallinn’s Military Cemetery following riots which persisted over two nights. As an arena of contested claims and values, Estonia’s Russians view the statue as possessing symbolic value that not only represents the victory of the Soviet Union over Germany during the ‘Great Patriotic War’, but also for their claim to rights in Estonia. At the same time, most Estonians considered it a symbol of Soviet occupation and repression following World War II. Religious heritage is often viewed as one of the most contested cultural properties, where possessive claims sometimes develop into violent conflicts or even war (Hayden 2002). For example, the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) has led to waves of attacks on and destruction of universally valuable sites of cultural heritage. Some of these included Palmyra and Aleppo in Syria, the Shrine of Jonah in Iraq, Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan, and Timbuktu mausoleums in Mali. All are recognized for their universal value. Other examples of targeting sites with religious history are increasingly visible in many Western cities. With the growth in extremist right-wing politics, mosques and other material cultures that bear witness to Islamic representations are vandalized and involved in different situations of conflict. In 2015, for instance, ‘Don’t Touch My Mosque’ (or ‘Rör Inte Min Moské’) was the slogan that mobilized thousands of people in Sweden’s three largest cities in solidarity with Swedish Muslims and to protest Islamophobic acts. In these and other similar cases, there is always an ideological underpinning to the contestations over heritage. In Palestine, for instance, religion and heritage were strategically used by the Israeli settler colonial power to establish its national project. Not only through projecting the biblical history of the Holy Land to attract Jews from different parts of the world, but the colonial power also used

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heritage and religion to de-signify the cultural of the Palestinians and thereby declared them as socially dead (Hammami, 2020). One specific example is the occupation and siege of the World Heritage Site of Hebron/Al-Khalil. Rather than being a shared space, it has become a battlefield for contested claims over space and territory (Hammami, 2020). War and other forms of violent conflicts are often followed by the construction of memorial sites. These sites are usually designed and framed within some sort of resistance narratives. Not necessarily resistance to injustices, although these can take place, but rather with ambitions to resist the emergence and blooming of any counternarrative (Margry & Sánchez-Carretero, 2011; Autry, 2012; Britt 2013). In Palestine-Israel, second and third generations of Palestinian refugees increasingly employ new tactics of resistance in which history and heritage are employed as political resources and means (Abdo & Masalha, 2019; Hammami this volume). For example, oral histories are translated into ‘unofficial’ memorials in refugee camps and on sites of expulsion (often washed away and confiscated by Israeli police and land authorities), as counternarratives to both the Israeli denial of an-Nakba and Palestinian official/diplomatic efforts that either sidelined the right of return from peace agreements or assimilate the experiences of expulsion. A number of other examples on counternarratives and the use of heritage as resistance can be drawn from former Yugoslavian countries. While the world was commemorating the tenth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in which Serbs killed more than 8000 Muslims in 2005, ethnic Serbs in the village of Kravica, 20 kilometres away, were busy constructing a countermemorial to Serb victims of the war, killed by the Muslim army from Srebrenica. With their traditional ideology as a reminder of pain, war memorials can create stronger polarization and mental barriers when conflict lessens, or as often described during post-conflict or peacetime. In the case of Vukovar, these memorials may actually hold on to the memories of the destroyed ‘shared city’ and erase the overlapping history of Croats and Serbs (Baillie, 2013). Heritage entanglement in these different situations of conflict diverges, following the ways in which heritage is targeted and utilized. Exploring this entanglement through a critical heritage studies (CHS) perspective revealed the different conceptualizations and approaches to heritage, as well as the utility of heritage for analytical purposes. Scholars of CHS view heritage as a present-centred process of interpretation, contestation, and manifestation through which the self is projected, often at the expense of

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the other. We also see how heritage expands towards people’s everyday life experience and politics of identity and rights. With the highly politicized process of heritage, the inevitable diverse interpretations of the past often become compared, assimilated, or re-invented in service of authorized discourses and/or particular interest. In his seminal thesis The Past Is a Foreign Country, Lowenthal (1985) explains how heritage since the nineteenth century has been continuously re-invented to serve the foundation and legitimacy of a range of collective identity projects, including nationalism and colonialism. Harvey (2001) views this as a process of ‘heritagization’ which since the nineteenth century has been supporting the efforts of many Western nation-states towards the creation of collective imaginary ‘common’ to their ethnic communities. Through this process, the past has been politicized and ‘re-invented’ (Hobsbawm, 1983), creating an authoritative narrative of value according to which potential heritages and the people associated with them become protected, while others may become cleansed, destroyed, erased, or neglected (Baillie, 2013)—yet may at any moment return on the agenda through new forms of contestation (Landzelius, 2003). What we, however, have found under-­examined in CHS is the potential of heritage for change, and how heritage expands towards societal development. Much of the discussion on change from below within heritage studies is related to the advocacy work that modern forms of civil society organizations provide due to institutional voids (Hammami, 2016; Mozaffari, 2015). Similarly, the less organized, smallerscale, and everyday life–related practices are underrepresented. This gap within research on change from below had become apparent as we explored the intersection of heritage and resistance. Resistance is most often defined as people fighting back in defence of freedom, democracy, and humanity (Pile & Keith, 1997) and may take violent or non-violent forms. How resistance is recognized as resistance is, however, unclear in the literature. For many, resistance should be intentional, publicly manifested (Pile & Keith, 1997; Moore, 2000), or collective and based on shared interest (Mayer et al., 2016). Scholars interested in everyday politics of resistance suggest that resistance can take the form of hidden and informal practices (James Scott 1987; Asef Bayat, 2013; Michel de Certeau; Judith Butler; Antonio Negri, to mention a few). Agreeing on a definition for resistance can be problematic because the writing dealing with the topic often uses resistance interchangeably with protests, social movements, riots, and unrest. There is also no space in this volume to frame a definition for resistance, and perhaps this is not helpful

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considering the diverging practices of resistance and how their differences depend on their unique socio-political contexts. In this book, we are interested in change that arises through resistance and, more specifically, change from below. Further, we focus on change driven through Foucauldian biopolitics, rather than change driven by a particular agent (i.e., protesters). Our engagement with resistance is therefore cautious, seeking to avoid any established divide between hidden and visible, individual and collective, every day and publicly manifested, and direct and indirect actions. As Abu-Lughod (1990) explains, work that dwells on Bourdieu and Gramsci ‘recognizes and theorizes the importance of ideological practice in power and resistance and works to undermine distinctions between symbolic and instrumental, behavioural and ideological, and cultural, social, and political processes’. We found our arguments well accommodated within the emerging field of resistance studies (i.e., Journal of Resistance Studies). In the editorial of its first volume, Stellan Vinthagen (2015, p. 8) explains how they conceive of resistance in relation to power relations: We are aware that others might use power as a more agency-oriented concept of ‘power to’ or ‘power with,’ or even as ‘empowerment,’ and we see no problem with the concept being used differently by people. But it then becomes necessary to explain what one means with power. For us, ‘power’ is always a matter of relations of subordination or fixations of subjectivity or practice, i.e., a structuring of the space of possible being or behaviour. […] Resistance is therefore potentially a liberation project, a matter of expanding the space of possible being or behaviour. However, we do not think ‘liberation’ is at all absolute. It is instead always emerging, a process of unfinished struggle. Yet we view (continuous) liberation as the potential seed of hope inhabiting resistance. (Vinthagen, 2015, p. 8)

What is specifically important in this definition is the continuity, or what we explained elsewhere, ‘accumulative impact of resistance’ (Hammami & Uzer, 2018). Resistance movements often emerge from past experiences, present needs, and future aspirations. Its dynamics, forms, relations, and impacts are communicated across geography. Some of these ideas are developing within resistance studies. In their recent book, Johansson and Vinthagen (2020) re-emphasize the notions of cultural learning, experimentation, continuity, and informality as vital dimensions of everyday resistance. This take on resistance is helpful for the

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purpose of our book. It recognizes the value and impact of informality and temporality in resistance. It also builds on Asef Bayat’s ideas of social nonmovements and quiet encroachment. Bayat argues that noncollective actors and uncoordinated activities eventually entail unrecognized forms ‘collective action’ (Bayat, 2013). These non-collectivities, as he explains, ‘embody shared practices of large numbers of ordinary people whose fragmented but similar activities trigger much social change, even though these practices are rarely guided by an ideology or recognizable leaderships and organizations’ (Bayat, 2013, p. 15). The fact that social non-­ movement occurs ‘behind the scenes’ and changes occur slowly and subtly; Bayat recognizes this as a strategy of resistance, which he terms ‘quiet encroachment’. This conception of resistance is broad and specific and involves a range of discursive and spatial practices of resistance and change. The take on resistance as making the change from below and through biopolitics (considering the conditions created by noncollective actors) is under-examined, if examined at all within heritage studies. It also advocates separating resistance from agents, without ignoring its potential role in the politics of subjectification. For example, Vinthagen (2015) argues that power should be replaced by ‘domination’. The idea here is to find alternative meaning for resistance beyond ‘resistance against’ and ‘resistance to’. In this context, he views resistance as ‘a subaltern practice that might undermine domination’ (Vinthagen, 2015, p. 9). The language of ‘domination’ is specifically important within critical heritage studies. Most of the analysis within this field attempts to explain and explore the dynamics that can challenge the domination frameworks of authorized heritage discourses. This theoretical framework of biopolitics is relevant to how we understand heritage, especially as relational and as processes. Its relevance is manifested in its capacity to support our analysis to move the focus on heritage from ‘what does it mean’ to ‘what does it do’, and from its politicization for war and conflict, to its politicization for productive resistance and change (Hammami & Uzer, 2018). Dwelling on those specific definitions of heritage and resistance supports our argument that both expand towards the politics of identity and everyday life and are profoundly related to issues of recognition, representation, justice, and rights.

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The Book: Process and Structure We began to explore these questions at the two-day intensive workshop which we, as editors, organized in July 2017 at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and to which we invited five scholars from our networks with whom we previously had conversation on similar questions. At the workshop we compared the different forms of politicization that give shape to and protect what we understand as heritage, and the consequences of this for people, history, and geography. We also explored the political agency of heritage and the possibilities it might offer for a productive change. Participants in this session were interested in the intersection of heritage and resistance and associated changes. To further explore these arguments and provide new theoretical insights for heritage and resistance, we asked the contributors to situate theoretical dialogues of heritage and resistance within specific contexts. During the workshop we decided to expand the theoretical and empirical scope of the book through direct invitations to scholars from the extended networks of the book’s contributors. The theoretical and methodological insights as well as a conservation chapter with Ciraj Rassool (Chap. 10) elaborate the concepts that emerged from the contributions. Due to a range of professional and personal reasons the review process was delayed several times, especially when the COVID-19 pandemic kicked off in January 2020. At the end of the process, twelve chapters developed into this book, Theorizing Heritage Through Non-Violent Resistance. These contributions provide a range of examples of how activists utilize heritage to strengthen their non-­ violent resistance against neoliberal economic developments (i.e., Webb, Eaton & Rocker), colonialism (i.e., Hammami, Burnett, Rassool), authorized narratives and invented traditions (i.e., Ayala-Alfonso, De Nardi), and violation of the subaltern (i.e., Uzer, Çaylı). The cases analysed in the contributions reveal that ‘heritage’ and ‘resistance’, as concepts, practices, and empirical realities for communities and individuals, are fundamentally interdependent and increasingly constitute and characterize multiple sites of struggles and (social) conflicts in cities. By crossing the disciplinary boundaries of heritage and resistance studies, the theoretical and empirical analyses of this book, first, bring new insights to the debates about ‘displacement’ (Lees et  al., 2015), ‘gentrification’ (Non, 2016), ‘exclusion’ (Ingram, 2015), ‘marginalization’ (Wacquant, 2007), ‘urbicide’ (Huxtable, 1972; Abujidi, 2014), ‘spatial cleansing’ (Herzfeld, 2006), ethnic cleansing (Pappé, 2006), and museum activism and

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movement (Janes & Sandell, 2019; Mozaffari & Jones, 2020). Secondly, the book brings a new energy to the field of heritage studies that has, as Walters et al. (2016) explain, overwhelmingly reported cases of conflict and war, often at the expense of peace and other forms of hopeful change. In this light, we problematize and theorize the entanglement of heritage and resistance by asking: in what ways does heritagization create injustices? How does this trigger resistance? In what ways are heritage and resistance entangled in (social) conflicts? How is heritage involved in the appropriation of urban restructuring and the resistances to it? How does resistance support the emergence of new values of heritage? What possibilities does heritage have for fighting injustices? And how can we make sense of this potential when working at the intersection of heritage and resistance? In the first chapter, we introduce our take on the intersection of heritage and resistance, and associated situations of conflict. To make sense of the historical and contextual attributes of this intersection, we provided several examples of resistance and other forms of protests in which heritage plays a role or became a battlefield of contesting claims. Here, we explain our views and arguments that heritage can be leveraged for claims made through resistance movements and that both heritage and resistance naturally expand towards the politics of identity and rights. In the following eight chapters, the authors, on the one hand, reveal the ways in which different official and unofficial heritage practices impact upon urban resistance and vice versa. Key questions and topics discussed in this section include the following: What forms of commemoration do activate or pacify urban resistance practices? What role does heritage play in justice-­ making? What are the implications of heritage activism within the context of nation states? What forms of heritage appear as communities reclaim their spatial and socio-cultural spaces? On the other hand, the authors explore how resistance movements take form in relation to particular possessive claims, and against the associated processes of injustices. They also examine how resistance involves under-researched processes of knowledge production, as well as supports the creation of new forms of heritage from below. The first two chapters research the emerging forms of heritage, and their roots in heritage activism and the right to the city. In ‘Exercising Our Rights to Past: Emergent Heritage Activism in Istanbul’, Evren Uzer elaborates heritage activism as a constituent part of exercising the right to the city and right to appropriation, through insurgent and emergent activist urban practices. She describes heritage activism as various acts of civil

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disobedience which leverage heritage and collective ‘alternative’ past narratives. She uses the case of a historical edible plant garden in Istanbul, Turkey, as a setting to discuss the notion of heritage activism as a demonstration of rights and claiming of public land. She highlights both rapid unfolding activism, its changing alliances in relation to conducting research, and bridges the current displacement and dispossession practices to heritage-related activism. In their chapter, ‘Acting Out the Future of the Albanian National Theatre: New Heritage at the Intersection of Resistance and New Media’, Kailey Rocker and Jonathan Eaton show how new forms and narratives of heritage can emerge through social media activism. Taking urban development in Tirana and the preservation of Albania’s National Theatre as the case, Rocker and Eaton demonstrate that online social networking platforms like Facebook can not only mobilize people against injustices, but can also inspire new process of heritage making, challenging authorized heritage practices and their normalized uncontextualized performance in everyday life. The fight against authorized heritage practices through action research and scholarly activism in community-based development projects is further developed in the subsequent chapters. In her chapter ‘Mapping More-than-Nostalgia of the “Pits”: Heritage Co-production as a Creative Resistance to Deindustrialization’, Sarah De Nardi investigates community heritage mapping as an activist tool to challenge the geographically bounded representation practices of heritage-making. Her analyses reveal that ‘heritage’ and ‘resistance’, as practices and realities for communities in the English Northeast, are interdependent and increasingly constitute and characterize multiple sites of struggles and social conflicts. She argues that the kind of heritage that can be shaped and brought to the fore through community interventions and positive, empowering activism can offer an alternative to the kind of ‘snapshot’, idealized or clichéd vision of heritage that many museums and institutions foster even today. In ‘Authenticity and Struggle: Historicising Skateboarding as “Action Art” on London’s South Bank’, David Webb explores the relationship between authenticity, as a concept capable of legitimizing heritage value, and resistance to redevelopment. His contribution calls for the bringing together of a lived and performed experience of place, with a sense-making derived from political history and urban conflict. In so doing, he also argues for the need to go beyond a sense of the relationship between people and place which can be observed, recorded, and acted on by heritage practitioners, in favour of becoming more finely attuned to the political work of heritage research

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and its situation within urban struggles. A tying together of cultural ethnography with political history calls for increased reflectivity on the part of heritage researchers and practitioners, and potentially provides a critical resource for social movements. The subsequent two chapters introduce different examples on struggles against dispossession and injustices through heritage and history. In his ‘Imagining Heritage Beyond Proprietorship, Contesting Dispossession Beyond the Power-Resistance Binary: Occupy-Style Protests in Turkey, 2013–2014’, Eray Çaylı explores justice-seeking activism within the inherent exclusionary practices of heritage making in Turkey. Focusing on the Gezi Park protests, Çaylı demonstrates that ‘the entangled ways in which the protesters both mobilized and contested dispossession, reiterates the importance of thinking the struggle over urban space beyond a binary opposition between power and resistance to, instead, consider agency as the product of this entanglement’. This mobilization, as he explains, has important implications for the dualisms of conventional understandings that underpin heritage-as-proprietorship—such as possession versus dispossession, security versus vulnerability, and humans versus nonhumans. Other images of dispossession and (in)justice-making through heritage and history are explored by Feras Hammami in his chapter, ‘Fighting Denial of the Right to the Past: Heritage-Backed Bodily Resistance and Performance of Refugeeism and Return’. Hammami illustrates the political agency of heritage in the politics of dispossession, refugeeism, and the right to one’s past. Working at the intersection of heritage and resistance in Palestine-Israel, he highlights how the Israeli settler colonial power mobilized history, heritage, law, and discourses to realize their strategies of dispossession in Palestine; and how resistance groups increasingly engage with their past to counter these strategies. Living on the site of ruins and reconstructing the history of Nakba from below enabled them to reveal the injustices they have lived through and reclaim their citizenship. The case of Iqrit showed how the right to one’s past is central to resistance and other forms of protests, and how struggle against dispossession, alienation, and refugeeism can be fortified by better engagement in heritage and history. Chapters 8 and 9 provide critical reflections on the importance of context, history, and temporality in conservation movements. In Chap. 8, David Ayala-Alfonso focuses on art-inspired activism in Colombia. In his ‘Reproductions, Excavations and Replicas: New Materialities in Response to Destruction’, Ayala-Alfonso explains how artistic practices that seek to

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recreate, enact, extend, and stage collections and museum displays often entail a form of critique inspired by materiality itself triggered against the history of injustices collections and displays might represent. These practices compel different forms of usage and interaction from the audiences and communities they interpolate, creating temporary rules and spaces of dialogue that displace the regular interaction with space, and awaken a sense of criticality on the material culture of everyday life. In Chap. 9, titled ‘Ethnoscaping Green Resistance: Heritage and the Fight Against Fracking’, Scott Burnett scrutinizes the ways in which colonial histories are engaged in conservation discourses and movements. Looking at the discursive practices of the anti-fracking movements in Australia, South Africa and the UK, he analyses ‘ethnoscapes’ within anti-fracking movements, demonstrating how unnoticed reinforcement of the histories of colonialism and ethnonationalism in the movements can threaten the social relationships required to deliver environmentally sustainable futures and indirectly foreclose possible avenues of dialogue with indigenous and oppressed peoples. Burnett’s analyses of heritage and resistance thus raise critical questions to the unchallenged positivism that often surrounds resistance and other forms of protests. In Chap. 10, ‘The Epistemic Work of Decolonization and Restitution: A Critical Conversation’, Uzer and Hammami develop reflections on the book’s theme through a conversation with Ciraj Rassool, a scholar-activist, and professor of history and director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape. We introduced Rassool to the theme of the book and shared with him a set of topic-questions prior to the conversation, which we conducted virtually. The conversation was meant as a thematic exploration of the intersection of heritage and resistance from Rassool’s perspective, and reflection on the empirical and theoretical findings reported by the book’s contributors in light of his long history of scholar-activism in South Africa. We close the book with two chapters where we, the editors, bring the theoretical and methodological advances of the contributions into a conversation to make sense of the heritage-resistance relations, and their patterns, consequences, and impact. The methodology chapter presents a collective reflection from all of the book’s contributors on the challenges, opportunities, and a variety of ethics questions that emerged when working at the intersection of heritage and resistance in different socio-political contexts. In the theory chapter, we have sought to articulate a

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transformative approach, inspired by the opportunities the intersection of heritage and resistance provides. Through a theoretical shift towards value, rights, and justice, we explain how working in the intersection can lead to a more pointing purposive and future-orientated practice of heritage; reveal the virtue of political movement as knowledge institutions in which the scholar activists rethink their identity in relation to, and contribution into, the making of societies, institutions, and education; inspire new analytical approaches and modes of engagement with heritage, paying more attention to issues of ethics, emotions, and affects; and urge ourselves and others to unsettle the stability of heritage as a concept and field of inquiry, and decolonize its foundations in theory and practice.

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Hammami, F. (2016). Issues of Sharing and Mutuality in Heritage—Contesting Diaspora and Homeland Experiences in Palestine. International Journal of Heritage Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2016.1166447 Hammami, F. (2020). Heritage Necropolitics and the Capture of Hebron: The Logic of Closure, Fear, Humiliation and Elimination. In M. Ristic & S. Frank (Eds.), Urban Heritage in Divided Cities: Contested Pasts. Routledge. Hammami, F., & Uzer, E. (2018). Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities and Cumulative Impact. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24(5), 445–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378908 Harvey, C.  D. (2001). Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning, and the Scope of Heritage Studies. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 7, 319–338. Hasian, M., & Paliewicz, N. (2020). Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities New York, Charlottesville and Montgomery. Palgrave Macmillan. Hayden, R. M. (2002). Antagonistic Tolerance: Competitive Sharing of Religious Sites in South Asia and the Balkans. Current Anthropology, 43(2), 205–231. https://doi.org/10.1086/338303 Herzfeld, M. (2006). Spatial Cleansing: Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West. Journal of Material Culture, 11(1/2), 127–149. Hobsbawm, E. (1983). Introduction: Inventing Tradition. In E. Hobsbawm & T. Ranger (Eds.), The Invention of Tradition. Cambridge UP. Holdo, M., & Bengtsson, B. (2019). Marginalization and Riots: A Rationalistic Explanation of Urban Unrest. Housing, Theory and Society. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14036096.2019.1578996 Huxtable, A. (1972). Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? A Primer on Urbicide. Collier Books. Ingram, C. (2015). Building between past and future: Nostalgia, historical materialism and the architecture of memory in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. Journal of Philosophy and Social Criticism, 41(3), 317–333. Janes, R. R., & Sandell, R. (Eds.). (2019). Museum Activism. Routledge, London and New York. Johansson, A., & Vinthagen, S. (2020). Conceptualizing ‘Everyday Resistance’: A Transdisciplinary Approach. Routledge. Khalidi, R. (2020). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. A history of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017. Metropolitan Books. Knudsen, T. B., & Andersen, C. (2019). Affective Politics and Colonial Heritage, Rhodes Must Fall at UCT and Oxford. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 25(3), 239–258. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1481134 Landzelius, M. (2003). Commemorative Dis(re)membering: Erasing Heritage, Spatializing Disinheritance. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21, 195–221.

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Lees, L., Bang Shin, H., & López-Morales, E. (Eds.). (2015). Global Gentrifications. Uneven Development and Displacement. Policy Press. Lowenthal, D. (1985). The Past Is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Margry, P., & Sánchez-Carretero, C. (2011). Introduction: Rethinking Memorialization: The Concept of Grassroots Memorials. In Grassroots Memorials: The Politics of Memorializing Traumatic Death (1st ed., pp. xii–48). Berghahn Books. Retrieved December 6, 2020, from https://www.jstor.org/ stable/j.ctt9qd4xs Mayer, M., Thörn, C., & Thörn, H. (Eds.). (2016). Urban Uprisings: Challenging Neoliberal Urbanism in Europe. Palgrave Macmillan. Moore, B. (2000). Resistance in Western Europe. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Mozaffari, A. (2015). The Heritage ‘NGO’: A Case Study on the Role of Grassroots Heritage Societies in Iran and Their Perception of Cultural Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21(9), 845–861. Mozaffari, A., & Jones, T. (2020). Heritage Movements in Asia: Cultural Heritage Activism, Politics and Identity. Berghahn Books. Mullins, R. P. (2021). Revolting Things: An Archaeology of Shameful Histories and Repulsive Realities. University Press of Florida. Munawar, N.  A. (2017). Reconstructing Cultural Heritage in Conflict Zones: Should Palmyra be Rebuilt? Ex Novo: Journal of Archaeology, 2, 33–48. https:// doi.org/10.32028/exnovo.v2i0.388 Murray, N., Shepherd, N., & Hall, M. (2007). Desire Lines: Space, Memory and Identity in the Post-Apartheid City. Routledge. Non, A. (2016). Gentrification from Within: Urban Social Change as Anthropological Process. Asian Anthropology, 15(1), 1–20. Pappé, I. (2006). The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld. Pile, S., & Keith, M. (Eds.). (1997). Geographies of Resistance. Routledge. Rhodes Must Fall. (2018). Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonise the Racist Heart of Empire. Zed Books. Ristic & S. Frank. (Eds.). (2020). Urban Heritage in Divided Cities: Contested Pasts. 1st edition. Oxon & New York: Routledge. Scott, J. (1987). Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 29(3), 417–452. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0010417500014663 Thörn, H. (2013). Stad i rörelse: stadsomvandlingen och striderna om Haga och Christiania. Atlas akademi. Tunbridge, J., & Ashworth, G. (1996). Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict. Chichester: Wiley. Vinthagen, S. (2015). Editorial. The Journal of Resistance Studies, 1(2).

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Wacquant, L. (2007). Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality. Thesis Eleven, 91(1), 66–77. Walters, D., Laven, D., & Davis, P. (2016). Heritage and Peace Making. London: Routledge. Whitehead, C., & Bozoğlu, G. (2016). Protest, Bodies, and the Grounds of Memory: Taksim Square as ‘heritage site’ and the 2013 Gezi Protests. Heritage & Society, 9(2), 111–136. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159032X.2017.1301084 Witz, L., Minkley, G., & Rassool, C. (2017). Unsettled History: Making South African Public Pasts. University of Michigan Press. Retrieved January 28, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.9200634

CHAPTER 2

Exercising Our Rights to Past: Emergent Heritage Activism in Istanbul Evren Uzer

Most of the last decade’s urban protests and insurgencies that affected a broad span from Latin America to the Middle East have been interpreted as opportunities to change the status quo, prioritizing the rights and welfare of elites as opposed to the well-being of the marginalized and disenfranchised. Some of these protests that emerged through conflict with authorities of state and private neoliberal interests had an entanglement with heritage either as heritage as an instigator as it revealed a forgotten, intentionally, sometimes violently erased part of history and collective memory attached to it or leveraged heritage, as a means to activism and created a new monumentality, a tangible site. Some of these protests also added a new layer of collective memory with the very act of resisting for civic rights. This chapter defines new modalities of resistance in relation to heritage and aims to elaborate heritage activism to exercise the right to the city and appropriation, through insurgent and emergent activist, urban practices. Heritage activism is understood as various acts of civil

E. Uzer (*) Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_2

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disobedience that leverage heritage and collective—alternative—past narratives. As a means to discuss the notion of heritage activism and the right to the city, I discuss different acts, potentials, and issues with heritage activism in the case of a historical edible plant garden—Yedikule Bostanlari from Istanbul-­Turkey.  This paper in particular considers  the period of 2013–2016,  where Yedikule Bostanlari faced total  demolition multiple times due to the district municipality’s plans and the activist efforts that respond to these threats.   Turkey’s past can be traced for different forms of violence on heritage, whether through its outright destruction (i.e. of civil architecture that belonged to non-Muslim population); erasure of certain historical from official discourse; exclusion of some other monuments, spaces, buildings, or artefacts from heritage designation or public museum displays; or lack of funding and complications in conservation processes for those that fall outside of the nation-state’s description of heritage. Some of these atrocities are demonstrated as a part of political spectacle, operationalizing heritage in the form of state violence. One recent example is conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque in 2020 from a museum that showcased art and architecture from multiple cultures and religions. While its initial conversion to a museum in 1934 represented the secularist shift in governance, conversion to a mosque in 2020 became a political gesture in pointing out the single layer, the Ottoman Empire and contest of Constantinople from the multifaceted history of this grand monument. The Yedikule Bostanlari case, the focus of this chapter, in that sense represents the operational conflict between the state’s desire for singular narrative and neoliberal policies that see such sites as a potential area to extract value from. Yedikule Bostanlari, despite being a site that goes back to Byzantium period, has also been actively and continuously used as a site of food production during the Ottoman Empire. This conflict between being a site of national heritage and disappearing under neoliberal policies of municipal government has been a leverage point that helped the acts of resistance in Yedikule Bostanlari. While researching on community-led or community-benefitted bottom-­up acts, there are a few potential risks worth mentioning: First is the issue of representation and the fallacy of community as a homogenous group. Being able to organize and mobilize around a particular goal is usually a privilege for those who do not have the means to spare time or resources for pursuing it. Therefore, representation in these groups should not be assumed but incorporated into the enquiry. Who is being excluded,

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therefore, not counted, matters, as a part of interpreting these acts of resistance. Another pitfall is falling into the romanticized view of the long term impact of the bottom-up tactics that are utilized by the activists and community members. This is primarily based on assumed premise of unified and horizontally structured community conception with equal access, voice, and intentions. These assumptions lead activists to use the tactics that might unknowingly serve the very neoliberal and colonial acts they are resisting, and this type of cooptation can also be seen in heritagerelated efforts (De Cesari & Herzfeld, 2015). These potential pitfalls might lead to acts that reinforce the power relations as opposed to challenging or undermining them. The aim of this chapter is to enquire about heritage activism for its potentials and pitfalls in relation to the theoretical framework of the right to the city (Harvey, 2003; Dikeç, 2002; Purcell, 2002, 2003). In this context, exercising the right to the city is understood through acts of heritage activism and advocacy, such as the appropriation of value and meaning of the space, claiming visibility and recognition of plural interpretations of the past, and creating alternative historical narratives through archiving, documenting, and employing alternative pedagogies for dissemination. Destruction of spaces that are retainers of collective memory is another matter we need to articulate as a part of the right to the city framework. As by their disappearance, the psychical damage extends well beyond today and harms new generations’ potential resistance for displacement and unity around commons. Plural and inclusive new descriptions of heritage are needed as heritage and heritage processes should aim for inclusivity, as in any other urban planning and governance processes. A similar logic should also acknowledge power dynamics and equity issues in order not to repeat and reinforce existing inequalities. Invisibilized or erased interpretations of the past have also appeared as a part of the urban uprisings of the last decade within the context of right to the city claims and represented within different forms of activism. Some of these activism efforts contribute to permanent changes within urban and heritage governance in the form of changes in the categorization of heritage (Hammami & Uzer, 2018) or recognition of new forms of heritage. The threat to Yedikule Bostanlari in Istanbul helped at least initially raise some questions on what conservation means for a heritage site that not only incorporates but also depends on active use and engagement of a community. Johansson and Vinthagen (2020) propose to look into everyday resistance, in order to understand as emerging forms of social action and we can analyse acts

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of opposition, all of which are not necessarily organized or coherent. Despite not being successful in leveraging a viable alternative imaginary of heritage conservation that could also mobilize a broader resistance or creating solidarity around it, Yedikule Bostanlari process showcased few forms of everyday resistance as I look in the context of heritage activism. These acts could be read as a local node within the larger framework of the right to the city.

Right to Appropriation: Going Beyond the Right to Use Failure to understand the multitude of political relations in the city, which welcomes conflict (Mouffe, 2000; Amin & Thrift, 2013) and represents minority rights, most often leaves marginalized and oppressed groups and minorities without visible means to express their dissent and voice their needs and claims. In more recent neoliberal urban politics, urban transformation projects go as far as to fragment the potential dissent of these groups by uprooting historic neighbourhoods and communities and relocating them to separate and distant locations (Mayer, 2009). Acts of some of these marginalized communities are theorized by the right to the city scholars as a form of transformative participation. These debates reveal the importance of centring our debates on use-value while defending the right to the city, as contemporary urbanism relies on exchange value (Kuymulu, 2014). David Harvey interprets right to the city in the broader political platform: “[right to the city] is a right to change ourselves by changing the city” (Harvey, 2008, p. 23). Place-based interventions that root in claiming these rights (changing the city and advocating for such changes) sometimes result in local gains, alliance building, and perhaps less often the ideas they generate resonate and build up to a larger rights movement as in Gezi Park Protests in Istanbul in 2013. Based on a more individual access perspective Mark Purcell suggests “the right to appropriation” beyond the right to use but to use in a way that suits the “collective needs” and suggests a shift of the political debate towards use-value needs of inhabitants (Purcell, 2002, 2003). Exercising these rights for the communities necessitates going beyond the usual modalities of participation, as it is allowed by institutions, but with an understanding that captures the complexity and dynamic structure of the community that opens up space

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for activism and advocacy for translating these needs and desires to practices of urban planning and governance of the cities. Participation in heritage processes, as in its categorization, management, daily use and interpretation, and exhibition, is even more constrained to the individual or collective contribution and other forms of new interpretations stemming from diverse values. Heritage management and preservation only recently began to be perceived as more integrated and holistic processes, as there are some examples of participatory heritage management, education, and preservation efforts that involve direct dialogues with communities, such as community-based archaeology. As unique and valuable as these approaches are, they are not mainstream, and some of them also repeat similar failure patterns of participatory processes well described in development studies, urban planning, design, and architecture fields. Participation, which is often deployed as the silver bullet for creating equal opportunity in exercising citizenship through governance systems, does not guarantee a positive or just outcome (Cooke & Kothari, 2001). There are countless examples that demonstrate it, in particular within the realm of urban governance; such participation is used to legitimize profoundly unjust and oppressive outcomes for marginalized communities. Transformative participation, which precisely serves the purpose of bottom-­up change, impacting in scale, needs to be engaging with the “emergent” domain, as described by Mitrasinovic (2015), in which social-spatial activity is deliberately configured to produce value propositions for specific communities. Advocacy could be one of the ways for communication and negotiation of these value propositions as it allows interpretation and communication of acts of dissent and activism. Alliances that emerge from resistance movements have the potential to lead to more organized networks that can be a part of this emergent domain where deliberations can be carried out without falling into reproducing the same power structures and hierarchies.

Heritage as Leverage for the Right to the City Claims Historian Peter Linebaugh’s research (2012) suggests that the commons of today may not necessarily be  the tangible and physical extensions of social, cultural, and economics of the every day but also values, principles,

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and ideals collectively nurtured in a way to clear the ruins of “failed” and “stagnated” systems (Caffentzis & Federici, 2014). The commons that emerge during the last decades’ urban protests are what Marcuse defines as “exposed,” “proposed,” and “politicized” by the people in the face of the crisis (Marcuse et al., 2009). These protests, accumulation of existing historical inequalities and inequities that are aggravated by events such as the financial crisis of 2008  in the United States, have generated dissent against the overarching impacts of neoliberalization on almost all aspects of life. The dissent, translated into demands along the lines of human rights, democracy, social and economic inclusion/exclusion, citizenship, and ecological well-being (Soja, 2010; Marcuse, 2009; Mayer, 2009). The selection of heritage sites necessarily gives preference to certain places, certain historical moments and memories, over others and presumes consensus when consensus is nonexistent. Values, well-being ideals, and principles that are articulated from defining moments of social and economic break-down, such as the Occupy movement, can be considered as the basis for “new commons” as formulated by those who are a part of it. As the destructive nature of state-sanctioned neoliberal urban policies has no boundaries and is, in fact, a systemic and global problem, heritage activism as a counteract needs to be articulated in the long-term, larger frame of struggles. Articulating the demands of activism towards advocacy requires, beginning from and engaging in the local situation, connecting to communities that are in the center of the struggles, yet being aware of larger framework of these struggles. Laura Jane Smith defines “authorized heritage discourse” as it privileges monumentality and grand scale, innate artefact/site significance tied to time, depth, scientific/aesthetic expert judgement, social consensus, and nation-building (2006). Heritage activism then is a collection of acts that aim to bring physical, social, or political change in and for heritage by means of responding to oppressive powers in defining and acting against authorized heritage discourse that mandates what is valuable and worth to conserve and represents the collective (nation-state) identity best and also cultural mainstream norms. Heritage activism and advocacy define and redefine cultural value propositions, enact them, and realize them to some extent. The city thrives in its heterogeneity, and that the diversity inherent in urban life must be present in order for public space to succeed. Mitchell (2003) points out a change in public space as the ruling elite, that is not interested in making

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the city a site for the cohabitation of differences, but as a site with the potentiality for profit (or contribution to growth economy). Bottom-up heritage practices, heritage activism, and advocacy are then crucial for those who are interested in making the city a site for the cohabitation of differences and making them visible through cultural representations of their self-defined heritage. Heritage management alienates its decision-­ making mechanisms from anyone but experts and decision-makers. It is exclusionary and top-down by nature. Therefore, demanding to participate in heritage mechanisms as a part of one’s exercising her rights to the city can most of the time be exercised only through some form of oppositional act.

Infrastructures of Resistance: Threads of Gezi Park Protests The period of the Yedikule Bostanlari case (2013–2016) overlaps with the end of Gezi Park events in 2013, which started as an environmental resistance that then turned into one of the most notable civil rights struggles of recent Turkish history. Gezi Park protests witnessed visibilization to heritage-linked claims of religious minorities (Parla & Özgül, 2016), new forms of heritage claim with the collective struggle for civic rights (Uzer, 2015), and expanded our understanding of cultural heritage that is produced through violence (Cayli, 2016). The attempt to destroy Gezi Park, a public amenity, was not the first of its kind. There were severe, similar others that included land grabbing and the displacement of communities from historic neighbourhoods supported by neoliberal state-initiated policies, which benefitted corporations in Turkey in the preceding two decades. Nevertheless, opposition to those state-led interventions only contained in  local parts and has not been translated into more substantial opposition. These protests coincided with similar struggles rooting from the exploitation of public resources from around the globe, such as in Greece and Brazil the same year. Following aggressive urban transformation projects in Turkey, which had mobilized local groups who had been uprooted from their communities, and recent and reckless destruction of a historical cinema nearby, similar other events brought Gezi Park occupation to an unprecedented level. These prior events and other factors of the park’s accessibility, lack of coverage in

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national media, and private and foreign news media coverage of police violence turned the sit-in into a more prolonged occupation. Interviews with the occupiers of the Gezi Park during the first week reveal police brutality on peaceful protesters as one of the main reasons to attract people to the park to join the protesters (Konda Research Group, 2015). Occupiers stayed camping at the park for about two weeks before they were forcefully removed. Researchers who were analysing the development of Gezi events of two weeks were generally inclined to describe the diversity of—mostly first-time activists—as a signifier for the scope of the events as going beyond the park itself. This interpretation departs from Gezi Park, by the end of those two weeks where there had been an almost continuous occupation, becoming a symbol of something much larger than the park itself as a common ground where civil struggles against state oppression and neoliberal urban policies that support corporate structures have been materialized. Alternatively, political scientist Sarah El-Kazaz proposed that, in Gezi Park, the core of the conflict remained the park, as the park is to be interpreted as a shared space where citizens can perform, practise, enact their beliefs and values, and create an anchor for collective memory (El-Kazaz, 2013). Both of these positions link the resistance in Gezi Park to a common ground that takes its value from collectivity, collective identity, even temporally. Heritage requires certain aspects of the past, collective memories, objects, buildings, and sites to be prioritized over others, within the frame of current political and scientific circumstances (in the local and global context). In this respect, heritage is highly political, amnesiac, and manipulative in pointing what we—as the public—should remember and forget. From the heritage perspective, Gezi protests also presented both the park and the surrounding area from different aspects. Reminded us all the layers of heritage and components of collective memory on the park and around; Armenian Surp Hagop cemetery that was underneath the current borders of the park, an Ottoman (Topcu) Military Barrack, a football stadium for a short period after the barrack has been partially destroyed by fire, a public park as a part of Proust plan and modernization process of the secular nation-state and its heritage, not specifically inside the park but nearby, Taksim square being the stage for the May 1, 1977, massacre, which was a paramilitary (and police) attack on a march for labour day, government’s attempt for commodification of heritage by the plan to build luxury residential units and shopping mall in the form of Topcu Military Barrack, and finally the symbolic importance of Gezi Park as a

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part of civil rights and struggle for the environment and democratic rights on city governance. We can perhaps call the remnants of Gezi from the heritage perspective as the embodiment of the intangible cultural heritage of civil rights struggle but also we need to recognize and represent it as a site of the heritage of atrocity in the context of Armenian heritage with the Surp Hagop Cemetery and May 1, 1977, shootings and its importance as a part of authorized heritage discourse (Smith, 2006) within the modernization project of Turkey.

Bostan as the Site of Emergent Heritage Activism Istanbul’s bostans are a living reminder of Istanbul’s history. They have been around from the Byzantine period until the last half of the twentieth century, provisioning the city with fresh vegetables. Gardens that provided vegetables to Constantinople’s residents by the twelfth century around the city walls near the Yedikule neighbourhood of historic Istanbul are documented. By the end of the fourteenth century, these gardens helped the city survive an eight-month siege. In the seventeenth century, Evliya Çelebi recorded 4395 gardens within Istanbul’s jurisdiction. Fruit and vegetable production in and around Istanbul changed little from the end of the Ottoman Empire until the 1950s and but drastically diminished onwards. Istanbul’s bostans became endangered in the 1980s when massive population growth, combined with aggressive neoliberal policies and speculative investment in housing and development, made real estate the highest profit sector in Istanbul. Bostan sites and other green areas in Istanbul suffered profoundly from this expansive urban development in the last three decades. Here I exemplify transformative participation acts that rely on use-value through Yedikule Bostanlari, from my fieldwork in winter of 2015 and summer of 2016, through groups that emerged from initial activist reflex towards differing advocacy perspectives, in particular Yedikule Bostancılar Derneği (Yedikule Bostankeepers Organization) and Tarihi Yedikule Bostanlari Koruma Girişimi (Historical Yedikule Gardens Protection Initiative). I discuss two components from these transformative participation acts; heritage pedagogies  and advocacy  work focusing on  the legal framework changes. Lastly I problematize the very nature of participation through the ambiguous and challenging concept of community as activists, through a reading on the engaged actors of Bostan cases.

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There has been extensive research and popular publications on Yedikule Bostanlari, in particular the past decade, in parallel to the rapidly diminishing land and rising threats to its existence (Ricci, 2008; Shopov & Han, 2013; White et al., 2015; Durusoy & Cihanger, 2016). Yedikule Bostanlari carry traces of Ottoman agricultural farming practices (irrigation) and some heirloom varieties (and traces of those that disappeared). Yedikule Bostanlari, by Theodosius walls, dates to even earlier, to the fifth-century Byzantium period. Yedikule (meaning seven towers/location) Bostan (edible plant garden) since the fifth century has continuously been used as gardens but was initially much more extensive than today. Bostans have been and still are farmed by migrants to the city. Eighteenth-century records suggest gardeners were mainly Slavic-speaking migrants from the Balkans, then the late Ottoman and early Republican period Christian Orthodox community has been farming. Since the 1950s, mainly by garden keepers from Kastamonu-Cide in Turkey. Yedikule Bostanlari transformed over time; the profile of the keepers as well as the actual product that is grown changed. Changes in the plants happened in parallel to the changes in the city and demographics. As non-­ Muslim communities diminished due to pogroms and political pressures, and outright deportation, the bostankeeper profile changed once again and also the market. Bostankeepers changed the plants, due to changing market or spacing needs over time. Endives were not as much planted after Rum—Greek Orthodox—community being diminished. Due to land grabs, rapid urban development, and loss of farming land, plants with larger spatial needs (i.e. cauliflower) disappeared. Changes in Yedikule Bostanlari have been rather drastic in parallel to rapid urbanization and changing migration patterns that became visible in the 1950s and onwards and its presence came to be threatened with the area becoming an urban renewal site in 2006. After that, Fatih Municipality, the district municipality that Yedikule Bostanlari is located, have utilized various urban planning and tax tools and regulations to control the area and evict the bostankeepers. In the summer of 2013, while the attention was on the Gezi Park protests’ final days, Fatih district Municipality poured concrete over some of the garden plots to change the area into “a modern-looking urban park.” Some researchers who happened to be on-site summoned activists and managed to stop the ongoing work. As of that conflict with the municipality, more activists joined, with varying intentions used a diverse repertoire of acts, including heritage pedagogies, civil disobedience, mobilized legal frameworks, and used  design as a negotiation tool. Gezi protests at the

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time triggered a series of civic platforms where Occupy-style meetings have been held. Due to this connected timing of events with Gezi Protests, Yedikule Bostan conflict quickly reached out to these audiences as some of the activists participated in other rights-related platforms at different locations in the city. Efforts of different initiatives and residents of Yedikule who supported urban agriculture use of the area resulted in 2017 with a planning decision that declared the area an urban agriculture park that would demonstrate and keep some of the current functions and protect its food production and connecting it into some of the pedagogical programming, some of which were demonstrated prior in activists’ efforts in making the site visible and shedding light to its importance. Despite this decision, there had been another conflict with the activists and residents and the Fatih Municipality in 2018 who unsuccessfully attempted to create an open car park on the site of Yedikule Bostanlari. As of 2021 the Yedikule Bostanlari Rehabilitation project that claims to create an urban agriculture park on the site is one of the projects that are listed as an ongoing work on Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality website; however, the threat of destruction of the bostan is present.

Heritage Pedagogies Yedikule neighbourhood, where the bostans are located, formerly a notable non-Muslim neighbourhood during the time of the fieldwork, is predominantly a lower-income community and is in need of a neighbourhood park and playground. Also, in the last decade, part of the Yedikule Bostanlari became a luxury villa complex (Yedikule Konaklari), of which allegedly its residents demanded more “modern”-looking scenery rather than the rural looking market garden that appeared to be more traditional and rustic. During my field trips in 2014 and 2015, residents of both the villa complex and from the Yedikule neighbourhood complained of crime in the area and not feeling safe due to unlit and littered surroundings. There had been a couple of ad hoc tent shelters on the sides of the land walls that were then in the vicinity of, but not occupied by, the gardens. Following the initial intervention of the Fatih Municipality to build a park on the bostan in July 2013, activists at Yedikule both did intensive work on-site at the bostans in creating documentation and forming an archive of the site but at the same time carried the topic of Yedikule Bostanlari to the citywide forums that followed Gezi Protests. These

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forums, which were inspired by the Occupy movement’s collectively moderated conversations, spread into public spaces, mainly neighbourhood parks across Istanbul, becoming vibrant platforms of conversation, voicing dissent and alternatives following the temporary closure of Gezi Park in mid-June 2013. These forums became a mechanism to tie together several fragmented struggles that are caused by the same systemic and structural causes. Some of the activists established initiatives, such as Tarihi Yedikule Bostanlarini Koruma Girisimi (Initiative of Conservation of Historical Yedikule Gardens), and documented all the cultural assets on site, which included existing Ottoman-era wooden structures and a well. An archaeobotanist, Dr Chantel White, mapped out the plants in comparison with historical records such as Geoponika–Byzantion manual for planting from the tenth century—which revealed the biological continuity in the flora of the bostans over the centuries. These activists also organized series of educational workshops and seminars that span into 2014 and 2015, where some of the bostan keepers taught farming practices like irrigation techniques or where students have built scarecrows while learning the history of the bostans. The educational efforts made more people aware of the threat of destruction and also the value of a site that is multilayered. Activists who have been in Yedikule, all of them outsiders to the neighbourhood, professionals, and students, imitated a multiplicity of efforts to emphasize the social, ecological, and historical value of the gardens. They prepared documentation of the variety and source of seeds, traditional irrigation techniques, and tools and created a publication. Some of the activists established the Yedikule Platform in fall 2013, which created connections to civic initiatives citywide, which increased the visibility of the site. Activists started organizing teaching and learning sessions, a bostan school, using the Yedikule Bostan, the garden, as a site. Some of these activities were ran together with food the Slow Food chapters in Turkey, with events that created further visibility. The same group also worked on reviving the Lettuce festival (Marul Bayrami), originally an Armenian festivity to celebrate the arrival of spring (Haspartsum), which discontinued its public facing version since the early 1950s and celebrated only within the Armenian churches. Group organized the festival on the site in 2015 and 2016. Slow Food’s events have been successful in attracting some of the residents, who have been siding with the Fatih Municipality which has the unbeatable promise of a safe and urban park for the residents. These

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events, including food, generated a communication opportunity but has not been effective in evolving into a collective negotiation platform and solidarity building as it would necessitate acting on the right for appropriation. All sides that were present at the time—activists fighting for conserving the gardens and their heritage value, activists supporting gardeners, residents who cannot use the site as it is public land, and gardeners who have been in precarious conditions due to the ever-increasing debt— remained uncompromising in making their claims. Yedikule Bostanlari also became a site of attention for design scholars and topic for students who explored the potential of providing a safe public park and playground in the non-farmed areas, co-existing with the current bostan plots (see Demirtas & Taborda, 2014). These propositions, even though not bringing existing conflicts into conversation fully, brought design’s potential as a negotiation tool as they were mainly able to visualize a viable synthesis that articulates different desires for the Yedikule Bostanlari case. In this respect, spatial design and its visualizations carry a strong potential to communicate alternative imaginaries to different parties of the spatial conflict.

Challenging Legal Framework The Turkish government, inviting private capital to build malls and housing, performs the role of a traditional agent. Also, in the bostan case, the decisions of the traditional agents remain opaque, yet it is evident that different parts of the local government follow an entrepreneurial agenda. Turkish Constitution defines the limits of public welfare/interest from an understanding that emerges from private ownership. Public interest, as a legally described concept in Turkey, had been revised with the constitutional amendments and other legal arrangements—in line with the central government’s urban policy preferences since the early 2000s (Tezcan & Poyraz, 2013). Thorpe describes a similar legal structure in Australia (2017), where the legal framework encourages a focus on private interests to the exclusion of broader social, environmental, and economic issues. Most of the last decade’s large-scale urban transformation projects in Turkey and a “modern-looking park” construction attempt of Fatih municipality in place of Yedikule Bostanlari are also no different where legal framework and institutions have been focusing on private interests. In Yedikule Bostan, keepers are legally renting the land from Milli Emlak Directorate and Fatih Municipality. They are growing vegetables

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and selling these vegetables, both on-site and at various open markets in the city. Bostan keepers lack entitlement to the land and monthly rent engagement, which does not offer long-term protection and makes them prone to eviction. This became the case as the municipality dramatically increased the rental fees (from 3000 TL annually to 30,000 TL annually) in 2013, and a group of bostankeepers had to abandon their plots to evade fast accumulating debt from these fees. In an attempt to secure permanent protection for Yedikule Bostanlari, the Chamber of Archaeologists made a legal application to the Conservation Board of the Municipalities to register it as a tangible and intangible heritage site in January 2016. This application has not resulted with a heritage status. This application took its cues from another one in 2015, another Bostan site in the vicinity, Piyalepasa Bostani, also a vegetable plant garden from the same period as Yedikule Bostanlari, was being threatened for destruction with an underground parking plan. The Chamber of Archaeologists’ initiative secured a unique heritage status with a protective status both to the land and to the bostankeeper in 2016. The Piyalepasa decision is an important precedent in terms of encouraging heritage authorities to go beyond the existing definitions and opening up this process even in a limited capacity. Yigit Ozar, Director of the Chamber of Archaeologists Istanbul branch, has spearheaded both of the applications. For Yedikule Bostanlari there had been extensive additional support in terms of reporting on the historical, environmental, and social values of the gardens in the forms of academic reports to UNESCO central and local representatives and to the Ministry of Culture and Tourism in Turkey (Çorakbaş et al., 2014). However, none of these efforts have been successful in providing a satisfactory status for the land that acknowledges its values and connects it with the public while providing its active use. In 2017 Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality (IBB) announced that the area, including Yedikule Bostanlari, is considered an urban agriculture park. Architectural renderings of the site from the commissioned firms resemble the earlier descriptions of the residents of Yedikule based on Fatih District Municipality’s promises to them, replacing some of the gardens with hard paved surfaces and passive green areas.

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Activism Challenging Status Quo or Reproducing Power Relations (Emergent Activists Versus Locals) In order to see whether the acts, as mentioned earlier of heritage activism, have been contributing to the creation of lasting change, particularly in a way that challenges the power relations, we need to avoid romanticizing activism efforts and look at Bostan cases also through the lens of specific power relations. This perspective, therefore, directly leads to a series of questions, such as the following: Who is the community? Whose rights and which rights? How is activists’ engagement affecting the course of events? Activists who had been involved in reacting to the initial destruction of the Yedikule Bostans can be described as socially progressive, as they had been concerned about broader issues on the social, environmental, and historical importance of the bostans and welfare of the bostankeepers. These activists have all been residing outside Yedikule and are part of a higher social and economic status compared to current Yedikule residents. Throughout the three years following the municipality’s intervention in 2013, activists also went through disagreements and decided to employ different tactics in the ways they believed to benefit the site and people involved. After the Yedikule Platform’s activists’ initial intervention and prevention of the construction of the car park by Fatih Municipality, these activists attended (without invitation and permission) the weekly municipal planning committee in late 2013. They expressed their concern about the proposed construction project that is destroying the gardens and arable land. They presented the garden’s history to prove the historical continuity of the vegetation as well as the irrigation techniques and gardening practice that carry traces of traditional farming and their link to heritage, particularly emphasizing its Ottoman origins. Activists’ intervention at this meeting and also the media visibility they created produced a conflict between two branches (and levels) of local government (Fatih District Municipality and Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality). These developments eventually put the project on hold until Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality’s commissioning of the land in 2017 as urban agriculture park. Any of the projects that were developed in the meantime have not progressed, mainly due to change of leadership in the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality. Activists  who have been engaged with Yedikule Bostanlari used the argumentation of preserving Ottoman heritage and bostans

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being a continuation of Ottoman heritage. In Turkey, the currently ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) have held the majority of the decision-making positions beginning from 2002. AKP counts the Ottoman legacy, which is interpreted as a Turkish-Islamic past, as one of the core elements of the nation and Ottoman heritage as above all the other pasts. It is possible to trace the impact of this approach in the last two decades of decisions on strengthening these imaginaries of an Ottoman and Islamic past in heritage funding, heritage management, and collection and programming practices (Posocco, 2019; Shaw, 2011; Türeli, 2006). As Ottoman heritage and legacy have been a constant motive in Turkish political discourse, when the Yedikule Bostan case became publicly visible, its presence contradicted the municipality’s actions at the time. Yedikule residents were not a part of the group of activists who prevented the initial destruction of the gardens, and they were allegedly mobilized by the Fatih Municipality, according to Yedikule Platform members, who protested the activists who had been present on the site regularly. These residents demanded a playground and safe public space for their children, and they perceived these activists as outsiders who came to defend the private interests of the bostan keepers. Even though there had been a few conversations between residents and activists, they did not evolve into a constructive dialogue. Bostankeeper Recep Erarslan, in 2018, explained the changes in this relationship between gardeners and residents, although too late, with some residents regretting their initial opposition. Fatih Municipality’s attempt with the construction of open car park by destroying an even more green area by piling debris was received reaction from bostankeepers, activists, and residents alike. In later footage Recep Erarslan also mentions the regret of other bostankeepers’ for their delayed solidarity, as his bostan has been one of the first to be destroyed (Umut Arsivi, 2020). When Fatih Municipality raised the rental fee on the bostan plots drastically in 2013, it resulted in some bostankeepers abandoning their plots. As the well-being of the remaining bostan keepers who began to accumulate debt due to these fees became a big concern among some of the activists, they initiated the establishment of an association of Bostan keepers in 2015 to get bostankeeping legally recognized as a profession. The bostankeepers, led by Cihan Kaplan, one of the gardeners, established Yedikule Bostancilar Association. These efforts fell short in preventing the precarity of the conditions for the bostankeepers. One of the first people I spoke

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with during my initial visit to the Yedikule Bostanlari in 2015, bostankeeper Recep Erarslan, passed away in May 2020, leaving a large amount of debt solely accumulated from the fees and fines that accrued from the bostan. Suna Kafadar, writer and activist who had been involved with the Yedikule Bostans and bostankeepers since the initial 2013 conflict, has documented these issues of land grab, accrual of debt, and intentional destruction of the bostan plots brought to wider public attention through various outlets (see Kafadar, 2020). Yedikule residents and the bostankeepers who have been leasing the gardens, gardeners learning the trade through families, seasonal workers who have been hired, are some of the voices that have been largely missing from the governmental interventions that have been reimagining Yedikule. Various efforts and interventions of the activists have been successful in preventing the initial destruction in 2013. These efforts, as Herzfeld (2015) describes hold a potential in challenging the hegemonic heritage discourse, providing  alternative readings of the past, alternative to the view of the state, the wealthy, corporations, and even academia. However, the efforts at Yedikule were not enough in mobilizing a larger unity among different stakeholders that could bring the appropriation of a heritage site as a living, interacted public space.

Concluding Remarks This chapter conceptualizes heritage as a means for people to exercise their right to the city. Heritage, beyond the authorized heritage discourse, is a plural, shared set of values and meanings that are commons by definition. Collective memory and history connect us to a vast world of struggles that bases our unity and, more importantly, gives value, meaning, and power to today’s political practice. They also show us that ‘commoning’ is the principle by which human beings have organized their existence for thousands of years. As Peter Linebaugh reminds us, there is hardly a society that does not have the commons at its heart (Linebaugh, 2012). Commons ‘outside’ of capitalism have always played a key role in creating alternative imaginaries that fed into class struggle and radical imagination (De Angelis, 2007). Even though Yedikule Bostanlari has never been a commons in the sense of being an open space for the use of all, it has not been fully enclosed, and provided indirect benefits and hospitality to those who passed by to enjoy. Some of the strategies and tactics that activists have employed in Yedikule cases were attempting to create imaginaries by

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proposing alternative ownership and care regimes of the land and redefining them as a form of commons that is living, connected, and collectively cared for. Feminist Marxist theorist Silvia Federici, together with George Caffentzis (2014), describes such new commons as seeds, the embryonic form of an alternative mode of production in the making. We can see these efforts as the seeds of a potential unity for future resistance in the face of a crisis that is yet to emerge. Perhaps also as efforts towards building up tools for establishing collective decision-making and partnership (as opposed to participation) that appropriation of the city can be a possibility. Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch (2004) that women were at the forefront of the struggle against land enclosures in the first phase of capitalist development. Observing the protests of the last decade in Turkey, particularly environment related protests (Çoban,  2004), and including different sides of the bostan case, it is fair to say women had been at the forefront of these struggles. This chapter did not zoom into gender dynamics within and across and power disparities stemming from these dynamics as a part of looking at the heritage activism in relation to the right to appropriation. It is essential to acknowledge that the gendered view has a significant potential to help us elaborate on these struggles and their impact. Afternote  As we have been working on the final revisions of this book chapter, which has been a long process in the making, the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded at an unprecedented pace all over the globe. There is currently an urgency to understand and create radically new approaches that will transform the normal we have experienced and that has dominated spatial practices and policy in the past decades. In large cities, being locally bound and experiencing the food distribution disruptions first hand revealed stark inequities in food accessibility and vulnerabilities of food supply chains. Perhaps a conversation for rethinking Yedikule Bostanlari as a part of local resiliency, on-site production, linking its active use to its heritage past, conceived as a living heritage site that feeds and demonstrates and teaches its history to the city may have been a premature discussion in 2013, but it should certainly be at the forefront of thinking for just, liveable, and self-sufficient cities in 2021 and onwards.

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References Amin, A., & Thrift, N. (2013). Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left. Duke University Press. Caffentzis, G., & Federici, F. (2014). Commons Against and Beyond Capitalism. Community Development Journal, 49(S1 January), i92–i105. Cayli, E. (2016). Inheriting Dispossession, Mobilizing Vulnerability: Heritage amid Protest in Contemporary Turkey. International Journal of Islamic Architecture, 5(2), 359–378. https://doi.org/10.1386/ijia.5.2.359_1 Çoban, A. (2004). Community-Based Ecological Resistance: The Bergama Movement in Turkey. Environmental Politics, 13(2), 438–460. https://doi. org/10.1080/0964401042000209658 Cooke, B., & Kothari, U. (Eds.). (2001). Participation: The New Tyranny. Zed Books. Çorakbaş, F.  K., Aksoy, A., & Ricci, A. (2014). A Report of Concern on the Conservation Issues of the Istanbul Land Walls World Heritage Site: With a Special Focus on the Historic Yedikule Vegetable Gardens. Retrieved March 22, 2019, from https://oxfordbyzantinesociety.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/ report_land_walls_whs.pdf de Angelis, M. (2007). The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capital. Pluto Press. De Cesari, C., & Herzfeld, M. (2015). Urban Heritage and Social Movements. In L. Meskell (Ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader. Wiley-Blackwell. Demirtas, A., & Taborda, C. (2014). BOSTANITY Workshop Outcomes. Retrieved March 22, 2019, from http://aslihan-­demirtas.com/archives/portfolio/bostanity-­2014 Dikeç, M. (2002). Police, Politics, and the Right to the City. GeoJournal, 58(91). https://doi.org/10.1023/B:GEJO.0000010828.40053.de Durusoy, E., & Cihanger, D. (2016). Historic Landscape vs Urban Commodity? The Case of Yedikule Urban Gardens, Istanbul, Megaron Journal, 11(1), 125–136. https://doi.org/10.5505/MEGARON.2016.48343 El-Kazaz, S. (2013). It Is about the Park: A Struggle for Turkey’s Cities. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/12259/ it-­is-­about-­the-­park_a-­struggle-­for-­turkey%E2%80%99s-­citie Hammami, F., & Uzer, E. (2018). Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities and Cumulative Impact. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24(5), 445–464. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1378908 Harvey, D. (2003). The Right to the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27, 939–941. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-­1317. 2003.00492.x Harvey, D. (2008). The Right to the City. New Left Review, 53, 23–40.

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Herzfeld, M. (2015). Heritage and the Right to the City: When Securing the Past Creates Insecurity in the Present. Heritage & Society, 8(1), 3–23. https://doi. org/10.1179/2159032X15Z.00000000035 Johansson, A., & Vinthagen, S. (2020). Conceptualizing ‘Everyday Resistance’: A Transdisciplinary Approach. Routledge. Kafadar, S. (2020). Bostanci Recep Amcayi Kaybettik, 2 milyon lira Bostan cezasi kaldi yadigar! T24 Internet Journal. Retrieved November 12, 2020, from https://t24.com.tr/yazarlar/suna-­kafadar/bostanci-­recep-­amca-­yi-­ kaybettik-­2-­milyon-­lira-­bostan-­cezasi-­kaldi-­yadigar,26521 Konda Research Group. (2015). Konda Gezi Report. Retrieved May 2018, from https://konda.com.tr/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2017/03/KONDA_Gezi_ Report.pdf Kuymulu, M. B. (2014). Claiming the Right to the City: Towards the Production of Space from Below. CUNY Academic Works. http://academicworks.cuny.edu/ gc_etds/439 Linebaugh, P. (2012). Enclosures from the Bottom Up. In D. Bollier & S. Helfrich (Eds.), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State (pp. 114–124). Leveller Press. Marcuse, P. (2009). From Critical Urban Theory to the Right to the City. City, 13, 185–197. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604810902982177 Marcuse, P., Connolly, J., Novy, J., Olivo, I., Potter, C., & Steil, J. (2009). Searching for Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice. Routledge. Mayer, M. (2009). The ‘Right to the City’ in the Context of Shifting Mottos of Urban Social Movements. City, 13(2–3), 362–374. https://doi. org/10.1080/13604810902982755 Mitchell, D. (2003). The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. The Guilford Press. Mitrasinovic, M. (2015). Concurrent Urbanities: Designing Infrastructures of Inclusion. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Mouffe, C. (2000). Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism. (Reihe Politikwissenschaft / Institut für Höhere Studien, Abt. Politikwissenschaft, 72). Wien: Institut für Höhere Studien (IHS), Wien. https://nbn-resolving. org/ urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-246548 Parla, A., and Özgül, C. (2016) “Property, Dispossession, and Citizenship in Turkey; Or, the History of the Gezi Uprising Starts in the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery.” Public Culture 28, no. 3 (80): 617–53. https://doi. org/10.1215/08992363-3511574. Posocco, L. (2019). Museum Politics in Turkey Under the Islamic Justice and Development Party (AKP): The Case of the Istanbul Museum of the History of Science and Technology in Islam. The International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 32, 83–103. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-­018-­9283-­0

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Purcell, M. (2002). Excavating Lefebvre: The Right to the City and Its Urban Politics of the Inhabitant. GeoJournal, 58, 99–108. Purcell, M. (2003). Citizenship and the Right to the Global City: Reimagining the Capitalist World Order. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(3), 564–590. ̇ Ricci, A. (2008). Istanbul’da Manevi Kültürel Miras: Kara Surlarının Bizans ̇ Bahçeleri. In Ş. Memiş & F.  Sadırlı (Eds.), Istanbul 2010 Avrupa Kültür Başkentinin Kalbi Tarihi Yarımada: 3. Uluslararası Tarihi Yarımada Sempozyumu Tebliğler Kitabı (pp.  66–67). Eminönü Belediyesi & Haliç Belediyeler Birliği. Shaw, W. M. K. (2011). National Museums in the Republic of Turkey: Palimpsests within a Centralized State. In Building National Museums in Europe 1750–2010. Conference Proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Bologna 28–30 April 2011. In P. Aronsson & G. Elgenius (Eds.), EuNaMus Report No 1. Published by Linköping University Electronic Press. http://www.ep.liu.se/ ecp_home/index.en.aspx?issue=064 Shopov, A., & Han, A. (2013). Osmanli Istanbul’unda kentici tarimsal toprak kullanimlari ve donusumleri, Yedikule Bostanlari (In Turkish). Journal Toplumsal Tarih, August 2013 sayi 236, 34–38. Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. Routledge. Soja, E. J. (2010). Seeking Spatial Justice (Globalization and Community Series). University of Minnesota Press. Tezcan, A.  M., & Poyraz, U. (2013). Kamu Yararı Kavramının ve Türkiye’deki Yasal Dayanaklarının Kentsel Politikalar Açısından Değerlendirilmesi, Çağdas Yerel Yönetimler, Cilt 22 Sayı 1 Ocak 2013, s. 121. Thorpe, A. (2017) Between Rights in the City and the Right to the City: Heritage, Character and Public Participation in Urban Planning. In A.  Durbach & L. Lixinski (Eds.), Heritage, Culture and Rights: Challenging Legal Discourses (May 2017, Hart), 121–147; ISBN: 978-1849468084; UNSW Law Research Paper No. 81. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3071600 or https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3071600 Türeli, I. (2006). Modeling Citizenship in Turkey’s Miniature Park. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, 17(2), 55–69. Umut Arsivi. (2020). Yedikule’de 1.500 Yıllık Tarihin Son Bekçisi: Bostancı Recep. Retrieved May 2021, from https://vimeo.com/396391847 Uzer, E. (2015). Commoning in Resistance: Gezi Park Protests and ‘Yeryüzü Sofraları’. In H.  Benesch, F.  Hammami, I.  Holmberg, & E.  Uzer (Eds.), Heritage as Common(s)—Commons as Heritage (Curating the City Series) (pp. 309–332). Makadam. White, C., Shopov, A., & Casson, A. (2015). Heritage under Threat: Saving the Ancient Gardens of Istanbul, Turkey. The SAA Archaeological Record, 15(1), 7–10.

CHAPTER 3

Acting Out the Future of the Albanian National Theatre: New Heritage at the Intersection of Resistance and New Media Kailey Rocker and Jonathan Eaton

Dear Mr. Rama, Europa Nostra, The Voice of Cultural Heritage in Europe, wishes to express its sincere concern regarding the alarming decision to demolish the National Theatre of Albania, a heritage site of great cultural and architectural importance in Europe. —Parzinger, 2018 The coauthors each contributed equally to the writing of this chapter, through a process of intensive, simultaneous co-writing aided by the use of Google Docs. K. Rocker (*) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Eaton University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_3

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Introduction In July 2018, the pan-European heritage organization Europa Nostra addressed an open letter to the Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama voicing its concern over the government’s plan to demolish and rebuild the country’s National Theatre. Shared via online news sites and online social networks, Europa Nostra’s letter demanded the theatre’s preservation, arguing that it was an important heritage object—not only for Albania but also for Europe. In conjunction with the efforts of local Albanians and others, Europa Nostra’s act of defining, valuing, and defending the theatre as heritage demonstrates the always-contested nature of heritage (Smith, 2006). Heritage is a confusion1 of interpretations that are informed by and formative of the contemporary political moment. The threat to Albania’s National Theatre is part of a broader effort to refashion the historic centre of the capital city Tirana through privatization, densification, and new construction. According to the plan proposed by the Albanian government in February 2018, the historic National Theatre would be demolished in order to build a new one on a smaller footprint, allowing for the construction of several private high-rise developments on formerly public land. This plan stemmed from earlier discussions about the National Theatre’s fate that date back to the early 2000s and has provoked many acts of resistance since then from local activists, actors, stage personalities, civil society groups, students, and other members of the public. These acts of protest have garnered momentum especially through the persistent and unwavering presence of a growing collective of the theatre’s supporters in the small plaza between the two wings of the building. Starting April 2018, protest organizers held communal gatherings outside the theatre every night. Some of these performative activities took the shape of open-mic nights—allowing members of the community to voice their opinion about the theatre—while others involved efforts to engage the theatre in a more traditional sense through activities such as poetry readings, theatre sketches, and film showings. Despite the protesters’ persistent efforts, municipal workers demolished the National Theatre in the early hours of May 17, 2020—the day before the nation was set to ease its COVID-19 restrictions to allow individuals greater freedom of movement outside their homes. While the National Theatre no longer stands today, the community that formed around it does.

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As illustrated by the case of the National Theatre, sites claimed as heritage can serve as physical and symbolic rallying points for resistance to social exclusion, speculative development, and the privatization of public space, among others. While these debates may have a strong physical presence at the sites themselves, they have also expanded to the virtual sphere, taking up space on online social networks like Twitter and Facebook. As such, these episodes of resistance have become fertile ground for expressions of “new heritage.” The term “new heritage” refers to the use of new media,2 or digital communication technologies, for interpreting, representing, and engaging in the “confusion” of cultural heritage (González-­ Tennant & González-Tennant, 2016; Kalay et al., 2008). While the term has previously been associated with digital archaeology, in this chapter we explore new heritage within the context of resistance efforts that sought to reframe the significance and meanings of the Albanian National Theatre. Through our efforts, we expand on the theoretical scope of new heritage to explore the relationships between physical sites and online communities, prioritizing heritage that manifests in digital form outside of quintessential “expert” knowledge. We also focus less on how new media can be used to digitally reconstruct past or lost heritage objects (i.e. more conventional approaches to new heritage) but instead on how new heritage can be productive of future imaginaries of heritage objects or even their relation to the city. The multiplicity of meanings and experiences that the National Theatre represents has prompted people with different backgrounds and different levels of connection to the theatre to find their own reasons to oppose its destruction. At the heart of this web of overlapping interests has been the mobilization of new media both to coordinate organized resistance efforts and to imagine different futures for the National Theatre on a more personal level. In other words, online social network sites, like Facebook, have created an open forum for concerned parties within and outside of Tirana to stay updated about the protest and post their own interpretations or imaginings of what the theatre is, has been, and could be. As a result, the public has access to multiple versions of the theatre and its meanings—some of which are totally new creations reflecting the nuanced imaginings of their authors. In this chapter, we examine the (re)productive intersection of heritage-­ making and resistance to undemocratic urban development, particularly through the ways that people deploy new media to engage in processes of new heritage-making. As people increasingly rely on new media in urban

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resistance campaigns (Dong et al., 2016; Pandi, 2014; Weiss, 2014), we need to consider how new media shapes such resistance efforts as well as the materiality of urban spaces. At the same time, we also need to be conscious of how actors deploy the concept of “heritage,” which in instances of resistance becomes a doubly political gesture—to assert control over heritage discourses and, at the same time, oppose extractive capitalist futures for the city. As such, the case study of the Albanian National Theatre illustrates that new heritage processes play a large role not only in shaping the theatre’s status as a heritage object for Albanian and European societies but also in conceptualizing the city of Tirana itself—both now and for the future.

Heritage, Resistance, and New Heritage Following Laurajane Smith, we understand heritage as both a social process and a discourse that engages with the past (or pasts) for “the social, cultural and political needs of the present” (2006, p. 83). Smith (2006) argues that many of the ways that heritage is officially conceived, presented, and adopted into place-making and identity-forming narratives are controlled from the top down. This “authorized heritage discourse” (AHD) draws on expert consensus and state power to determine official interpretations and political uses of heritage, all of which affect the ways that heritage is mobilized in the public sphere. At the same time, heritage discourses can come from below (Robertson, 2008; Hammami & Uzer, 2018). Drawing on alternative meanings and ways of knowing, subaltern types of action often work against authorized discourses. The tension between authorized and subaltern heritage discourses can be productive. It can lead to more meaningful public engagement with heritage (Kisić, 2016), or even new forms of resistance. As Robertson (2008, p.  144) observes, “heritage from below is most often found in, or drawing on, expressions of resistance or memory of resistance amongst the dominated.” Much of the research at the intersection of heritage and resistance has centred on urban spaces within neoliberal regimes. Following this trend, studies concerning both heritage and resistance have more often examined so-called urban renewal efforts that remove people from a place, a form of spatial cleansing under the pretext of preserving “heritage values” (Herzfeld, 2006), but often with the effect of disrupting communal identity and ties to place (Lelandais, 2014; Zipp, 2009). As De Cesari and Herzfeld (2015, p.  171) indicate, “struggles over urban heritage often

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occur as local actors try to regroup in the face of neoliberal urbanism or other forms of discriminatory and violent spatial planning.” Through resistance efforts, different actors, especially residents threatened by eviction, are able to assert their “right to the city” (Lefebvre, 1996), which is more than the right to access the city but to change, shape, and define it (Harvey, 2003). Our understanding of resistance in relation to heritage draws on the work of other recent heritage scholars. This includes the work of Hammami and Uzer (2018, p. 446), who emphasize Foucault’s (1997) take on resistance as a plural, irregular process “embedded in webs of power relations,” as well as Baaz and Lilja (2017), who draw on Ricoeur (1976) to see different layers of meaning-making in resistance. Like Hammami and Uzer (2018, p. 446), we are concerned with “how heritage becomes involved in resistance to help generate alternative narratives to the enforced forms of urban imaginaries and social change,” or how heritage can lead to productive resistance. We are furthermore concerned with how new media shapes and links both heritage processes and forms of resistance, as online social networks, online news, and digital photo collages occupy an increasingly prominent position in today’s urban struggles. Through an interplay of heritage and new media that blurs the physical and virtual domains, we can see how resistance plays out as a response to power. However, that response is not merely reactive. Ultimately, we see the case of heritage-­ based resistance explored in this chapter as generative of new imaginaries within the space of the contested city. New media has transformed the way that individuals—from heritage specialists to laypeople—interact with the heritage field, giving birth to the concept and method of new heritage. Researchers who study new heritage continue to be concerned with issues of heritage documentation and interpretation (Kalay, 2008) but focus on exploring and incorporating a wide range of digital technologies into their methodological repertoire (González-Tennant & González-Tennant, 2016, p. 190) and take digital or virtual representations and productions of heritage objects as one of their key objects of study. One of the most common examples of new heritage practice involves archaeologists, among others, using digital methods to represent, manage, and disseminate both material forms of heritage and its interpretations (Kalay, 2008, p.  1) through exercises like landscape reconstructions or virtual museum displays. Our study departs from these common examples of new heritage practices that involve quintessential

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“expert” knowledge production to examine how actors involved in resistance efforts participate in new heritage processes. Because of its discrete, or discontinuous, nature, new media enables the proliferation (reproductive capacities) of original heritage objects and their interpretations as well as the production (productive capacities) of the object and new interpretations. In addition to scanning, archiving and/or modelling, digital technologies have the capacity to deal with chunks of data from multiple sources, offering unique opportunities to meaningfully draw connections and compare interpretations alongside each other—that is, versioning (Kalay, 2008, p.  5). More importantly, digital technologies also offer tools to create entirely new works and interpretations that furthermore contribute to and complicate our understanding of contemporary heritage—that is, virtualism (Malpas, 2008, p. 17). While scholars exploring new heritage have identified both versioning and virtualism as two potentially positive effects of new media on the heritage field, they have largely focused on the production and dissemination of academic and rigorously produced knowledge to non-specialist audiences. For example, most forms of new heritage have drawn on a mutually reinforcing combination of historical documentation, oral history, and artefactual evidence. Despite such rigorous approaches, scholars like Malpas (2008) are still concerned with the authenticity of new heritage objects and their interpretations, especially as new heritage often involves a collapsing of distance between the past and the present (temporal de-­ placement) as well as the physical object and the individual (spatial de-­ placement)—without the accompanying materiality of a physical object itself. This has given rise to an overarching dilemma over whether new media can appropriately service heritage activities like preservation (Kalay, 2008). “Like every medium ever used to preserve cultural heritage, [new] media is not neutral; it impacts the represented information and the ways society interprets it” (Kalay, 2008, p. 1). For this reason, our chapter follows the political potential of new heritage—viewing versioning, virtualism, and de-placement as additional ways for practices of resistance to resonate and converse with heritage as a discourse. We understand the collapsing of spatial and temporal boundaries within the processes of versioning and virtualism as a powerful avenue for productive resistance. While this collapse may run the risk of uniformly presenting heritage objects and their interpretations—obliterating differences (Malpas, 2008)—and detaching the individual from the place itself, in cases like the

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National Theatre, this surge of new heritage material actually works to lend visibility to diverse (and subaltern) heritage discourses, link individuals with the space, and draw them physically to it. New media, furthermore, can build on the productive tension between authorized and subaltern discourses by broadening the field of play and enabling more participation in the acts of both reproducing and producing new heritage through online social networks and other simple mass-­ market platforms. This proliferation of engagement linked with both resistance and heritage problematizes discussions of authority, authenticity, and responsibility in new ways. New heritage products/interpretations become not only a source of meaning-making and identification but also a form of asserting alterity and political positionality imbuing both “authors” and “audiences” of new heritage media with civic/political responsibilities to heritage objects under threat. New heritage produced in spaces of resistance contributes to heritage discourses and resistance ones simultaneously, inviting audiences (in our case, Albanians in Tirana, those on online social networks, etc.) to engage in the continued production and reproduction of new heritage imaginaries and interpretations. New heritage holds powerful potential for resistance movements precisely because it represents “a change in the way in which cultural heritage itself appears to us, and so a change in the way we understand, experience and interpret ourselves” (Malpas, 2008, p. 19). In the case that follows, we will show how the organized and informal forms of protest surrounding the National Theatre attempt and, in some ways, succeed in changing people’s relationship to heritage and, through heritage, the ways that people are civically engaged in imagining the past and future of their city. The next section touches briefly on our methodology, including how we identified new heritage in practice, and presents a timeline of the National Theatre protests between the months of March and October 2018.

A Note on Methods Our analysis pushes the conceptual bounds of new heritage conceived and applied by fields such as digital archaeology to draw on other types of digitally produced media that were distributed either online or as prints around Tirana in conjunction with the National Theatre protests. Some examples of the digital media we collected range from online news articles to digital collage art to videos shared on Facebook. We identify these

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examples as characteristic of new heritage because they engage with the practice of representing a heritage object (the theatre) using new media. Therefore, because these resistance efforts are taking place between the physical space of the National Theatre and the virtual spaces of sites like Facebook and online news outlets, we see new heritage as a productive lens through which to examine the ongoing theatre protests in Albania. We conducted this project over the course of seven months in 2018, starting from the early stages of the theatre protests in March–April through October, while we were living in Tirana, Albania.3 From March and April, we identified iterations of the theatre’s new heritage that had been distributed by online Albanian news outlets, including Panorama, Shekulli, Gazeta Shqip, Exit, and Dita, many of which also have a print version and nationwide coverage. Once a prominent campaign began to form on Facebook, eventually reaching tens of thousands of followers, we shifted our focus to iterations of new heritage being posted and shared on the social networking site. Given the enormous amount of content being produced and reproduced on Facebook, we focused our data collection and analysis around three key moments in the life of the protest during the spring and summer of 2018: (1) mid-March, the public announcement of the government’s plan for a new theatre and mixed-use private development on the site of the old theatre; (2) early July, the first parliamentary vote on the special law to give the public land of the National Theatre to a private developer; (3) mid-late September, the second parliamentary vote on the special law. (See Table 3.1 for a timeline of key events linked with the National Theatre protests from March through October 2018.)

Placing the National Theatre in the City and in the Debate Albania’s National Theatre—a complex that included two symmetrical arms, a central courtyard, and a reflecting pool—stood until May 2020 at the very heart of the country’s capital, amidst a network of pedestrian streets and plazas. This post-futurist, prefab structure, completed in 1939 (Cecinato & De Virgilio, 2012), was bordered by various government buildings also constructed during Albania’s Italian occupation—notably the Ministry of Interior Affairs, responsible for the state police. The blocks surrounding the site of the former theatre are speckled with listed cultural

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Table 3.1  Key events in the timeline of the National Theatre protests (March-­ October 2018) March 12 March 19

Design for the new theatre project officially presented First Facebook page for those interested in saving the National Theatre created April 9 Artists vote to present their alternative proposal to save the theatre April 30 Petition to have the theatre declared a monument is published July 5 First vote in Parliament to pass a special law to transfer the public property of the National Theatre to a private developer, titled: “The Determination of the Special Procedure for Negotiation and Signing of the Contract with the Subject ‘Design and Realization of the Urban Project and the New Building of the National Theatre.’”a This date also coincides with a large protest march. July 18 Europa Nostra writes an open letter to the Prime Minister calling for the theatre’s preservation July 27 President Meta returns the special theatre law to Parliament September 20 Second vote in Parliament to pass the special law October 11 President Meta refuses a second time to sign the law Source: The authors a Translated by the authors from the Albanian: “Përcaktimin e procedurës së veçantë për negocimin dhe lidhjen e kontratës me objekt ‘projektimi dhe realizimi i projektit urban dhe godinës së re të teatrit kombëtar’”

monuments, including the remains of a castle and several stately but dilapidated Ottoman-era homes, as well as newer high-rise developments. The tension between the former and the latter is as palpable here in this neighbourhood as anywhere else in the country. As land values have risen in the city centre, the pressures on the government and private landowners to sell, lease, or redevelop their land have risen apace. In the last decade, Tirana’s city centre, including some of the city’s oldest neighbourhoods, has undergone considerable developmental facelifts, including, among others: three different iterations of the city’s central square (Skanderbeg Square) from 2010 to 2017; the colourful refurbishment and subsequent gentrification of the famous bazaar area (Pazari i Ri) in 2018; and the construction of multiple high-rise towers within several hundred metres of the National Theatre site, from the late 2000s to present. Unlike some of the other historical buildings in the city centre, the National Theatre itself was never designated as a “cultural monument,” which would have granted it protection from massive alteration or demolition. Individual protection for the theatre was largely unnecessary from

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2000 to 2017, when the theatre complex was included within the official boundaries of Tirana’s historical city centre (April 13, 2000, DCM no. 180). However, in 2017, when the Albanian Council of Ministers approved a measure to shrink the boundaries of the protected zone, the National Theatre was left without legal protection beyond its status as a public facility (April 12, 2017, DCM no. 325) (see Fig. 3.1). The reduction in size Fig. 3.1  This map depicts the historic core of central Tirana. The black outline marks the boundaries of the historic zone defined in 2000, while the shaded area marks the reduced zone as of 2017. The U-shaped theatre complex, depicted near the center of the map, is noticeably left out of the 2017 boundaries. (Source: Map produced by the authors on OpenStreetMap’s base map licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license (CC BY-SA 2.0))

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of Tirana’s central historical zone was accompanied in some cases by the listing of individual buildings as “cultural monuments.” However, the theatre, as well as other iconic structures such as the National Stadium and the Pyramid, was not granted this designation, freeing those sites for large-­ scale redevelopment. The legal manoeuvres surrounding the destruction and replacement of the National Theatre, in particular, reflect a long history of debate surrounding the historical significance of the theatre complex, dating back to the years 1998 to 2000 when then-Minister of Culture/now-Prime Minister Edi Rama argued for the need to replace the National Theatre building. Both then and in 2018, the arguments of Rama and other government officials focused on the dilapidated state of the building and the health hazards that it posed to both performers and audience members. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that when the government presented the design for the new theatre, the public presentation highlighted the ways in which this project was the perfect solution to address the deficiencies of the old building and provide a unique and modern performance space meant to inspire actors and engage the imagination of the public (Panorama, 2018a). What the government’s arguments did not emphasize was the extent to which the financial feasibility of the project depended on a massive reduction in the footprint of the theatre, in order to free up valuable land area for an extensive high-rise development. Journalists investigating the proposed project uncovered the discrepancy between the government’s focus on replacing the theatre and the project’s focus on new commercial development, finding that on the site of the former National Theatre, only 10% of the proposed floor space was allocated to the new theatre building, while the remaining 90% was allocated for adjacent retail, office, and residential spaces, along with underground parking (Çela & Erebara, 2018). This arrangement reflects some of the imbalances present in the application of “public-private partnerships” (PPP) in Albania. PPPs are a development model based on cooperation between public and private entities that share risks, costs, and benefits (Klijn & Teisman, 2003, p.  137). While popular today globally, PPPs play an especially prominent role in Albania’s urban development scene, producing many of the aforementioned projects in Tirana’s city centre. According to an International Monetary Fund country report released in November 2020, the total contract value of PPPs in Albania “is expected to increase to almost 50% of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2021” (p.  11). One

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feature of PPPs in many national contexts is that their unique combination of public and private investment often requires special legislation in order to implement (Tang et  al., 2010). In the case of Albania’s National Theatre, the necessity of a special law for the demolition and redevelopment of the site gave protesters who wished to save the building both urgent timeframes and focus points for action. As the empirical sections of this chapter will show, protesters’ activities in 2018 were often directed towards and concentrated around the two parliamentary votes on the special law in July and September (see Table 3.1). In proposing a new National Theatre for Albania, the government neither recognized nor sought input from the general public about the old theatre and what should become of it. The new one was presented as a “done deal,” one which any self-respecting Tiranan should be proud of. This, coupled with dissent against the untransparent manner in which the government handled the PPP, prompted “unauthorized” voices to call for the National Theatre’s recognition as heritage, as a formative place for Albania’s performing arts, a historical site of national importance, and an architecturally unique structure. Notably, these attempts to recognize the theatre as heritage manifested as daily protests at the National Theatre itself, taking place within its central courtyard—a space that is open for public use, although not immediately apparent to passers-by (see Fig. 3.2). Spatiality plays an important role in shaping urban resistance. When describing the 2011 Occupy movement, geographer David W.  Harvey (2013) emphasized the centrality of the specific public spaces where resistance occurred and the important role they played in fostering protest. Central locations certainly provide greater visibility than more isolated ones, but the usage of public space is not only about being noticed. As Harvey (2013) explains, “To the degree that much of politics is symbolic, these symbolic movements are important to really achieve something. One of the things that arose around the Occupy movement is the degree to which the public spaces are political commons.” In other words, gathering in a centrally located public space is about symbolically occupying a place of power, as well as claiming a space that belongs to the public. In our case study, the National Theatre protests are centred within and between two kinds of public space—the historic centre of Tirana and online, particularly social network sites. Beyond the physical space of the theatre, people have found ways to use virtual public spaces like Facebook to express their relationship to the protests and the National Theatre. Since the rise of internet use in Albania in

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Fig. 3.2  Protestors gather in the plaza between the two arms of the National Theatre to celebrate it and call for its protection. This photo was taken in August 2018. (Source: The authors)

the early 2000s, online social networks have become increasingly a part of daily experience, in particular Facebook. According to StatCounter Global Stats (2018), Facebook had nearly 80% of the online social network market share in the country, as of December 2018.4 This is illustrated by the fact that nearly every organization in the country (public, private, non-­ governmental, international) has an active Facebook page. When collectives first started forming in March 2018 around the issue of the National Theatre, they also began using Facebook to announce upcoming activities at the theatre; share artistic interventions, support letters, and other messages of solidarity; and broadcast speeches, protests, and other activities in real time (via Facebook Live). Furthermore, individuals, from well-known graphic artists to students, began voicing and/or visualizing their opinions about the National Theatre on Facebook, resulting in an influx of creative interpretations and adaptations of the theatre. In the next three sections of this chapter, we elaborate on how the virtual and physical dimensions of the National Theatre protests overlap in productive ways, shaping how people participate in the protest, how they produce new heritage through acts of resistance, and how they imagine futures for the city and the theatre.

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From Wall to Wall: New Media and Participation From theatre walls to Facebook walls,5 the National Theatre protests have invited participation on multiple scales, intimately shaping the resistance efforts and expressions of new heritage surrounding the theatre. The physical-virtual interplay has opened up new, diverse opportunities for people, especially non-heritage experts, to interact with the protests and heritage-making processes. For this reason, the products of new media provide a helpful lens through which to analyse the protests, since interpretations and values of the theatre are produced, disseminated, shared, and manipulated as much on the Internet as they are offline through the physical experience of the site itself. In this section, we explore how the use of new media has affected participation dynamics as the protests have changed and broadened over time, from large-scale identity-building efforts to more personal, intimate, everyday acts of resistance. In the days leading up to the July 5 parliamentary vote on the special theatre law (see Table 3.1), a petition-signing event was held by an organized group of protesters composed of actors, a number of whom were older and well-established artists; activists, often younger, some of whom had participated in previous protests critiquing the actions of the present government; and a wide and amorphous conglomeration of Tirana residents who cared to varying degrees about one or more of the issues at stake. The petition-signing invited members of the wider Tirana public to engage in the theatre protest. While protest organizers and residents of Tirana participated in the petition-signing, several loosely organized protesters began engaging those present through an organic initiative called Unë Jam Teatri, or “I am the theatre,” which developed into a powerful tool for self-identification and protest expression. In this action, protesters took photos of people holding a white sheet of paper with the phrase “unë jam teatri,” which they then shared via online social networks along with the hashtag: #unejamteatri. The simplicity of this action—which sought to build a collective identity around the National Theatre—facilitated participation in this initiative and, as a result, the larger resistance effort.6 Heritage processes can serve as a link between personal identity and place, not as something static but as a relationship that is “actively and continually recreated and negotiated […] in terms of the social, cultural, and political needs of the present” (Smith, 2006, p. 83). As the #unejamteatri initiative demonstrates, new media can play an important role in this process. As Malpas (2008, p.  20) writes, “the task of heritage

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interpretation, then, is to enable the visitor to recognize that which is, in a certain sense, already his/her own.” In a similar way, protesters are encouraging people to identify with the theatre and, in so doing, take ownership and responsibility for preserving, protecting and enjoying it.7 Additionally, the use of online social networks facilitates participation beyond those who can take a photo at the theatre, as people from outside of Tirana and even around the world were posting their own photos online with the same #unejamteatri hashtag. In following the National Theatre protests, we also witness the growth of a transnational collective spanning beyond a theatre-focused interest group to include participants from other contemporary protests and social movements, demonstrating the theatre’s place within mutually supportive networks of resistance that engage in heritage interpretation. For example, in September 2018 members of the “Blue Heart of Europe” protests concerned with protecting the Albanian stretch of the Vjosa River from hydroelectric development joined forces with the theatre protesters. Together they invited passers-by to kayak in the reflecting pool of the theatre’s courtyard. Symbolically, this action tied the waters of the theatre and the Vjosa, in an expression of their shared interests for preserving heritage, both natural and cultural. New media tools were essential to this activity; organizers used online social networks both to invite potential participants to the activity and to stream it live. This collaboration with the Blue Heart of Europe illustrates two ways that the National Theatre protest broadened participation on multiple scales: (1) inviting specific artists, protesters, and thinkers to engage with the National Theatre, and (2) creating physical and virtual spaces where voices other than those of the protest organizers are welcomed and encouraged. This broadening of participation was accomplished by using new media tools to place conversations about heritage preservation within larger ones concerning the environment, political economy, and urban development across Albania and Europe. By acknowledging the interconnectedness of many of the issues facing Albanian society today, the National Theatre protests built solidarity through the participatory potential of new media. Alongside larger-scale efforts at building community, local artists and artisans have notably expressed pro-theatre sentiments through small, everyday acts of resistance that used new media tools to engage in the heritage discourse of the theatre, that is, new heritage. These small-scale acts predominantly took the form of sketches or digital collages shared via

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social networking sites such as Facebook. Some of these acts presented clear political commentary—such as creating a digital collage that placed both protesters and the National Theatre building face-to-face with lawmakers inside the Albanian parliamentary chamber. Still others appealed to Albanian social conventions surrounding death and mourning, by posting faux death notices for a number of lost or threatened Tirana monuments (including the theatre) on Facebook and around the city. Other instances were subtler yet, such as one artist’s set of sketches depicting typical Tirana scenes or landmarks, one of which was the National Theatre. Through these small (artistic) acts of resistance, sometimes combined with artist commentary, individuals were addressing the threat that the theatre was facing as a result of the government actions and upcoming parliamentary vote. These small, artistic acts are ultimately producing expressions of resistance that contribute subtly to the heritage discourse surrounding the National Theatre. Drawing on the theatre as a prototype (Gell, 1998), these politically engaged works of art exaggerate certain features of the theatre that can provide a contemporary commentary on the theatre’s place within the social life of the city, which we discuss further in the next two sections. Additionally, because of new media’s potential to proliferate these artistic products, they take on a life of their own, as they are shared by other individuals who sometimes colour them with their own interpretations. Any of these small, artistic acts have potential to provide commentary not only on the National Theatre protests but also on the values and connections that people make with the theatre as an enduring feature of their city. All these examples, from large-scale identity-building efforts to small, everyday practices like posting one’s opinion or sharing an image on Facebook, demonstrate resistance and speak broadly to the scalar dimensions of heritage practices. As David C.  Harvey (2014, p.  585) notes, “space and scale [local, national, regional, transnational] are social and practiced rather than essential and pre-given entities” and as such, it is worth exploring how scale shapes and is shaped by heritage. In our case, the protesters are operating at a variety of scales, from a combination of local to transnational and collective to individual, to work against the Albanian state’s denial of the theatre’s value. These flexible networks and pockets of resistance are bolstered by social networking platforms like Facebook, which allow people to access a wide range of interpretations of the theatre as well as share in activities taking place at the physical site

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itself. Furthermore, online social networks enable individuals to define their own relationship to the theatre. Hence, participating in initiatives like #unejamteatri or producing and sharing digital sketches of the theatre are clear acts of resistance, which at the same time employ new media to enter into the discourse of new heritage. In the next section, we explore in more depth the sentiments and imaginations embedded within some of the political and evocative artworks produced and shared publicly by Albanian artists.

Constructing a New Heritage Discourse: Imagining the National Theatre via New Media In addition to shaping the scale of participation, new media gives individuals a chance to compare and imagine different versions of the theatre, sometimes simultaneously. In this section we discuss how individuals critique the urban development of Tirana and support the National Theatre, as well as other cultural monuments, through new media practices such as versioning (Kalay, 2008, p. 5) and virtualism (Malpas, 2008, p. 17) and, more often, a combination of the two. Through combinations of versioning and virtualism, individuals are able to de-place and de-time the theatre. Ultimately this process of moving the theatre through time and space allows for new ways to visualize, perform, and understand the perceived significance of the National Theatre today. The resulting creative outputs reflect a flowering of interpretations that fall outside the confines of Albanian state heritage discourses, connecting the theatre with the more diverse set of (unofficial) heritage values held by those who oppose its destruction. In April, protesters began collecting signatures for a petition that called upon the Ministry of Culture to recognize the National Theatre as a listed cultural monument with a developmental buffer zone of 50 metres on all sides of the buildings (Panorama, 2018b). This petition signalled a turning point in the protest, where the newly formed Alliance for the Protection of the Theatre, together with the Union of Stage and Screen Artists,8 collectively voiced a set of written arguments concerning the heritage values of the National Theatre. It was also one of the first instances where we witness the intentional use of versioning, or the layering of different interpretations pertaining to the theatre, via new media.

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Through the format of the open letter and with the aid of new media, the petition conveyed three different arguments regarding the significance of the theatre and its past. From an architectural point of view, the petition asserted that the theatre was the first of its kind in Albania to use the experimental technique of prefabricated construction, as well as the country’s last remaining post-futurist building. Speaking from an artistic/cultural angle, the petition drew upon the generations of Albanian artists whose skills were nurtured in the theatre’s halls and how that shaped contemporary theatrical and artistic practice in the country. Finally, the authors of the open letter addressed the theatre’s historical value by discussing its construction during the Italian Fascist occupation and its role in hosting the 1945 Treason Trials—a series of show trials that the nascent socialist regime organized to consolidate its power (Panorama, 2018b). Through the format of the open letter published and shared online, the authors of the petition were able to present three non-competing narratives or “versions” of the National Theatre, each of which expressed certain heritage values that alone, or in combination, argued for its preservation. Alongside uses of versioning, we also see some examples of how individuals are employing new media tools such as digital design software to reproduce and reimagine the National Theatre. In the lead-up and response to the July 5 parliamentary vote on the special law, artists responded with digital images that modified the theatre and its location. The political artist Avni Delvina used his digital collaging technique to place the National Theatre directly below the castle of Kruja, the former stronghold of the fifteenth-century Albanian national hero Skanderbeg, making the castle almost a vertical extension of the theatre. The artist’s description reads: “The battle of the Theatre is the battle for Albania. […] The actors seem tired and poor. A part of them is broken and don’t resist. But the Theatre is like the Castle of Kruja … unconquerable!”9 (Delvina, 2018). The imagery and commentary reimagine the theatre from the artist’s perspective as an impregnable cliff-top fortress that will continue to act as a stronghold for Albanian identity. Rather than use interpretations of the theatre’s significance stressed in the petition, through virtualism Delvina inserts elements of Kruja Castle—a known cultural monument in Albania—to imagine a visual and virtual basis for a new heritage of the theatre. Virtualism provides a useful new media tool for individuals to interpret and imagine the National Theatre in new ways and in light of the present struggle for its preservation.

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Both the example of versioning—the open letter—and virtualism—the theatre re-imagined as a stronghold—rely on new media’s ability to de-­ place and de-time the original object. Benjamin (1969) was among the first to explore this issue in his examination of the reproduction of artwork through media like film and photography. More recently, the topic has been taken up again by Malpas (2008) to explore new heritage. Through new media, protesters and artists are finding ways to alter the theatre and its physical location in the city centre or to place the theatre within a montage of historical contexts, some of which are themselves located centuries earlier and outside of Tirana. Via this practice of production and reproduction, individuals and collectives are proliferating the theatre and its different contexts, a process that presents different temporal and spatial, as well as a-temporal and a-spatial, contexts on equal footing. Importantly, while these works are altering and/or working within different temporal and spatial registers that service the contemporary moment, they are not removing the importance of place around the theatre. They are, according to Malpas (2008, p. 19), changing the way in which the history, space, and location of the heritage object are being perceived and experienced. For Malpas (2008, p. 23), this changing perception can be potentially problematic because the heritage object itself runs the risk of becoming lost in different interpretations and its viewers, the risk of feeling de-placed or lost themselves. In the case of the National Theatre, however, the act of de-placing the theatre, or locating it within a conglomeration of different temporal and spatial contexts, is intentional and about keeping the physical theatre in its place. The continued presence of the theatre in the centre of Tirana comes to represent the positive fulfilment of protesters’ various personal motivations, such as social justice, childhood memories, sense of community, or desire to protect public space. In other words, through new media tools like versioning and virtualism, protesters and artists are able to produce new associations and meanings for and with the National Theatre, expanding the object’s relevance today and broadening its connections to people both within and outside of Tirana. In the next section, we examine how new heritage produced in resistance to the loss of the National Theatre and the proposed urban development plans for Tirana is linked not only with the future of the theatre as a heritage object but also with the future of the city. Through the use of new media tools and with the aid of the National Theatre as heritage object, people find ways to unsettle the present by projecting undesirable futures

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for Tirana—futures that demonstrate what the potential loss of the theatre could mean on a greater scale.

Projecting Futures with New Heritage In addition to layering the National Theatre’s interpretations and contributing new ones through digital collaging, activists and artists are also using the historic and contemporary images of the theatre to offer alternative images of the future of Tirana. These images overwhelmingly involve imagining the loss or impending loss of the theatre and the rise of high-­ rise developments. In this section, we focus on how the digital products of new heritage discourse can be used to imagine alternative futures, in addition to layering and envisioning multiple pasts. We demonstrate how protesters and artists undertake the political act of de-placing the theatre to project often undesirable futures, many of which they would like to prevent. In the April 2018 issue of Sputnik, a one-page fanzine produced by the Albanian street artist DiverSanti and shared publicly via online social networks, the National Theatre is stacked in a pile of Tirana’s historic buildings on the edge of the latest iteration of Skanderbeg Square (see Fig. 3.3). Six massive, multi-coloured skyscrapers threaten to consume the theatre, which already sports a bite-shaped hole. This dark scene also features a man on a pedestal dictating to a divided crowd of individuals while a youth flies a drone with a noose near the man’s head. These high-rise buildings represent the total realization of the government’s planned urban development for the centre of Tirana. The juxtaposition of the dominating towers against the sidelined and fading historic buildings like the theatre presents a future of Tirana as a super-modern city that is siloing and gradually consuming its historical foundation. In a different version of the same high-rise-filled future of Tirana, an anonymous street artist, using digital art to design a print poster, portrays the National Theatre surrounded by leafless trees that are sprouting towers from their branches (see Fig. 3.4). The towers on trees suggest a double commentary, both mocking the supposed forestation of Tirana that is claimed by the authorities and indicating that the only things popping up around the city are towers. One might say that in Tirana, towers grow on trees. Notably, in this digital collage, the theatre continues to occupy its current position in the centre of the city. However, with the growth of the trees and their towers, the poster implies that it is only a matter of time

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Fig. 3.3  The 13th edition of the digital fanzine Sputnik, published April 2018. (Source: Ergin ‘DiverSanti’ Zaloshnja)

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Fig. 3.4  An anonymous street artist pasted a poster of skyscrapers on trees to the side of an abandoned public building in central Tirana. This photo was taken in September 2018. (Source: The authors)

before this high-rise future comes to fruition and there is no space left for the theatre. At present, several of the towers depicted by DiverSanti in Sputnik have already been constructed in the city centre, while the designs of others have been approved by Tirana city planners. To more directly convey the idea that a threat to the National Theatre is also a threat to the city’s future, others have looked to digital evidence from Tirana’s past. In September, the aforementioned Alliance for the Protection of the Theatre posted a socialist-era video on its Facebook page, showing the deconstruction of Tirana’s Ottoman-era bazaar neighbourhood in order to construct the monumental Palace of Culture (today, home of the Opera and Ballet Theatre and the National Library) in Skanderbeg Square. The tone of the video is one of optimism and industriousness, produced to show how Tirana was being transformed into a modern, socialist metropolis. The Facebook post, however, recontextualizes the video for a contemporary audience by opening with the question: “Do you like weekends in the alleys and bazaar of Korça, walks on the old streets of Berat and Gjirokastra…? Have you ever wondered why you don’t find something similar in Tirana?”10 (Alliance, 2018). The post re-­ interprets the construction of the Palace of Culture in place of the old bazaar—initially depicted as constructive for Tirana—as something

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destructive against the city’s historic character and urges viewers to keep history from repeating itself by joining in the effort to protect the National Theatre. In this instance, an online social network provides a platform for reinterpreting a decades-old film and projecting an undesirable future for both the theatre and the historic centre of Tirana that can be avoided through collective effort. All of these examples are oriented towards the future, often indicated by the presence or absence of the theatre and the presence or impending presence of the towers. Once again, through digital technologies, artists and collectives are able to use spatial and temporal de-placement to change the orientation of the heritage object in relation to the city and the contemporary viewer. These political acts go beyond traditional notions of new heritage, which focus more so on the display and re-creation of past or lost heritage objects, to focus on the intertwined futures of the heritage object and the city. Through these future-oriented works of new heritage, individuals are able to communicate the National Theatre’s meaningful relationship to the city today and tomorrow.

Conclusion As contemporary societies become more entangled with new media, it becomes more important to examine how its usage influences the shape of resistance, the shape of heritage discourses, and the relationship between the two. To consider these issues, we explored the production of new heritage, that is, the use of new media tools to shape heritage discourse, within ongoing protests over the urban development of Albania’s capital and the preservation of its National Theatre. From the outset of the theatre debates, it became apparent that virtual spaces, such as online social networks, were playing an important role in reinforcing and supplementing the physical spaces of protest. In both arenas, many of the National Theatre’s supporters have portrayed the building as heritage, which has become a focal point of their resistance against the continued high-rise development of central Tirana. In the process of defining what should be valued as heritage, people also establish what matters to them about their city. In the case of the National Theatre, protesters expressed their support for the civic values of architectural diversity, transparent governance, artistic expression, and historical accountability. In doing so, they were drawing on new heritage practices to act out their right to shape their city (Lefebvre, 1996; Harvey,

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2003), not merely to live in and consume it. Through new media or digital technologies, heritage-making can become the means through which protesters form relationships with the theatre, the city, and each other. For many artists who engaged with the National Theatre protests, a future without the theatre was undesirable because it portrayed a Tirana that had lost the positive values that the theatre embodied for protesters. These artists symbolically destroyed, displaced, or degraded the theatre in their own works to portray a future that may yet be averted. These imaginings of the theatre, as new heritage expressions, help us understand how the futures of cities are negotiated and contested, ultimately demonstrating the socially constructed nature of the city. As we see with the National Theatre, new heritage is not a discourse or process that can be solely controlled by heritage experts or the state. It is a process that can actively engage subaltern voices. Collectively and independently, protest participants (many of whom did not identify as heritage experts) took ownership over defining their own relationship with the theatre, expanding the heritage object’s relevance and broadening its connection with more people (e.g. the #unejamteatri initiative) and even additional political or social causes, like the “Blue Heart of Europe” protest. This was made possible by new media’s ability to accommodate versioning, or layering of interpretations, and virtualism, or the production of new ones, as in the digital collage that integrated both the National Theatre and the Castle of Kruja. These processes allowed protesters and artists to de-place and de-time the theatre, bringing its pasts into the present and making its present about the future. At the same time, engagement in new heritage practices via online social networking platforms like Facebook contributes per Harvey (2014) to a deeper understanding of the scalar dimensions and flexibility of heritage as process and product. In the case of the National Theatre, authoritative transnational heritage actors such as Europa Nostra also interceded on behalf of the protesters. This troubles the simple distinction between authoritative and subaltern heritage discourses, or heritage voices from above and below (Robertson, 2008)—as new heritage practices contributed to the formation of an alliance amongst sympathetic authoritative and subaltern heritage voices against an official state narrative for the theatre. Further, this point of scale illustrates the tensions between transnational and state authorized heritage discourses (AHDs), as Europa Nostra and others included the theatre in an AHD of Europe, while the Albanian state excluded the theatre from its own AHD. Indeed, in contexts ranging

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from transitional justice to Indigenous rights, many subaltern actors reach out to authoritative transnational bodies to support their cause against the state. New heritage practices facilitate such multiscalar and multivocal resistance efforts because of new media’s ability to connect the physical and virtual worlds (de-place) and heritage’s ability to bridge past, present, and future (de-time). Beyond the National Theatre protests, new heritage can prove to be both a tool and analytical lens for resistance acts elsewhere, whether they concern urban development, identity politics, or accountability. In the last several years, local governments and communities across the southeastern United States have been debating whether or how Confederate war monuments should be interpreted as heritage. At the same time, there are many ongoing debates around the definition of public space and urban heritage, such as the struggle to save Baltimore’s McKeldin Fountain—a brutalist structure that became the site of protests such as Occupy Baltimore (Moren et  al., n.d.). (The fountain, like Albania’s National Theatre, was ultimately razed but has since been revived through an augmented reality app and become the subject of international collaboration.) These objects, which some would define as heritage, are touch points for debates surrounding larger questions about the way society is or should be. While these debates largely take place at physical locations, they are also experienced widely online through open letters, Facebook posts, and augmented reality apps, among others. The inherently political act of recontextualizing and reinterpreting heritage objects is part of the reason why these objects can become focal points of resistance, even or especially when the issues at stake are larger than a single building. The intersection of new media and heritage, or new heritage, finds a productive catalyst in moments of resistance where people are drawing on new media to expand the scope of their efforts. In the case of the National Theatre protests, this massive amount of digital content is focused towards the physical site of the theatre, linking the heritage object conceptually and publicly to contested futures. Through the production and reproduction of new heritage discourses surrounding contentious objects like the National Theatre in Albania, individuals and collectives are projecting desires—for the futures of these objects and what they represent for the city.

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Notes 1. Heritage is often used as a singular term, but it always involves a collective of meanings, uses, and manifestations. Through the use of the term “confusion” as a collective noun, we are emphasizing the multiplicity of heritage. Like a murder of crows or a gaggle of geese, we want to put forth a “confusion of heritage.” 2. There really is no essential difference between “new” and “old” forms of media. “Old” media could be considered to include twentieth-century advances in film or photo technology that provided new ways for people to communicate the material world. New media works in the same way, through the aid of digital technologies, such as cell phones, computers, or the Internet. 3. For the majority of the research period, Eaton was working as a program officer at a local non-governmental organization that focuses on cultural heritage. And Rocker, an anthropology PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, was conducting IRB-approved dissertation research examining the contemporary phenomenon of dealing with the socialist period in Albania, funded by both the Fulbright programme and American Councils. This chapter was a product of their overlapping interests in cultural heritage, resistance, and urban studies. 4. Our anecdotal experience living in Albania corresponds with these figures. When meeting someone new (whether casually or professionally), followup communications are often conducted via Facebook Messenger. 5. This is a reference to the former name for Facebook “timelines.” Prior to 2011, they were called Facebook “walls.” In both iterations, they were/are spaces where users can share information with other users and (if they so choose) the general public. 6. Another enduring protest hashtag #mbroteatrin (protect the theatre) was used consistently from May 2018. 7. This progression seems to bring full circle an adage of the United States National Park Service popularized by Freeman Tilden (1977, p. 38) in his book Interpreting Our Heritage: “Through interpretation, understanding; through understanding, appreciation; through appreciation, protection.” 8. Translated by the authors from the Albanian: “Aleanca për Mbrojtjen e Teatrit” and “Sindikata e Artistëve të Skenës dhe të Ekranit” respectively. 9. Translated by the authors from the Albanian: “Beteja e Teatrit eshte beteja per Shqiperine. Teatri sta mbush syrin ne pamje te pare. Aktoret te duken te lodhur dhe te varfer. Nje pjese thyhen e nuk rrezistojne. Por Teatri eshte si Kalaja e Krujes… i papushtueshem!” 10. Translated by the authors from the Albanian: “A ju pëlqejnë fundjavat në sokaket dhe pazarin e Korçës, shëtitjet në rrugët e vjetra të Beratit dhe Gjirokastrës…? E keni menduar ndonjëherë pse nuk e gjeni diçka të tillë në Tiranë?”

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References Alliance for the Protection of the Theatre. (2018). Facebook. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from https://www.facebook.com/mbroteatrin/ videos/2036341326657776 Baaz, M., & Lilja, M. (2017). (Re)categorization as Resistance: Civil Society Mobilizations Around the Preah Vihear Temple. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 30, 295–310. Benjamin, W. (1969). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In H. Arendt (Ed.), Illuminations. Schocken Books. Cecinato, A., & De Virgilio, C. (2012). Teatri Kombëtar—Muzeu i Qytetit të Tiranës. In A.  B. Menghini, F.  Pashako, & M.  Stigliano (Eds.), A.  Beshaj (Trans.), Arkitektura Moderne Italiane për Qytetet e Shqipërisë: Modele dhe Interpretime (pp. 201–213). Dudaj. Çela, L., & Erebara, G. J. (2018). Zbulohet projekti i ‘Fushës’ me afro 90 mijë metra katrorë kulla dhe Teatër. Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. Retrieved December 2, 2020, from https://www.reporter.al/zbulohet-­ projekti-­i-­fushes-­me-­afro-­90-­mije-­metra-­katrore-­kulla-­dhe-­teater/ De Cesari, C., & Herzfeld, M. (2015). Urban Heritage and Social Movements. In L. Meskell (Ed.), Global Heritage: A Reader (pp. 171–195). John Wiley & Sons. Delvina, A. (2018). Facebook. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from https:// www.facebook.com/avni.delvina/posts/10216674148997177 Dong, L., Kriesi, H., & Kübler, D. (Eds.). (2016). Urban Mobilizations and New Media in Contemporary China. Routledge. Foucault, M. (1997). Ethics (Vol. 1 of Essential Works). New Press. Gell, A. (1998). Art and Agency: Towards a New Anthropological Theory. Oxford University Press. González-Tennant, E., & González-Tennant, D. (2016). The Practice and Theory of New Heritage for Historical Archaeology. Historical Archaeology, 50(1), 187–204. Hammami, F., & Uzer, E. (2018). Heritage and Resistance: Irregularities, Temporalities and Cumulative Impact. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24(5), 445–464. Harvey, D.  C. (2014). Heritage and Scale: Settings, Boundaries and Relations. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21(6), 577–593. Harvey, D. W. (2003). The Right to the City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 27(4), 939–941. Harvey, D.  W. (2013). On Why Struggles Over Urban Space Matter [Online]. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from http://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/ 29822 Herzfeld, M. (2006). Spatial Cleansing: Monumental Vacuity and the Idea of the West. Journal of Material Culture, 11(1/2), 127–149.

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International Monetary Fund. (2020). Albania. IMF Country Report No. 20/309. Washington, DC. Kalay, Y. E. (2008). Introduction: Preserving Cultural Heritage Through Digital Media. In Y. E. Kalay, T. Kvan, & J. Affleck (Eds.), New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage (pp. 1–10). Routledge. Kalay, Y. E., Kvan, T., & Affleck, J. (Eds.). (2008). New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage. Routledge. Kisić, V. (2016). Governing Heritage Dissonance: Promises and Realities of Selected Cultural Policies. European Cultural Foundation. Klijn, E., & Teisman, G. R. (2003). Institutional and Strategic Barriers to Public-­ Private Partnership: An analysis of Dutch Case. Public Money and Management, 23(3), 137–146. Lefebvre, H. (1996). Writings on Cities (E. Kofman & E. Lebas, Trans.). Blackwell. Lelandais, G.  E. (2014). Space and Identity in Resistance Against Neoliberal Urban Planning in Turkey. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 38(5), 1785–1806. Malpas, J. (2008). Cultural Heritage in the Age of New Media. In Y. E. Kalay, T. Kvan, & J. Affleck (Eds.), New Heritage: New Media and Cultural Heritage (pp. 1–10). Routledge. Moren, L., Tomšić, N., Mayhew, J., & Bricelj Baraga, M. (n.d.). Nonument! home page. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from http://nonument01.org Pandi, A. R. (2014). Insurgent Space in Malaysia: Hindraf Movement, New Media and Minority Indians. International Development Planning Review, 36(1), 73–90. Panorama. (2018a). Fotot/Njihuni me projektin, ja si do të jetë Teatri i ri Kombëtar. Panorama. Retrieved December 5, 2020, from http://www.panorama.com.al/fotot-njihuni-me-projektin-ja-si-do-te-jete-teatri-iri-kombetar/ Panorama. (2018b). Peticioni: “Kur shpallet monument shtëpia e Nënë Terezës, pse jo ajo e Mihal Luarasit, Pirro Manit, Kadri Roshit, Sandër Prosit…” Panorama. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from http://www.panorama.com. al/artistet-­p eticion-­s i-­p ara-­1 6-­v itesh-­p er-­t eatrin-­k ur-­s hpallet-­m onument-­ shtepia-­e-­nene-­terezes-­pse-­jo-­ajo-­e-­mihal-­luarasit-­pirro-­manit-­kadri-­roshit-­ sander-­prosit Parzinger, H. (2018, July 18). Heritage in Danger—Support Request National Theatre of Albania, Tirana, Albania. Retrieved March 11, 2019, from http:// www.europanostra.org/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2018/07/HP-­2 0180718-­ Albania-­National-­Theater-­Rama.pdf Ricoeur, P. (1976). Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. Texas Christian University Press.

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Robertson, I.  J. M. (2008). Heritage from Below: Class, Social Protest and Resistance. In B. Graham & P. Howard (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (pp. 143–158). Ashgate. Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. Routledge. StatCounter Global Stats. (2018). Social Media Stats Albania. Retrieved December 20, 2018, from http://gs.statcounter.com/social-­media-­stats/all/albania Tang, L., Shen, Q., & Cheng, E. (2010). A Review of Studies on Public-Private Partnership Projects in the Construction Industry. International Journal of Project Management, 28(7), 683–694. Tilden, F. (1977). Interpreting Our Heritage (3rd ed.). University of North Carolina Press. Weiss, M.  L. (2014). New Media, New Activism: Trends and Trajectories in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia. International Development Planning Review, 36(1), 91–109. Zipp, S. (2009). The Battle of Lincoln Square: Neighbourhood Culture and the Rise of Resistance to Urban Renewal. Planning Perspectives, 24(4), 409–433.

CHAPTER 4

Mapping More-than-Nostalgia of the ‘Pits’: Heritage Co-production as a Creative Resistance to Deindustrialization Sarah De Nardi

Introduction We live with memory every day; its many articulations surround us. We use memory to make sense of the world in which we live, but also of ourselves and of our place within that world. Being grounded in memory is akin to finding one’s bearing, accessing an inner repository of things that matter. Place and memory are inextricably intertwined, as witnessed by a rich tradition of scholarship on the linkages between landscape and memory (to name but a few, Said, 2000; Schama, 2005). Unsurprisingly this relationship is still the subject of sustained inquiry across the humanities and social sciences, developing along with decolonising and multivocality-­ driven research agendas and fieldwork methods (Ahmed 2004). The relationship between the ways in which any given community experiences

S. De Nardi (*) Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_4

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place (Waterton 2015) and the extent to which the group itself is participant in academic and scholarly narratives on ‘place’ and heritage is worth exploring through direct participation and shared sensory experiences in the field (sensu Pink, 2009 but see also Tuan, 1974). The many strands of connectivity between ideas of place, home, identity, memory and the past, then, are well-rehearsed topics. The idea of home, articulated across disciplines and literatures, is a concept negotiated in embodied quotidian and dynamic ways (Tolia-Kelly, 2004; Brickell, 2012). Memory is variously interpreted by those who look at the organic, individual mnemonic formation processes and collective (Seremetakis, 1994) or socio-political (McAtackney, 2016) understandings of the past and how this frames the present (see also Zerubavel, 2003). For Jones (2011, p. 4) ‘notions of being-in-place are powerful, even fundamental to everyday life … Within this memory is key as it is one means by which people are in place/landscape’. Emplacement emerges from both the material and symbolic elements of memory (Koshar, 2000): rituals, places, things that remind us of something meaningful. This volume asks, what new forms of heritage appear, as communities reclaim their spatial and cultural spaces? How does resistance form and develop in relation to proprietary claims upon the past? Therefore, in this chapter, I report on fieldwork and related memory and storytelling mapping I undertook with members of a community in the ‘deindustrialized’ northeast of England—the Sunderland suburb of Ryhope, which was once a colliery (coal mine) settlement in its own right, and Beamish Museum. Specifically, I have been involved in ‘heritage’ mapping of the 1950s in collaboration with Beamish, who plan a huge new ‘area’ based on imaginings of that decade in the Northeast. Beamish and the communities involved wanted to capture what life was like in the 1950s but not as a stagnant, immobile snapshot: as a growing, affectual memory which feeds into sense of place today. Thus, the chapter’s narrative engagement with the process of community mapping unfolds in a cyclical manner: as the chapter progresses, new detail of the work and its rationale emerge. The idea is to convey a work-­ in-­progress which is also a project in limbo: at the time of writing the COVID-19 pandemic has greatly delayed the process of removal of this heritage asset from Ryhope and its transportation to Beamish Museum. The resulting feeling about this endeavour (both the dismantling and the mapping) is of something suspended in time. Besides working with a skewed, unfinished timeline, this chapter also chiefly seeks to make sense

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of multiple encounters with this community, the expectations brought to the table by both participants and myself as the academic, and the ways we have managed to get into a common ‘groove’ from which we started working together. The idea has been to make co-production and collaboration instructional and inclusive but also fun. From the academic’s point of view, output was the key. After all, scholars do not routinely engage with the public or local communities for the sake of it—they (or we) do it for a purpose. That is, to create knowledge, to publish it, to circulate it and share it. The challenge is to write up research in community co-­ production in ways that don’t reproduce ‘othering’ or ‘top-down’ rhetoric and discourses that have plagued anthropology, cultural heritage and other disciplines for a long time (Askins, 2009). My work with community-led mapping (De Nardi, 2019) has explored at length the motivations and processes at play when social groups and communities of memory use visual and embodied terms of reference to frame their own interpretations of place, belonging and the variegated past. As context is fundamental in articulating participatory fieldwork, while outlining the framing of this project focused on the Northeast mapping, I was mindful of Dicks’s (2010) unpacking of the nuance in the linkages between local identity, place and heritage-making processes among former Welsh mining communities. Senses of the past and its link with the politics of place matter. In the field of cultural studies, some (i.e. Fantoni, 2011) have touched on the link between collective workers’ memory and mythologies of belonging and identity that are tethered to history and place: class and identity positionings foregrounding relations to space and place.

Heritage and Resistance: A Paradigm for Change As researchers, we view co-production as a fundamental framework within which to shape knowledge-building about local history(ies) and heritage(s); we concur that community insights must be encompassed in professional reports, interpretation, and publication. This particularly applies to ‘hidden’ or unofficial versions of events and memories that disrupt canonical and mainstream versions of the past or top-down heritage interpretations. So at one extreme, the official memory established by regimes (Iacono & Këlliçi, 2015; Young & Light, 2016) effectively flattens or obliterates dissident memories and pushes ‘other’ memories into the realm of the private (Drozdzewski 2015), the personal and the familial. At the other end of the

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spectrum, mnemonic resistance and activism can operate in the imagination, shaping collective or familial mythology (Cappelletto, 2003). Heritage and resistance are at the heart of the case study I engage with in this chapter. Here is the first fragment of the fieldwork mosaic. What happened? When Beamish Museum decided to relocate the Grand Electric, an iconic local cinema/bingo hall to a recreated 1950s town setting (see below), the museum and residents expressed an interest in preserving local stories and memories of Ryhope that went beyond the materiality of the cinema building itself. The underlying assumption of the 1950s project was to showcase the rich vernacular and creative diversity of the Northeast, beyond the deindustrialized and ‘ex-coal mining’ canon by which the area is mainly known (Orange, 2015). Engaging with sense of place (after Agnew, 1997) opens up articulations of local imagination in this village and within the Grand Electric, the heritage asset that prompted the mapping exercise. The storyscape of Ryhope and its cinema in the sections that follow blurs the lines between tangible and intangible heritage in favour of a holistic understanding of community priorities that encompass everyday experiences alongside recent memories and assumptions about the past (cf. Ahmad, 2006). In the Northeast English context of Ryhope and its relocating building, resistance is intended not as revolutionary or activist processes as in other contributions to this volume: here resistance took the form of an everyday process of establishing local identity and social fairness through heritage practices that create, shape, and are shaped by imaginaries as well as political contexts. These practices challenge and disrupt stereotypes of ‘passive’, culturally apathetic deindustrialized communities in Britain (and elsewhere; see e.g. Cheshire & Hay, 1989; Beatty & Fothergill, 1996). The ‘struggle’ of working-class communities striving to be heard and to proudly own and enact their chosen heritage(s) as they wish is an issue emerging amongst ever more urgent calls to bottom-up representation. I do not directly engage with this imperative here, but the need to foreground local sense of place and ‘senses of the past’ (see De Nardi, 2014) is the foundation of this chapter. The next section explores the nexus between the active process of remembrance and creative resistance as it is channelled by fieldwork and ultimately, emerging from community-­led maps.

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Mapping More than Nostalgia: Grassroots Engagements with the Industrial Past The main question I asked of my research, for the purposes of this chapter, is: Is nostalgia always unruly, spontaneous, or can it be carefully staged, engineered and managed to achieve a specific version and experience of the past? Can nostalgia be a powerful tool to shape a future and not just a past? Using the case study of the upcoming 1950s town at Beamish, I engage with some of the affects feeding in and out of the imagined communities of a ‘nostalgic’ past time, curated by the museum for its 1950s extension. Nostalgia: A Form of Resistance? Can nostalgia and revivals of a past ever be construed as ‘grassroots’? If ‘grassroots’ is a term resonating with the civil rights movement and positive political thrust towards equality and justice, the idea of nostalgia, cosy and a little stifled, may seem jarring. In working with Beamish Museum, a private edutainment establishment that narrates the social histories of the Northeast while being part of what is still, to large extent, part of a ‘nostalgia industry’ (sensu Dann, 1998), I weighed the rationales that I would encounter. If resistance is becoming part of everyday life and intrinsic in dynamic sense of place at a local, regional, and national level, so is nostalgia; but nostalgia, unlike resistance, is often conceptualized as a backwards-­looking and conservative drive as opposed to a forward-leading energy—assuming that all resistance is proactive or indeed, a positive drive. Often nostalgia is romanticized and conceptualized as a framework for ‘rose-tinted lenses’ with which we look back at a better past. For others (Navaro-Yashin, 2009) the melancholy patina of ruination feeds nostalgia not as a backwards-­pulling desire but as a way of understanding temporality, the world and society. Memory works like that too. Remembering is a future-­ facing process as well as a past evocation serving a myriad of purposes. In vindicating their own sense of place during the process of heritagization, the community of Ryhope (past and present) succeed in establishing power and nostalgia not as retroactive and regretful remnants but as powerful affects and agents for social justice and change. However, nostalgia is only a part of local contemporary sense of place nurtured by members of former mining communities in northeast

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England. Other imaginaries and agendas are at stake, more socially pressing values that position Ryhope and its inhabitants in the vibrant present. This repositioning beyond the rhetoric of deindustrialization resists a retroactive placing of that community in the realm of ‘what it used to do’— its past productivity, which can never return. Sense of place as shared and replicated in social interactions and cultural production among communities in former industrial areas constitutes an awareness of economic decline, yes, but coupled with vibrant present understandings and socio-political ambitions to move forward. The senses emerge strongly in any engagement with place and heritage. Tolia-Kelly (2004) has formulated the idea of home as a resurgence of feelings and sensations related to the past—she calls this re-memory after Toni Morrison’s masterpiece Beloved (Morrison 1987). The feelings stirred by familiar objects that remind us of the past act as potent forces in the present: these affects trump nostalgia even when we are overwhelmed by a desire to return to an ‘elsewhere’—an absent present—which reminds us of home. For former mining communities, re-memory is a constant daily experience. Although oral history has proved that the memory of the experience of the mining industry and its everyday life may differ for women and for men (the former pitmen) (Dicks, 2010, p. 165), the collective remembrance of the livelihood of villages is all-pervasive. Place is fundamental in this remembrance: vacant, often spectral pit heads stick eerily out of the ground, abandoned yet very present. People engage with these remnants by writing about them in blogs and newspapers, photographing them and making art about them. Resistance to mainstream media’ representations of deindustrialized communities takes the shape of imaginative creative practices that subtly disrupt the paradigm of ‘bereft’ community without a contemporary focus of identity. Co-produced memory visualizations and heritage deep maps can become a stepping stone towards greater fairness and inclusivity in scholarly outputs because it is often initiated or at any rate led and curated by the community. I propose to consider community heritage mapping as a tool to express local forms of resistance to the restrictive canon of a left-­ behind deindustrialized Northeast. The takeaway here is that far from becoming a tool for stagnant and retroactive nostalgia, the place-making and place-commemorating exercise of community-led maps serves to re-establish vibrant, visible and proud identities in former coal mining areas. In undertaking this particular fieldwork, I have asked several questions, the answer to which is not always

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apparent. That is not unusual in qualitative fieldwork, naturally, but unanswered questions can affect the ethics of participatory fieldwork. Mapping My co-researchers wished to find an output that would recount and visualize the multi-faceted heritage and memory values of their village and its cultural economy which, they argued, existed above and beyond the local coal mine. Broadly, the creative impetus in designing and making the maps serves as an argument against the ‘stereotyping’ of former mining villages in the Northeast of England as stagnant, disenfranchised communities. This resistance also opened up new dialogues across generations of town residents. For local young people, the Grand Electric was always just a ruin, or had been a car showroom, and they got to learn of its colourful past from their elders. More broadly, Ryhope locals were had been in work, in semi-skilled or skilled professions that did not have to do with the black gold industry. The local community-based co-researchers I worked with were interested in mapping the cheery memory and affectual history of their local picture-house—not the coal pit and its dusty accoutrements. I worked with several overlapping mnemonic groups: the former users and projectionists at a cinema in the outskirts of Sunderland, in the locality of Ryhope. In remembering and shaping their heritage in the first person through participatory deep mapping practices, the Ryhope community played with and to an extent disrupted established notions of what a cinema or what a picture-house represents and feels like. They did so by inserting their own vision for its development and by reasserting their own eclectic experience of this site as bingo hall, hide and seek playground, or relic. In capturing sense of place, mapping can bring to life the entanglements that give ‘home’ a meaning for communities. Conceptually, mapping can constitute a form of dynamic investigation of deep-seated meanings and affects otherwise imperceptible to those who are not locally and emotionally situated within a certain context. As with any other kind of heritage engagement, mapping needs to be handled with sensitivity and with the collaboration and input of the local communities (Askins, 2009). In thinking about the mapping of nostalgia as one of many affects shaping memory and sense of place, we may go beyond the conservatism of the usual notion of ‘harking for something gone’ and focus our attention on

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a positive, forward-thinking and empowering statement about community and place. As I discuss in my book (2019), co-produced memory mapping may bring together the imaginative, the creative and the unspoken in a story that ‘illustrates’ passions, dreams, points of view and convictions. I believe that my engagement with the northeast of England offers some insight into this process.

Mapping Heritage Value(s) in Northeast England: The Ryhope Fieldwork Community-centred mapping of emplaced stories and affects may channel otherwise elusive imaginaries and the ephemeral mnemonic spaces that we encounter and inhabit in fieldwork, which includes spoken or unspoken longing for future identities living side by side with past practices, past materialities and past ‘communities’. Mapping heritage values and participation has many advantages: for one, through my work with the Outreach team at the Beamish, I was able to access and share stories and memories with local communities in the neighbourhoods of Ryhope and Kibblesworth in northeast England, but also to find strategies to visualize these memories, in order to make them tangible once more. By connecting to the communities I worked with through a shared sense of being in place and sensory emplacement, I was able to reach out to my co-researchers in a stimulating way. Although we do not have the same experiences of place, past family life or even language and social context, we were able to understand one another through the mutual understanding of place attachment, the getting together to watch films. We were united by the hard-to-define sense of togetherness that reminiscing on the past often creates (Pink, 2009). The affects and atmosphere that recalling a life create are important social binders and spatial tethers. More importantly, the mutual desire to express a unique genius loci of Ryhope and the cinema in the face of changing times and circumstances brought the storytellers together even more passionately. Here is a further fragment of the fieldwork experience as I understand it. How did we engage together? We saw why we did it. The project was driven by a desire to capture and foreground identity and sense of place in the face of a changing socio-economic geography. When the Grand Electric cinema in Ryhope is dismantled and finally reconstructed at the

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Beamish Museum in the next (Twelve months? Two years? We do not know), the affects and associations which the building as a social core had to the community of Ryhope risk being lost. That is the reason why I proposed mapping as a way to create at a glance, engaging expressions of multiple stories. The maps we initiated are more than fragments of a bigger story of deindustrialization in a small town. The collaborative storytelling and mapping, made up of negotiations of content and the printing of drafts, are part of the town’s legacy—experienced as a hopeful future-­ facing endeavour. As this fragment takes form, it is time to take a closer look at the Grand Electric, which is currently being taken apart to be stored and reconstructed: a metaphor for a brighter phase in its life after decades of neglect, but also a strange moment in time. From my engagement with my local storytellers, I learned that the Grand Electric proudly stood in the location that was formerly known as Ryhope village; it was built in 1912 and contained 900 seats in its heyday, operating as a lively and popular pit village picture-house. In 1956, the Grand Electric implemented new technology Cinemascope: out went the square screen, in came the rectangular one. People in the Northeast did not often go to the big, glamorous but pricey chain cinemas—they rather enjoyed outings to their local pit village picture-­house. The cinema and subsequently the Bingo hall it became were the symbols of leisure time for a working-class community. Sometime in the 1960s, the cinema became a Bingo hall to ‘keep up with the times’, as more and more young people moved out of the area or were able to go to the pictures in central Sunderland and older residents sought a social space more inclined to their taste and need. As a cultural geographer, I am interested in how the Grand Electric, as a historical structure and as an affectual entity in a local topography of ‘home’, is remembered locally. How does the derelict cinema make sense to local people and to outsiders in 2021? As a fieldworker, I am fascinated by interactions with a structure that is still standing but is no longer used, and that has not yet become something else on the Museum grounds. I wonder about the kind of place this is, and the values it attracts. The cinema and bingo hall are more than a heritage asset: it was the place of work and leisure for many. Further, I am interested in how much of the popular imagination about the place will influence the remaking of it at Beamish Museum. The reconstructed Grand is likely to resonate with the local community as most residents knew people working in the cinema.

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The vision that the Museum has of the Grand Electric complex in Ryhope is at odds with the memories and perceptions of the local people who participated in the workshops and with locals. The Museum had involved the local community in gathering their memories of the site, but they had streamlined their narrative to focus on the picture-house phase of the building. In the end, I was working with twelve local people that had responded to the Museum’s invitation to participate. By using the cinema’s space as a playful space of explorations, the narrow slicing off of a phase in the life of the building limits its significance to a museum-­ sanctioned aspect or mood which is foregrounded at the expense of other, non-conformist meanings of the same heritage space. While a range of memories and experiences were collected during oral history sessions, the final product in the Museum grounds risked being unilateral, unless a new medium was found to open up and blend all perspectives and engagements with the Grand Electric by many actors in the local community across time. Hence the map [visualization]. Here, I tried to enter all elements of the cinema and its surroundings as they were remembered and reenacted by community members. The fact that the maps or, rather, the memory visualizations curated by the community participants display not the cinema building in isolation, but the recreation spaces and the dwelling places of those who worked and attended this leisure space, means that multiple perspectives of place, of Ryhope, are possible. Near the end of the chapter before the concluding section, I include the community-edited and unabridged key (legend) accompanying the map’s visual stories and memories (Fig. 4.1). Beamish Museum tweaked the plan and logistics of the reconstructed Grand: the story that the Museum wants to get across is understandably at odds with the memories of the former staff and patrons of the cinema. The auditorium and projection rooms, for example, used to be separate worlds: the former projectionists and the community of cinema-goers of Ryhope remember them as being apart, self-contained realms of task and activity. The Usherettes served as the intermediaries between auditorium and projection room: they were necessary for the economy of the cinema because the projectionists had no idea of what the picture sounded like. However, the entrance to the projectionist’s room (which was originally accessed via a ladder) will be made easier for better and safer access, through a door. At our community meetings in Ryhope and at the Beamish Museum, the idea of a switch to digital film as the sole technology of projection to be deployed at the reconstructed Grand did not resonate with the former

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Fig. 4.1  Visualizing elements of the cinema and its surrounds as remembered and reenacted by community members

projectionists. Their perplexed attitude and tight-lipped silence for a few seconds expressed an inner resistance to the idea, which fascinated me. I wanted to see where this would lead. Then two of them spoke out. ‘But I want to get that feeling, of seeing reels in the analogue projectors’, Eddie and Bill, who had worked in various picture-houses in the area, said unanimously. I thought about this desire: feels for reels. The museum intends to install only one 35  mm projector instead of the classic twin single-reel projectors. If the Museum decides to install two, they will need to work out the timing of the switch between projectors if they want to get that authentic feel. To counter this resistance Beamish pointed out that Cinemascope was brand new and exciting at the time, and that the thrill of that revolutionary innovation should be part of the proud story of the Grand Electric. Although the rectangular Cinemascope screen is going to be used at the reconstructed cinema, Jack Parry commented that the square screen would be more in keeping with the classic look of the Grand and that, in

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fact, ‘the square screen is more like the old times’. With hindsight, it occurred to me that perhaps Bill and Eddie wished to resist the homogenization of many pasts into one, portable and convenient to the Museum. They both wanted a tangible proof of their skill and a display that faithfully attests to their actual experiences and their lifelong work at the cinema. In the passionate words of the former projectionists recalling the technicalities of their work there may be indeed a note of retrospective longing— but resonating with a very present pride, a demand for professional and personal acknowledgement. Let us consider this moment of disagreement about the choice of screen type. Is a desire for one’s own version of authenticity a form of resistance or a holding back? What does it mean to want to have a museum display done ‘the right way’? After all, the authenticity of many among the memories of the Grand Electric in its Beamish Museum incarnation will have to be mediated for the modern world. Besides the choice of screen format, the cinema’s ceiling and screen will not be nicotine-stained like in the original picture-house. The Grand Electric’s smoky atmosphere (‘like a cloud’ quipped Eddie) will be lost to future audiences. Some cinemas at the time were equipped with an extractor fan, but this was not the case at the Grand Electric. A lady co-researcher (who wished to remain anonymous) shared with the group the recollection that her uncle had developed lung cancer from passive smoking in the projectionist’s room of the Grand. Local projectionist Jack admitted that, on occasion, the picture became positively blurred due to smoke: ‘It was murder to try and focus’, he said. Currently, Beamish Museum is facing a slight dilemma with regard to the ‘authenticity’ of the 1950s cinema experience. In a smoke-free environment like a twenty-first-century museum, how to incorporate the sensory ambience of the cigarette smoke, a salient part of the social and sensory experience of going to the pictures? My twelve co-researchers and I felt that making explicit the ‘sanitization’ of the past is important in order to tell the realistic story of the cinema. In conceptual terms, memory and sense of place have to do with more than the ‘physical’ structure of the Grand Electric. In other words, the idea and imagined reality of this place coexist with factually established topographical, technical and social paradigms. As the Grand Electric picture-­house is planned, packed up and reconstructed brick by brick, the former projectionists’ ambivalent feelings towards film and screen formats represent a key ‘message’ which informs the memory maps that we were designing as a group.

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The Grand Electric’s story is a variegated and colourful melange of people, materialities and stories from the community: which is what we tried to convey with the multi-layered map of recollections and sensory stimuli that are intangible, and may be invisible to the untrained eye of the outsider. Are the memory-resistance stories incorporated on the maps, and, if so, how can they be foregrounded? As a group of map-makers, we agreed that we would not make distinctions between ‘approved’ and ‘unconventional’ memories displayed on paper: only connections, ideas, without a hierarchy, in a dialogue which can grow and expand as more and more people participate in the mapping experiment on- and offline.

Legend to the Map This accompanies the visualizations and is entirely written by participants in the research and mapping project. 1. The Grand Electric: Cinema & Bingo Hall. Built 1912. 2. Burdon Terrace and Tunstall Street are vanished terraces of colliery houses. Ryhope colliery opened in 1857, and these houses would have built near the mine for the pitmen and their families; earlier, Ryhope had been a small village. The local geography has changed a lot. There was a Double Burdon Street, which was to the north, and parallel to Ryhope Street, the B1286. Single Tunstall Street was between them. Former residents include Doris (Burdon terrace), Jenny, b. 1959 (Burden Street). Brick Row (still there) which led to Ryhope Colliery ran across the West end. On the modern map there are now Western Hill and Shaftesbury Avenue. 3. Jock’s Ice Cream Shop: this was on Ryhope Street near the Western Hill junction. People loved congregating there on a Sunday after going to the Grange Town Regent Cinema. The Grand Electric was built on church land, so it did not open on a Sunday. 4. The Store Fields: A playground the children used to go to in the 1950s. Every year Clarks Fair used to come, with a climbing frame and all sort of rides and attractions like the teacup lids. 5. A Bomb Shelter: 59 Hewitt Avenue. Sonia Orr’s grandmother used to go down there during the Second World War.

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6. Nurse Cook or Nurse Um Um’s house (that’s what she always grunted when pensive, Um Um). 7. The Pub: The Guide Post Inn was the pub nearest the Grand Electric. 8. The Police station was on the opposite side of Ryhope Street to the Grand Electric. On Saturday nights Cinema-goers remember witnessing fights and even arrests. 9. The Co-op used to be on Ryhope Street where TECAZ is now. The Co-op premises included an office block with marble staircase which Margaret as ‘so clean you could eat your food off it’. 10. Betty’s place: The Veterinarian’s daughter who used to play the piano at the Grand Electric. 11. The Railway Station: now disused. 12. EDITH lived here, she was the ticket girl at the Grand Electric. Remembered by cinema-goers as lovely and smiley, Edith sold tickets there in the 1950s. She lived in Railway Street initially but then moved to Mariville in the South-East of Ryhope. Her sister Jenny ripped the tickets on entry. 13. The Pit/Colliery: Diane and Sonia (and friends) used to trespass into the pit area. The owners had sunk the structures, not dismantled them, so you could still see the pit head sticking out. 14. The Pit Baths. That’s where the miners washed off the worst of the grime before heading home… 15. The Quarry: The pit and the quarry were favourite haunts for kids. 16. The Slaughterhouse. Some of the residents remember animal hides drying outside the slaughterhouse and seeing rats scurrying about… 17. Ryhope Infant & Junior School. 18. Dr Gillan’s House. He was the local doctor. 19. Marked in green are the allotments which Steve (born 1981) remembers being situated near the Grand Electric. Steven was too young to remember the Grand Bingo Hall but he and his friends were allowed to play on the grounds.

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The Photo Album (Photographs by Beamish Museum Curators but Chosen by Project Participants, and Accompanied by Local Community Members’ Comments) (a) The outside of the Grand Electric on Ryhope Street. Lately, it had been used as a storage space for collectable cars, and is now due to be dismantled and taken to Beamish Museum. (b) The inside of the Grand before being moved to Beamish. Notice the bingo gameboards where the screen would have been! (c) A view of the Grand’s interior, with a pretty stained-glass window. (d) The Grand’s once attractive decorative elements had gone into disrepair. (e) This is a film programme from 1955! (f) Another film programme from the 1950s. (g) We found these two pairs of 1950s 3D glasses under the seats as the Museum was clearing rubbish from the building. (h) The old seats from the Grand’s auditorium were stripped away and stored upstairs when the Grand became a bingo hall. (i) You can see the seats from the Palladium Cinema on Claypath, Durham being transported to Beamish, where they will go in the Auditorium of the Grand. (j) Here they are—you can tell they belonged in the Palladium thanks to the ‘P’ engraved on the side of each row of seats. Captivated by the myriad ways in which these memories have become atomized and have coalesced around foci of commemoration, I have stepped into the alternate, public and private memory-worlds of these two mnemonic communities with an open mind. The maps I devised—the outputs I am still conceptualizing, expanding and training on with the community—and the process itself of trying to visualize place are a labour of love. Our experiments have sought to evoke and visualize the many different sets of memories—the sense of place of the cinema and its affectual economy in Ryhope, and the reimagined and rehashed affects of the future cinema space at Beamish. In resisting to stereotypes of deindustrialization and cultural stagnation, the maps reveal a world of cultural engagements and imaginative interactions with place that are best experienced at a glance, visually more accessible than if the same material had to be

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extrapolated by oral history transcripts. The process of creative framing of a community’s own many identities and resilience may be seen as a form of resistance. If resistance is revealed as a vibrancy which is part of everyday life and intrinsic in dynamic sense of place, it can confront its place at the heart of heritage practices, engaging in a dance with the concept of nostalgia. Unlike resistance, nostalgia can be ‘sensed’ in what is told and written about a place, and it can be as nuanced as processes of resistance. However, while the workings of nostalgia may be seen to act as a salve to nurse wounds of a better past, resistance to present-day injustice is dynamic, a healing process. While the two may well be working in tandem, at the Grand Electric and beyond, the process of nursing a wounded historical pride and of healing perceived social inequities need not be contradictory.

Final Reflections Remembrance of the coal mining industry situates stories and values through co-production. For the community of Ryhope, remembering the skills and livelihoods associated with their local picture-house, the Grand Electric, is also part of a politics of hope for renewal. The fieldwork and collaborative exploration of the everyday places of the northeast of England beyond the closure of the pits have proven a foray between heritage ethics and social meanings; an experiment in conducting heritage commemoration and meaning-making that has at its heart community imaginaries. In relaying their stories to the wider world at the Beamish Museum, the locals of Ryhope claim their right to reassert their communities’ visibility and to revive the presence of skill and passion for work that did not depend on the mines. The co-researchers and residents have expressed a desire to carve out their place in the history and future of England and the UK as more than yet another pit village. And yet, some need things to look right, to feel right—far from being nostalgic, this drive to authenticity is a testament to skill and ability, rather than a drive to languid conservatism. And yes, of course: memory mapping can and does bring up a healthy dollop of nostalgia too on occasion. Nostalgia is a wholly human way of coming to terms with a variety of changing circumstances—good, bad or neutral. It is a response to the passing of time and to the ageing of things and people. We could and should embrace and work with feelings of loss, and acknowledge a longing for a past now gone, in its many inceptions

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and manifestations. Any exercise in participatory research and memory-­ making does not operate in isolation from the current socio-economic and emotional expectations and circumstances of communities that have been deindustrialized. In general, the members of the communities I worked with wished to put themselves on the map, as they grew and evolved. The interest of the local community in depicting their own heritage values manifested itself as abundant attendance in our sessions at the Museum and in community centres. According to community spokespersons, the locals at Ryhope and former users of the Grand Electric were interested in conveying the multiple nature of their engagement with this site. The community participants resisted against the notion of the Grand being typecast as an old-school, retro cinema existing solely as an extension of the mine head. Co-researchers in the community have resisted this flattening by disclosing multiple memories through storytelling—that is to say, by reaching out to the Museum and researcher (me) with their memories of everyday life that did not begin and end at the mine shaft. While the participants cannot be sure of how the Grand Electric will translate into the Museum’s 1950s town, as the project is not complete, they have expressed satisfaction in the process of at least sketching what they hope the message will be: ‘we were here’. Communities living on the outskirts of cities like Gateshead and Sunderland perceive themselves not as victims of deindustrialization and poverty, but as social groups who, while striving for a novel, post-industrial sense of identity, have dispersed but are still very much in place. This sense of belonging matters. It should be foregrounded in heritage decision making. Northeast communities should be empowered by heritage professionals to feel, concretely, that they own their ‘turf’, defined by emotional, not physical, geographies of home and work, even if not everyone lives in close proximity anymore. In any event, ‘heritage’ and ‘resistance’, as practices and realities for communities in the English Northeast, individuals, are interdependent and increasingly constitute and characterize multiple sites of struggles and social conflicts. The kind of heritage that can be shaped and brought to the fore through community interventions and positive, empowering activism can offer an alternative to the kind of ‘snapshot’, idealized or clichéd vision of heritage that many museums and institutions foster even today. By imposing independent, unpredictable, multi-vocal and multi-­faceted visions and memories of a collective past, the mapping co-researchers resist

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Museums’ tendency to stereotype, crystallize and channel preferred (authorized?) discourses on community. In this sense, the maps I initiated with the local communities are a creative, forward-looking endeavour, not an exercise in nostalgia. These colourful, in-becoming visualizations are capable of capturing, if not creating energies (De Nardi, 2019). Their at-­ a-­glance snapshot of what matters to a community may engender subsequent projects across generations of local residents, old and new. As an act of resistance, the making of the maps brings up more than usable heritage data and historical context—they disclose the emotive undercurrents of sites which have been or will be destroyed, uprooted and moved to the Beamish Museum. They want to keep the spirit of these communities alive even after the uprooting and physical relocation of their cinema. The communities I worked with thoroughly enjoyed the idea of putting their thoughts and memories on a visible, accessible medium which can be copied, circulated and emulated by other communities telling their own stories. Where dissonant memories clashed, an agreement was usually reached by agreeing on the necessarily subjective and emotional nature of recollection. The maps will hopefully remain as a homage and testimony to the locales where many affects took place and intermingled—truer to life than any oral history transcript or museum label ever could be. A final reflection: is the memory mapping of Ryhope an exercise in nostalgia, or rather a proud wish to show how things were done on the cheap, in a communal spirit and with a sense of hope? Are these affects back again, taking shape as a creative resistance to top-down heritage representations?

References Agnew, J. A. (1997). Place and Politics. Allen & Unwin Inc. Ahmad, Y. (2006). The Scope and Definitions of Heritage: From Tangible to Intangible. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 12(3), 292–300. Ahmed, S. (2004). Affective Economies. Social Text, 22, 114–139. Askins, K. (2009). That’s Just What I Do. Placing Emotion in Academic Activism. Emotion Space and Society, 2(2009), 4–13. Beatty, C., & Fothergill, S. (1996). Labour Market Adjustment in Areas of Chronic Industrial Decline: The Case of the UK Coalfields. Regional Studies, 30(7), 627–640. Brickell, K. (2012). ‘Mapping’ and Doing Critical Geographies of Home. Progress in Human Geography, 36(2), 225–244.

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Cappelletto, F. (2003). Long Term Memory of Extreme Events: From Autobiography to History. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 9, 241–260. Cheshire, P.  C., & Hay, D.  G. (1989). Urban Problems in Western Europe: An Economic Analysis. Unwin. Dann, G. M. S. (1998). There’s No Business Like Old Business. In W. F. Theobald (Ed.), Tourism, the Nostalgia Business of the Future (pp. 29–43). Routledge. De Nardi, S. (2014). Senses of Place, Senses of the Past: Making Experiential Maps as Part of Community Heritage Fieldwork. Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, 1(1), 5–23. https://doi.org/10.117 9/2051819613Z.0000000001 De Nardi, S. (2019). Visualising Place, Memory and the Imagined. Routledge. Dicks, B. (2010). Heritage, Place and Community. University of Wales Press. Drozdzewski, D. (2015). Retrospective Reflexivity: The Residual and Subliminal Repercussions of Researching War. Emotion Space and Society. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.emospa.2015.03.004 Fantoni, G. (2011). “La mineraria lavori o lasci lavorare”: Myth and Memory of a Labour Struggle in Northern Tuscany. Modern Italy, 16(2), 195–208. Iacono, F., & Këlliçi, K. (2015). Of Pyramids and Dictators: Memory, Work and the Significance of Communist Heritage in Post-Socialist Albania. Arqueologia Publica, 5, 97–122. Jones, O. (2011). Geography, Memory and Non-Representational Geographies. Geography Compass, 5, 875–885. Koshar, R. (2000). From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory 1870–1990. University of California Press. McAtackney, L. (2016). Re-remembering the Troubles: Community Memorials, Memory and Identity in Post-conflict Northern Ireland. In E.  Epinoux & F.  Healy (Eds.), Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: Exploring New Cultural Spaces (pp. 42–64). Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Morrison, T. (1987). Beloved. Penguin. Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2009). Affective Spaces, Melancholic Objects: Ruination and the Production of Anthropological Knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute NS, 15, 1–18. Orange, H. (2015). Reanimating Industrial Spaces. Conducting Memory Work in Post-industrial Societies. Left Coast Press. Pink, S. (2009). Doing Sensory Ethnography. Sage. Said, E. (2000). Invention, Memory and Place. Critical Inquiry, 26(2), 175–192. Schama, S. (2005). Landscape and Memory. Harper Collins. Seremetakis, N. (1994). The Senses Still. Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. University of Chicago Press.

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Tolia-Kelly, D.  P. (2004). Locating Processes of Identification: Studying the Precipitates of Re-memory through Artefacts in the British Asian Home. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 29, 314–329. Tuan, Y. (1974). Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perceptions, Attitudes, and Values. University of Wisconsin Press. Waterton, E. (2015). Heritage and Community Engagement. In T.  Ireland & J. Schofield (Eds.), The Ethics of Cultural Heritage (pp. 53–67). Springer. Young, C., & Light, D. (2016). Multiple and Contested Geographies of Memory: Remembering the 1989 Romanian “Revolution”. In D. Drozdzewski, S. De Nardi, & E. Waterton (Eds.), Memory, Place and Identity: Commemoration and Remembrance of War and Conflict (pp. 56–73). Routledge. Zerubavel, E. (2003). Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past. University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER 5

Authenticity and Struggle: Historicising Skateboarding as ‘Action Art’ on London’s South Bank David Webb

Introduction The notion of authenticity is one of the key tenets of formal heritage management and is often associated with a focus on the material fabric of a building or historical site. Numerous academic accounts have sought to dislodge this association by emphasising the discursive foundations of preservationist approaches to heritage and the potential for authenticity to exist within intangible practices (Harrison, 2013; Harvey, 2008; Holtorf, 2012; Pendlebury, 2008). Some have even argued that formal heritage management can have the effect of undermining the essentially wild nature that defines the authenticity of practices such as graffiti (Cooper, 2014; Merrill, 2015) and techno (Schofield & Rellensmann, 2015).

D. Webb (*) School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_5

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This chapter offers a more radical account, arguing that authenticity is something which can be crafted from historical resources and associations to suit political struggle. This assertion challenges even those liberal pluralist accounts which see a range of authenticities but nonetheless tend to describe those authentic practices that pre-exist struggle. A more critical reading of authenticity allows for practices in, and relationships with, place to be both authentic and constructed in relation to struggles. Such possibilities come about through a process of consciousness-raising which invites heritage users to reconsider or expand their understanding of use by excavating meaning from the past and building relationships with it. It is often the threat of change that generates the need for consciousness to be raised.

Authenticity in the Literature Within the heritage literature there is widespread recognition of the peculiarity of Western notions of authenticity, which have tended to reify the physical remnants of old buildings and sites. This has been compared with Eastern examples of authenticity as found within the practices of repair and restoration of structures (Gao & Jones, 2020; Tiwari, 2017) and critical scholars have even talked of the ‘weaponization of authenticity’ (Song, 2020, p. 4) globally, to impose particular visions of development on historically and socially diverse areas (Zhang, 2018). International efforts, such as the UNESCO convention on safeguarding the intangible cultural heritage, have sought to extend the notion of authenticity beyond a focus on physical fabric. Even so, authenticity has generally come to be seen as tied up with discourses that are established and of long-standing, whether they be of preservation, of repetitious intangible practice or even of subaltern activities such as those practised by indigenous communities (Smith, 2006). This pluralist view often involves a search to discover extant ways of conceptualising and practising authenticity. This chapter draws on the same base of data used by a paper published in 2018, which explored conflict over the proposed redevelopment of a skateboarding spot on London’s south bank (Madgin et al., 2018). That paper argued for the need to reframe authenticity beyond its association with a relatively fixed outlook, noting that authenticity on the south bank was ‘fluid and connected to the everyday practices that take place in, and are shaped by, the built fabric’ (p. 586). Place attachment and a willingness to fight and resist change were found to be closely bound up with ‘the

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embodied experiences of, and emotional attachments, to the space that were derived from the everyday practices of generations of skaters’ (Madgin et al., 2018, p. 586). However, because that paper was focused on detailing these experiences, emotional attachments and everyday practices, questions about their discursive history were out of scope. The central arguments in this chapter are that authenticity and attachment to place must be located within political struggles, that those struggles are socially and spatially diffuse and that they both shape, and are shaped by, historical association. In recognising these points, the chapter seeks an account of ‘young people’s bodily knowledge and experiences’ (Ruiz et  al., 2019, p. 1) that lies in a generative relationship with the past.

Theorising Authenticity In contrast with the more psychological literature (e.g. Lewicka, 2011), governmentality and assemblage approaches place greater emphasis on power, identity and politics in explaining socio-material relationships, including authenticity. The construction of identities, and with them emotions and attachments, takes place via dispersed and historicised processes (e.g. see Matless, 1998). Assemblage thinking has been drawn on to explain more clearly how ideas, identities and intensities of feeling may solidify or change over time (e.g. Harrison, 2013; Hillier, 2013; Law & Chen, 2019; Pendlebury, 2013). Often building on Foucault, assemblage theories have emphasised the need to attend to the co-evolution of numerous discourses and the interplay between them (Pendlebury, 2013), suggesting a less ‘voluntaristic’ sense of change (Uitermark, 2005). If the history of an authentic connection between people and place on the south bank is thought of as an assemblage then it becomes possible to join up with an array of heritage, planning and arts and cultural discourses with fragmentary and ‘partial connections’ (Strathern, 1991). The acts of understanding and communicating an authentic experience of place become caught up dialogically with these discourses, through which experiences might be variously shaped; indeed, it is through such dialogue that experience is made both authentic and compelling. This point has been made in different ways across a range of post-structuralist literature. De Landa (2006) and Deleuze and Guattari (1977, 2004) talk of relations of interiority and exteriority in the way that assemblages emerge, while actor-­ network theorists have explored related notions of absence presence (Callon & Law, 2004). The basic point is to emphasise the dispersed and

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entangled nature of identity formation, and therefore also of peoples’ attachment to places, as opposed to understanding that relationship in a much more dualistic sense.

Connections Between Theory and the Fieldwork The structure of this chapter begins with a look at a history of political conflict around the meaning of art on the south bank, attending along the way to the potential to isolate a story of action art on the south bank. The intention is not to argue for the ‘realness’ of action art as the true or best history of art on the south bank but to outline political struggles: competing historical efforts to bring the south bank in line with particular subjectivities, as well as successive rounds of institutional reform aimed at structuring the conditions from which future subjectivities would emerge. The story illustrates the potential that existed to craft a discourse of action art from the historical conditions there. In this sense, political history is seen as a resource which might be used for making sense of the relationship between people and places and for communicating the relevance and importance of this relationship to wider publics engaged in political contests over place. The chapter then considers the arguments advanced by skaters in the light of this history. It attends to the significance of a historically located discourse of ‘action art’ to skaters’ interior understanding of their experiences and emotions before considering the ethics and political utility of this discourse when compared with exterior discourses of liberal pluralism and authorised heritage. Finally, the chapter reflects on what can be learned from the construction of action art as an assemblage guiding how sense was made of experiences and emotions at the undercroft and what implications this might have for heritage practice. This approach, which regards authenticity as not just constructed and experiential, but also as a product and agent of history, can facilitate a more detailed understanding of the task of crafting resistance to dominant development models.

The Context for the Research The arguments made here are supported both by an extensive literature review and by a programme of interview research which took place between 2014 and 2015 to chart those involved in the campaign to save the undercroft skateboarding area on London’s south bank. London’s south bank has been a focus for cultural buildings and activities since the

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Second World War. The prestigious Royal Festival Hall, completed in 1951, received grade I listed status in 1988, while the Royal National Theatre, just a few hundred metres to the east, gained grade II* listed status in 1994. In early 2013 the Southbank Centre, which manages the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room, Hayward Gallery and the undercroft skate spot, announced plans to redevelop the undercroft. The space was targeted for conversion to chain cafes and restaurants as part of a wider attempt to cross-subsidise the provision of arts buildings and activities. The Long Live Southbank (LLSB) campaign was set up shortly afterwards, with skateboarders, graffiti artists and local activists all seeking to resist the proposals. The Twentieth Century Society also objected to the proposals and provided an artist’s impression of the scale of the proposed changes (see Fig. 5.1). Their concerns centred on the loss of the ‘brutalist’ post-war architecture on the site.

Fig. 5.1  Twentieth Century Society artists impressions

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In 2013 LLSB successfully prevented the proposed redevelopment from going ahead. Coming in just under a year later, we conducted 17 interviews with skateboarders and activists involved in the campaign, another with the campaign’s barrister, 2 interviews with representatives of heritage organisations which acted as consultees in the planning system, 3 walking tours with older skaters who had memories of the space and 3 interviews with representatives of the Southbank Centre. These interviews were used to produce a short film to help explain the skateboarders’ claims to the space. While not all of this material is directly referred to in this chapter it forms a bank of research from which the conclusions were generated. The authors also worked closely with those who were directly involved in LLSB, having informal conversations and getting to know some of the skaters.

Arts, Culture and Political Struggle on the South Bank Known for much of the early post-war years as a dilapidated, industrial area of the city, the south bank has become a major tourist destination, supported by the re-introduction of pedestrian ferries from 1999 and the development in 2000 of the London Eye. These dramatic economic changes have been matched by substantial changes in economic politics, which have not only expressed themselves through the site but have also been produced and contested at this location. It is not surprising then, that the purpose of art as an activity on the south bank has also been contested during this time. This section outlines four discourses of arts and culture that have each offered different rationales for the definition and purpose of art. They serve as historical context, both shaping the production of claims to authenticity on the south bank and serving as a historical resource for activists to mine. Table  5.1 provides a summary guide to these discourses, both as a map to guide the reader through this section

Table 5.1  Arts and cultural policy discourses on the south bank

Passive subjects

Political subjects

Elitism Consumerism

Grants-based mobilisation Action art

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and as a means of highlighting the relationship between the discourses and the contested politics of art on the south bank.

Action Art Skateboarders and campaigners tapped into the rich political and cultural history of the south bank to build a case for the value of skateboarding as an art form reflecting the lives, experiences and interests of the undercroft’s users. The element of LLSB’s campaign which did this most explicitly was a rebuttal to the Southbank Centre’s claim that the redevelopment of the undercroft and surrounding buildings was part of a package of work that would lead to ‘more art for more people’ (Fig. 5.1). By changing just one word of this slogan, Long Live Southbank put out a powerful reveal of the politically loaded language being used by arts institutions, while simultaneously distancing skateboarding from an approach to arts provision that had overtones of passive consumerism (Fig. 5.2). Less immediately obvious, LLSB’s call for art by the people (Fig. 5.3), and therefore of the people rather than for them, tapped into a political heritage which has been salient to the Southbank since its post-war origins in the construction of the Royal Festival Hall and the holding of the Festival of Britain. Fiona McCarthy traces a direct connection between William Morris’s vision of a collective access to the best of the arts and the ethic of the Festival of Britain. Morris’s ideal of art for the people was, says McCarthy, ‘a central inspiration’ (Maccarthy, 2014, p. 109) on the Festival of Britain, and she explores the significant effect this ideal had, not only on the festival’s organiser Herbert Morrison (known at the time as ‘Lord Festival’) but also on Clement Atlee’s conversion to Socialism. ‘This was the Prime Minister’, she states, ‘who kept a framed print of Watt’s famous portrait of Morris on the wall of his study’. So strong are the links McCarthy draws

Fig. 5.2  More art for more people

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Fig. 5.3  More art by more people

between William Morris and the Festival of Britain that she goes as far as describing the festival as ‘William Morris’s “art for the people”, reinterpreted by Attlee’s Labour government on an unprecedented scale’ (p. 110). And yet a critical questioning of whose art was to be valued, encouraged and performed on the Southbank has haunted the use of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery since their creation. The national communitarian politics of the immediate post-war period answered by stressing the inclusive and representative nature of the Festival of Britain. Thus the Director-General of the festival presented it as ‘the people’s show, not organised arbitrarily for them to

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enjoy, but put on largely by them, by us all, as an expression of a way of life in which we believe’ (Sissons & French, 1964, p. 337). Such a positioning seeks to obscure the boundary between those providing and those taking part in art, rendering art as democracy: a representation of the people and of Britain. Many of the attractions offered by the Festival of Britain clearly illustrated this ethic. The country pavilion, for example, brought bees, butterflies and farm animals onto the festival site while the twinned explorations of ‘The People of Britain’ and ‘The Land of Britain’ (Harwood & Powers, 2001) set out to share experiences of working life across class and geographical divides. As well as seeking to reflect the diversity of British social life, the Director-General’s reference to a festival ‘by them, by us all’ gestures towards an important undercurrent of ‘action art’ which has been expressed playfully and often spontaneously by successive visitors to the south bank, whether in rehearsal rooms, participatory art activities or through impromptu busking. This tradition of art by the people, rather than for the people, has grown to become an important aspect of efforts to express a collectivist arts practice. While participatory art might not be something instantly associated with William Morris’s commentary on art there is nevertheless a strong connection to his more political work (Morris, 1891), with its romantic, anarcho-Socialist assumptions that the promotion of individual freedoms of work and expression will unlock inner tendencies towards goodness, creativity and social harmony (Kinna, 2000). This monist form of humanism breaks down the boundary between those providing and taking part in art through the promotion of a radically participative democracy and economy.

From Elitism to Grant-Based Mobilisation The political drivers which promoted such freedom of expression contrast with a tradition of elitism and depoliticisation of arts policy in London, and Britain as a whole, which was dominant in the early post-war period. This was perhaps best encapsulated in the Arts Council’s 1946 slogan ‘the best for the most’, which vested curatorial decisions in a tier of arts managers (Bianchini, 1987, p. 103). Bianchini describes a cross-party commitment to delegating decisions about what constitutes cultural value to these supposedly non-political specialists, whose status was derived from a tradition of ‘Labour Welfarism’ (Bianchini, 1987). His example is the Greater London Council’s (GLC’s) Recreation and Community Services

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Committee, which sought ‘to maintain and manage the Southbank Concert Halls as a centre of international standard and by grants to major companies’ and to offer a ‘wide-ranging programme’ reaching ‘the largest number of Londoners’ (report of GLC Recreation and Community Services Policy Committee, 21 June 1977, cited in Bianchini, 1987, p. 104). From the beginning of the 1980s, however, the GLC began to use the arts as part of a wider political communication strategy aimed at projecting ‘the GLC’s image as a progressive, caring, socialist council’ (interview with T. Banks, quoted in Bianchini, 1987, p. 105; see also Lansley et al., 1989). The south bank venues were an important part of this, and their location close to the GLC’s County Hall helped symbolise ‘a Labour local government bridgehead in an economically poorer part of London’ (Bianchini, 1987, p.  104). The GLC increased the budget for open-air entertainment by over 500% between 1980 and 1985 and the foyer of the Royal Festival Hall was kept open after hours from 1983 and used for live music and exhibitions, massively increasing the number of first-time concert attendees. More widely, the GLC established the Ethnic Arts Subcommittee and the Community Arts Subcommittee on a multicultural basis to represent, and ideally politicise, minority groups. It was successful at achieving grassroots control of these committees for as long as it was able to provide grants (Bianchini, 1987) and their ideological legacy can be seen as a strong influence on the LLSB campaign. The approach contrasted starkly with that of the Thatcher government, which received advice that setting up a communities programme to assist black unemployed youth would do little more than ‘subsidise Rastafarian arts and crafts workshops’ and fuel the ‘disco and drug trade’ (Travis, 2015).

The Turn to Consumerism The major policy changes under Thatcher were, however, economic rather than directly racially targeted. Upon the abolition of the GLC in 1986 responsibility for the south bank concert halls was initially transferred to the Arts Council. Then, on 31 March 1988, the Southbank Centre was established as a charity with a board of trustees, albeit continuing to draw a large share of its funding from the Arts Council. The changing governance of the arts reflected the broader agenda under Thatcher of rate capping to denude elected local authorities of funds and undermine the application of resources based on need. Democratically controlled public

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functions were transferred to companies, trusts, charities and co-­operatives with ring-fenced budgets that necessitated more ‘entrepreneurial’ approaches and diversification away from public funding. The initial justification for these changes was that markets would create ‘additionality’, increasing the size of the pie and thus creating ‘more art for more people’. The effect, however, was to modify public goals with the demands of consumers. A case in point is the National Lottery. Introduced with a promise that its funding would be additional, it has ultimately become a substitute for taxation (House of Commons, 2004, paragraph 159). Total public funding for the arts declined by 28% between 2007/2008 and 2015/2016, forcing Arts Council England to support part of its core portfolio with lottery funding (National Campaign for the Arts, 2017). A similar political drive for market dependence led, in 2015, to the transferred management of public heritage assets to English Heritage: a registered charity set up for the purpose. Mainstream taxation now provides just 25% of Southbank Centre’s income (Arts Council England, 2019) signalling, in a sense, a reversal of the welfarist model of providing ‘grants to major companies’ (report of GLC Recreation and Community Services Policy Committee, 21 June 1977, cited in Bianchini, 1987, p. 104). Such changes raise the question of how this growth in consumer influence on arts governance and funding on the south bank has affected the political heritage of its cultural offer. In other words, how does the way the arts are funded affect the nature of the offer? The Southbank Centre’s website tackles this issue head-on, arguing that greater market dependence is not only compatible with, but may even provide opportunities for, their ‘festival approach’: A cornerstone of our festival approach is the integration of commercial entrepreneurship with the arts, which has seen our self-generated income increase steadily over the last five years. Today it makes up 58% of our total income—compared to 43% in 2010—and helps fund our extensive free programme. (Southbank Centre, 2018). The use of cross-subsidy and a free programme is thus presented as a means of dealing constructively with a wider context of rising ticket prices and the ‘gentrification’ of arts audiences (National Campaign for the Arts, 2017, p. 6). One way in which this market liberal reasoning has impacted on the south bank is through the transformation of urban governance, with the emergence of a patchwork of partnerships as a means of brokering links between democratically insulated boards and development partners

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(Jones, 2014). With increased commercialisation, the more antagonistic political history of the 1980s has been downplayed.1 In contrast, Baeten notes an association between the rise of partnership governance and the re-emergence of interest in the Festival of Britain through the ‘festivalisation of the South Bank’ (2000, p.  298), which has been pursued since 2005. The renaming of the Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall and Purcell Room as the ‘Festival Wing’ provided the backdrop for proposals, including the redevelopment of the undercroft, which sought to fund general maintenance by increasing commercial income. Ironically, given the radical influences on the Festival of Britain discussed earlier, the festivalisation of the south bank has been viewed by some as caught up with a broader shift in cultural policy which values those arts that are able to contribute to a consumption-based economy. Indeed, Oakley notes how, during the mid-2000s, arts funding was justified in part by the contribution arts could make to attracting global talent to London and maintaining its status as a major centre for financial services and he paraphrases policy makers: ‘even bankers need a good night out’ (Oakley, 2013, p. 22). Parallels can be seen in the London Mayor’s Cultural Strategy, which argued that ‘London’s buzz and its reputation as a vibrant, youth friendly and exciting city are crucial factors in attracting businesses and their employees, as well as students and tourists’ (Mayor of London, 2014, p. 94). Concerns about the relationship between consumer-driven governance and funding on the Southbank and the nature of the development proposals and cultural offer have been prominent in academic commentary and in campaign messages. Mould’s commentary on the festival wing proposals for a new ‘cultural quarter’, for example, argues that such quarters are: all designed to do the same thing—encourage consumption and spending on what the narrative labels as “culture”, a specific type of culture, one that makes money for investors. Anything that doesn’t form part of that narrative, such as the skate park in its current guise, is being displaced. As such, the cultural provision that the Festival Wing plan foretells seems to narrow the provision of culture, rather than the ‘culture for all’ that their tagline suggests. (Mould, 2014)

The debate is thus framed around whether marketisation is a means of increasing the size of the economic pie for the benefit of all or a means of making culture subservient to capital, with ‘accumulation by

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dispossession’ (D. Harvey, 2004, p. 63) a distinct possibility. Those scholars who have undertaken close ethnographic work on the south bank have tended to moderate Mould’s stance and pursue a more nuanced picture. Jones (2014), for example, found extensive evidence of tolerant approaches to security and management and pro-active approaches to providing participatory art. Emma Street similarly charted evidence of everyday resistances on the Southbank despite efforts to use a consensual, partnership-based approach to remove or quieten political conflicts (Baeten, 2009; see also Street, 2011). On the part of those working for the Southbank Centre, considerable efforts appear to have been made, both to maintain the collectivist ethic of the festival heritage and to stress its dominance over commercial drivers. Deputy Artistic Director Shan Maclennan, writing after the decision to retain the undercroft, thus talks of a mission to provide ‘the unique conditions which allow Southbank Centre—a social space in the true sense—to have potency for the many, to be truly a caring place, a “peoples” place’ (2015, p. 39). For her, this is achieved partly through radical elements of the methodology, which require that learning and participation shape and lead the artistic programme from the beginning … allowing the festival to emerge as a collective effort with unexpected voices and actions often taking centre stage. (p. 38)

None of this, however, reverses underpinning changes in governance and funding which have taken place since the 1980s and it remains to be seen whether these structures will stand up to renewed pressure for commercialisation in the future. The history of arts and culture on the south bank thus reveals elitism and consumerism, as institutional models for organising the delivery of performances to relatively passive audiences, and grant-based mobilisation and ‘action art’ as potentially radical, participatory models. In this context, the growth of interest in reconnecting with the Festival of Britain since 2005 can be seen to have offered festivalisation as a means of generating revenue but also of connecting with elements of a radical past. It was in this context that heritage issues associated with the proposed festival wing redevelopment were raised during 2013.

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Assembling Authenticity: ‘Action Art’ on the South Bank One of the things that are apparent from the section above is that the campaign to save the undercroft entered into an institutional environment littered with competing discourses about the kinds of art which ought to be valued. Central to the LLSB campaign was the isolation of skateboarding as an art form equivalent in status to all other kinds of artistic practice on the south bank. Every single one of the skateboarder campaigners interviewed for the project self-identified as an artist. Furthermore, through a representation of skateboarding and graffiti as art ‘by the people’, LLSB sought to surface a historical undercurrent of action art; one that had been present in the immediate post-war Festival of Britain and made resurgent through the politicisation of ‘ethnic’ communities in the 1980s. The notion of ‘festivalisation’, which had been drawn on to brand the Festival Wing proposals, only served to ensure that the Festival of Britain’s Socialist heritage retained a prominent position within the framing of the ensuing dispute. Skateboarder-campaigners sought to reclaim ownership of a festival heritage by advancing a radically collectivist interpretation of action art as a means of understanding their lived experience of the site. This outlook had become uniform among skateboarders by the time they were interviewed for the research project: a little over six months after the Festival Wing proposals were withdrawn. Furthermore, the interviews provided detailed accounts of a process of community building and collective sense making. These described a process of organisational consolidation, as campaigners unified around a single entity, and of discursive orientation in relation to social and historical influences.

Organisational Consolidation Initially, individual skaters, BMX-ers, dancers, graffiti writers and others had found themselves engaged in developing detailed design proposals through a participatory process co-ordinated by We Are Southbank on behalf of the Southbank Centre. But a gradual loss of faith in this process arose from the realisation that retention of the existing undercroft space was off the table. This prompted many, but not all, to adopt what one campaigner described as a ‘position of no compromise’ (campaign participant one). Activists then gravitated towards those they knew best,

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resulting in the rise of SOS Resistance, Save Our Southbank and Long Live Southbank in addition to the Southbank centre’s formally recognised group We Are Southbank. One participant recalled that: I was like, ‘Look, I think the problem we have is this identity crisis, we need to be one because we can’t be serious to the world if we’re five different organisations’. So … it eventually got consolidated down to the Long Live Southbank and that was the official campaign that was registered and the Southbank, we made that very clear that that’s the organisation that you’re going to deal with, that’s it, we’re not doing anything in bits and pieces. (Campaign participant two)

As well as helping the campaigners to avoid contradicting each other, having a single institutional entity would also go on to provide the basis for a clearer and more united collective understanding of the value of the undercroft. Thus, by the time this research was conducted in 2014, there was a clear and shared understanding of what made the undercroft special.

Discourse and Experience in Dialogue LLSB gained accolades for its work with social media, but activists stressed the primary importance of face-to-face conversations to the campaign, many of which were held around a large trestle table. All interviewees acknowledged how important ‘the table’ was as a place where skaters learned to connect with a diverse stream of passers-by, each of whom had their own memories and senses of what the purpose of the south bank had been and should be. Where social media, press and events work required specific skills and dedication, the table was more inclusive and provided opportunities for even casual skaters to engage with the public as and when it was convenient. Many of the campaign themes arose from these discussions and can be viewed in the short film You Can’t Move History, which was produced from the project’s interviews (https://vimeo. com/146671695). Alongside this work was an extensive programme of events, held in theatres, bars and other cultural venues. These led to a different dynamic, but with dialogue still at the fore. Activists explained how certain individuals came to take on roles attempting to speak for the skateboarding community and also talked of the tensions involved. One participant explained:

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I think there was always a nervousness of because we’re now having to push this story out of the space to a very wide audience are we now almost overselling it or are we eroding some of it, is it going to have a detrimental effect? Those concerns are healthy because you want to make sure you protect your culture in its purest essence, even though it changes and it evolves you want to make sure that you’re looking after it at the same time. (Campaign participant two)

Another talked of the dialogical nature of acting as a spokesperson and the doubts it generated: that was constantly things like, ‘Am I right, is this the right rhetoric, are we doing that?’ But it takes a lot of work, but what it does is it puts you into the mentality of a politician and once you understand it, all it is is spin and all it is is trying to manoeuvre round what someone else is saying to make you look better and the whole back and forth. (Campaign participant one)

Informal conversations confirmed that the slogan ‘more art by more people’ was just one of those generated through this kind of back-and-­ forth relationship with journalists, commentators and Southbank Centre representatives.

The Narratives that Emerged Campaigners had to defend themselves, not only from the proposed redevelopment of the undercroft, but also from arguments that a replacement space under the nearby Hungerford Bridge would be just as good. Their arguments therefore emphasised the close, personal connection between skaters and the undercroft as well as the authenticity of that connection. In talking about the undercroft as their place, skateboarders referred to it variously as ‘base camp’, ‘home’, ‘the vortex’ (campaign participants three, four and five) before expanding on this to talk about the culture of the relationships built there. Skateboarders talked about it as a place of nurture, where problems or grievances were sorted out naturally and where older skaters looked after and helped teach new tricks to younger ones. For skateboarders themselves, there was a strong familial connection to the undercroft. One participant explained that:

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this place teaches you about life, teaches you about people, teaches you how to be a good person, how to be a good human being and how to share a space and just to share yourself with other people and you learn to be confident. The older skaters took me under their wing, like we do with everyone, and they teach you how to skate, that’s the most important thing, but they just teach you the values of skateboarding … Essentially, it’s like a family. (Campaign participant one)

Another emphasised the open and inclusive nature of the community: the ones that don’t fit anywhere else they come down here so this is like the filter for you know all that creativity to come out and this comes out everywhere on the walls and on the slabs in the ground on the cracks and everything, I see that as beautiful. (Campaign participant four)

The other skater participants agreed that the space was largely self-­ organising and free from conflict or discrimination. Those spokespeople, or translators, who were not skaters drew on more starkly communitarian terms to develop ‘relations of exteriority’ with surrounding discourses. One of them describing the situation as a ‘romantic story’ even analogous to an Amazonian tribe: ‘you’ve got an organic big group of people, a community who have no real formal structure and who have no hierarchy or particular leader’ (campaign participant two). These more romantic, anarchic connections were also drawn by two of the skateboarder interviewees, who explicitly self-identifying as anarchists. Finally, for skateboarders who came to prominence as spokespeople in the campaign, speaking at events and translating the campaign message to London audiences, a discourse of ‘organicism’ became prominent. This drew attention to a delicate and incremental growth of relationships between people and places: an informal democracy bringing with it the potential for a symbiotic connection between the skateboarders and the undercroft space. One skater explained it as follows: The self-expression and art I find most interesting and exciting cannot be taken out of its physical context. My favourite busker is a bloke who does really atmospheric live mixes under Elephant and Castle roundabout … For me, such things are beautiful because they come about organically. They are reinterpretations of spaces in a city that would otherwise be dull and unused. (Woodhead, 2015)

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Again, this emphasis on a self-organising, non-hierarchically organised community of skateboarders helped reinforce the significance of the undercroft as a ‘found space’, with an associated special value to the skateboarding community. As one interviewee explained, ‘it was just part of a structure and then that was used in an imaginative way by communities and groups of people that then started to build an association with it and then a passion for it and a symbiotic relationship’ (campaign participant three). The undercroft was therefore not only a magnet for skateboarders; it had also become part of skateboarding culture and vice versa.2 In the words of one interviewee, ‘the place is also within the people’ (campaign participant six). These claims not only served to enmesh the skateboarders as tightly as possible with the specific location that is the undercroft, the ‘spiritual home of skateboarding’, but they also collectively amounted to an expression of skateboarding as action art with a historical consistency and therefore right to be included as part of the ‘natural’ arts offer on the south bank.

An Architectural Investigation of ‘Action Art’ The emergence of the narratives above led some activists, and also some academics, to question how far back these themes could be located in the history of the site. A lack of information about the original purpose of the undercroft prompted speculation about whether its architects had set out to encourage appropriation of space and flexibility of use. Thus, in her investigation of the ‘tangle of seemingly endless walkways, undercrofts and staircases’ (Herring, 2009, p. 1) which originally connected parts of the site, Herring suggested that these reflected a deliberate effort to encourage freedom of exploration by ‘gregarious citizens’ (p. 1). However, Dennis Crompton, one of the architects involved in designing the buildings situated above the undercroft space, ultimately put forward a more functional view of the purpose of the original design. His emphasis was on the purpose of the whole site as being to encourage socialising, being based on the ethic of ‘a big party’. As part of that, he saw a need ‘to design things which are sufficiently flexible and adaptable that they can be put to any use in the future’. When asked about the skateboarding, he said: You know, its action art, its good it’s what the south bank is meant to be about—action art—not that it is particular in any sort of way but if the people there are redefining spaces by their activities then it’s an artistic activ-

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ity and it’s what the whole place is about. Any architecture should be capable of evolution, that’s not particular to this but any architecture should be able to respond to its current uses. (Stakeholder interview)

In summary, then, skateboarders sought to creatively isolate aspects of the south bank’s history, including that drawn from before Crompton’s involvement, that helped them emphasise their consistency with its Socialist festival heritage. In the process, their aim was to re-appropriate the contemporary rhetoric of festivalisation. More generously it could be said that an element of self-actualisation took place. In a sense, the skateboarders literally became the living heritage of a south bank political ideal. For the skater-campaigners, then, a discourse of action art helped them situate their everyday experiences in relation to a radical history of artistic thinking and arts policy on the south bank, contesting the discourse of festivalisation which had grown out of efforts to compromise between the area’s Socialist cultural heritage and the demands of neoliberal governance. In contrast with this, the rise of interest in action art was allied with the arrival of the skaters’ position of ‘no compromise’ on proposals to relocate the undercroft space. Action art was not only useful in giving the campaign historical pedigree, it also helped tie together the cultural and material aspects of the undercroft by emphasising the importance of their symbiotic development. A community rooted in place and in history could not simply be granted a new home by others. In this sense the undercroft became, not just a place to free-skate as understood by the older skaters who had been engaged in experimentation with the relationship between people and place, but a full-blown alternative community: a ‘tribe’ with its own cultures and traditions handed down over generations. This is as a heritage discourse that, while linked relationally to Morris’s monist and humanist form of anarchism, can be located more deeply within an organicist tradition of symbiosis and harmonious order (Matless, 1998).

Implications for Conservation Practice This chapter has developed the literature on authenticity, arguing for an extension beyond narrow, materialistic framings to encompass intangible practices, including everyday experiences and emotions. More than this, the chapter has emphasised the value of reading authenticity as something which is fluid and constructed in relation to historically situated political struggle. This reading emphasises that authenticity is never just an internal

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process within a hermetically sealed community with a given history. Rather, it is a contested process that is situated in relation to a wider array of discursive forces, each with their own situated histories. Despite this emphasis on the need for a situated reading, policy makers in government and civic society sectors all advanced more universalist understandings of authenticity on the south bank. The terms of English Heritage guidance (English Heritage, 2012) were drawn on by the mayor’s Senior Cultural Officer who argued that the skaters had earned a right to use the undercroft by creating social and communal value there (Cooper, 2014). This liberal pluralist position recognises diversity and is based on values of tolerance and co-existence. But it compartmentalises notions of value, seeing the undercroft’s value as accruing directly to its community of skateboarders and street artists, albeit shared with those observing them. By contrast, our skateboarder-campaigners reached for a political history capable of territorialising skateboarding within a struggle for communitarian Socialism on the south bank that also became a struggle to determine its political ‘soul’. Universalistic notions of authenticity were also advanced by the representatives of two civic society organisations approached as part of the study. Both representatives explained how the concerns which framed their representations on the planning application were bound up with the guiding rationale for founding their organisations, which emphasised the innate reality, and therefore authenticity, of a building’s physical fabric. As one interviewee put it: ‘my organisation focuses on architectural preservation, here the real object is what’s important and you don’t know what you might lose if that was destroyed’ (consultee interviewee one). An interviewee from the second organisation, while noting the centrality of a ‘minimum loss of fabric and so of romance and authenticity’ (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 2009, adapted from Morris & Webb, 1877) in their organisation’s manifesto, emphasised the inherently subjective and reflective nature of conservation work. She stressed the freedom of heritage lobbyists in being able to attend to such issues as patina, mood and atmosphere, whereas architectural history can be ‘quite anti-septic, sort of black and white’ and government-funded advice ‘has to be objective because it’s a corporate view, and that view has to be consistent across the country’. Such freedom was nevertheless always tied back to a view of a building’s life through history. In many ways these views could be said simply to reflect the terms of a well-recognised ‘authorised heritage discourse’ (Smith, 2006), which

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legitimises the claims of statutory heritage consultees. However, they also illustrate how the legacy of William Morris can be constructed to legitimise divergent claims to authenticity. As David Harvey argues: heritage heroes such as William Morris, for instance, can be placed not as elements of an inevitable sequence of growing heritage concern, nor even in the context of their own time, but in the context of our needs and yearnings for a specific past and our desires for a particular future. (D.  C. Harvey, 2008, pp. 20–21)

The act of laying claim to one or other of these histories is therefore not just a matter of resorting to the ‘real’ of an authenticity found alive within a social grouping and place setting but entails a popular, and inevitably ethical, choice based on a sense of the goodness or virtue of a particular authenticity at a given time (Ferdinand et al., 2007; Hillier, 2013; Latour, 2010). Furthermore, and crucially for assemblage theorists, it must be one that does useful work in relation to exterior or competing constructions. In staking their claim to the future of the south bank, campaigners drew on, among other things, the distributed memories and lingering atmosphere of the south bank as a site of political activism and resistance, insinuating their present-day relevance and significance. Such claims lie far from the relatively ossified premises of heritage objectors. How can the success of the LLSB campaign be understood, then, when viewed within the context of surrounding discourses of liberal pluralism and authorised heritage? It would be wrong to imply that the success of the LLSB campaign was inevitable, but the use of a discourse of action art to tap into and invigorate a latent sense of the political significance of the south bank was seen by campaigners as central to its ability to mobilise people. Such observations might point to a need for new ways of working for heritage practitioners that go beyond a willingness to recognise the legitimacy of alternative constructions of an authentic relationship between people and place. The LLSB example illustrates the potential to locate a politically entangled history of a place within both its everyday use and the imaginations of those who came into contact with it. The work of campaigners in excavating and promoting a history of action art in points to a divergent, radical and progressive form of heritage practice not tied to ossified discourses of authenticity but able to re-imagine authenticity through a dialogical relationship with aspects of the political past. For today’s practitioners this could mean not seeking to ‘dig up’ or ‘re-enact’

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the past but rather to engage consciously in a creative process of making future pasts of utility to later generations. Such a project is fragile, under-­ developed and remains to be tested in areas with a political history that is weaker and less symbolic than the south bank’s. Nevertheless, it offers a way of rethinking what the future value of heritage practice may be and an opportunity to break free from the strictures of rigid heritage and planning practice.

Notes 1. See, for example, the omission of the 1980s in a decade-by-decade rundown of the south bank’s history offered by South Bank London, the ‘destination brand promoting London’s South Bank’. Although Billy Bragg’s appearance at the ‘Big Busk’ on the Royal Festival Hall foyer in 2012 did imply links to the 1980s, Bragg used this to argue that commercial redevelopment of the undercroft was necessary to realising the Southbank Centre’s vision for the area. 2. This emphasis on symbiosis and an organic relationship between people and place has similarities with Matless’s research on organicist attitudes towards rural landscapes, where the intimate connections between people and the earth are emphasised partly in order to distinguish a particular attitude towards the landscape and aversion to intervention by centralised forms of management.

References Arts Council England. (2019). About us. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/ about-­us-­0 Baeten, G. (2000). From Community Planning to Partnership Planning. Urban Regeneration and Shifting Power Geometries on the South Bank, London. GeoJournal, 51(4), 293–300. https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1012236328008 Baeten, G. (2009). Regenerating the South Bank: Reworking Community and the Emergence of Post-Political Regeneration. In R. Imrie, L. Lees, & M. Raco (Eds.), Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City. Routledge. Bianchini, F. (1987). GLC R.I.P. Cultural Policies in London. New Formations, 1(1), 103–117. Callon, M., & Law, J. (2004). Introduction: Absence—Presence, Circulation, and Encountering in Complex Space. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 22(1), 3–11. https://doi.org/10.1068/d313 Cooper, A. (Writer). (2014). Graffiti Sessions.

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De Landa, M. (2006). A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity. Continuum. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1977). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Viking Press. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. l. (2004). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Continuum. English Heritage. (2012). Decision summary. https://www.heritagegateway.org. uk/Gateway/Results_Single.aspx?uid=1410383&resourceID=7 Ferdinand, J., Pearson, G., Rowe, M., & Worthington, F. (2007). A Different Kind of Ethics. Ethnography, 8(4), 519–543. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1466138107083566 Gao, Q., & Jones, S. (2020). Authenticity and Heritage Conservation: Seeking Common Complexities Beyond the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ Dichotomy. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13527258.2020.1793377 Harrison, R. (2013). Heritage: Critical Approaches. Milton Park, Abingdon; New York, Routledge. Harvey, D. (2004). The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession. Socialist Register, 40, 63–87. Harvey, D. C. (2008). The History of Heritage. In B. J. Graham & P. Howard (Eds.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (pp. 19–36). Ashgate. Harwood, E., & Powers, A. (2001). Festival of Britain. Twentieth Century Society. Herring, E. (2009). The Southbank: An Invitation to Participate. Available at http:// arts.brighton.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/44827/18_Ellie-Herring_ The-Southbank-An-Invitation-to-Participate.pdf [accessed 5/10/2021]. Hillier, J. (2013). More Than Meat: Rediscovering the Cow Beneath the Face in Urban Heritage Practice. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 31(5), 863–878. https://doi.org/10.1068/d6812 Holtorf, C. (2012). The Heritage of Heritage. Heritage & Society, 5(2), 153–174. https://doi.org/10.1179/hso.2012.5.2.153 House of Commons. (2004). Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport— Fifth Report. Jones, A. (2014). On South Bank: The Production of Public Space. Ashgate. Kinna, R. (2000). William Morris: Art, Work, and Leisure. Journal of the History of Ideas, 61(3), 493–512. https://doi.org/10.2307/3653925 Lansley, S., Goss, S., & Wolmar, C. (1989). Councils in Conflict: The Rise and Fall of the Municipal Left. Macmillan. Latour, B. (2010). On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Duke University Press. Law, A., & Chen, X. (2019). ‘Absent-Present’ Heritage: The Cultural Heritage of Dwelling on the Changjian (Yangtze) River. In C.  Hein (Ed.), Adaptive

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Strategies for Water Heritage: Past, Present and Future (pp.  273–290). Springer Open. Lewicka, M. (2011). Place Attachment: How Far have We Come in the Last 40 Years? Journal of Environmental Psychology, 31, 207–230. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2010.10.001 Maccarthy, F. (2014). Anarchy and Beauty: William Morris and His Legacy 1860–1960. National Portrait Gallery Publications. Madgin, R., Webb, D., Ruiz, P., & Snelson, T. (2018). Resisting Relocation and Reconceptualising Authenticity: The Experiential and Emotional Values of the Southbank Undercroft, London, UK. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 24(6), 585–598. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2017.1399283 Matless, D. (1998). Landscape and Englishness. Reaktion. Mayor of London. (2014). Cultural Metropolis. The Mayor’s Culture Strategy— Achievements and Next Steps. https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/ files/cultural_metropolis_2014.pdf McLennan, S. (2015). Case Study: Southbank Centre London and the Social Utility of the Arts. In S. Clift & P. M. Camic (Eds.), Oxford Textbook of Creative Arts, Health, and Wellbeing: International Perspectives on Practice, Policy and Research (1st ed.). Oxford University Press. Merrill, S. (2015). Keeping it Real? Subcultural Graffiti, Street Art, Heritage and Authenticity. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 21(4), 369–389. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2014.934902 Morris, W. (1891). News from Nowhere or, an Epoch of Rest: Being some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Reeves & Turner. Morris, W., & Webb, P. (1877). https://www.spab.org.uk/about-us/ spab-manifesto Mould, O. (2014). Intervention—‘The Southbank and the Skaters: The Cultural Politics of Subversion’. Antipode, February. National Campaign for the Arts. (2017). Arts index 2007–2016. https://forthearts.org.uk/publications/arts-­index-­2007-­2016/ Oakley, K. (2013). A Different Class: Politics and Culture in London. In C. Grodach & D. Silver (Eds.), The Politics of Urban Cultural Policy: Global Perspectives. Routledge. Pendlebury, J. (2008). Conservation in the Age of Consensus. Routledge. Pendlebury, J. (2013). Conservation Values, the Authorised Heritage Discourse and the Conservation-Planning Assemblage. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19(7), 709–727. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2012.700282 Ruiz, P., Snelson, T., Madgin, R., & Webb, D. (2019). ‘Look at What We Made’: Communicating Subcultural Value on London’s Southbank. Cultural Studies, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/09502386.2019.1621916

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Schofield, J., & Rellensmann, L. (2015). Underground Heritage: Berlin Techno and the Changing City. Heritage & Society, 8(2), 111–138. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/2159032X.2015.1126132 Sissons, M., & French, P. (1964). Age of Austerity, 1945–51. Oxford University Press. Smith, L. (2006). Uses of Heritage. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings. (2009). SPAB’s Purpose (pp. 1–2). SPAB. Song, J. (2020). Global Tokyo: Heritage, Urban Redevelopment and the Transformation of Authenticity. Palgrave Macmillan. Southbank Centre. (2018). Governance. https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/ about/what-we-do/governance Strathern, M. (1991). Partial Connections. Rowman and Littlefield. Street, E. (2011). (Re)shaping the South Bank: The (Post)politics of Sustainable Place-Making. Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading, Reading. Tiwari, S. R. (2017). Material Authenticity and Conservation Traditions in Nepal. In K.  Weiler & N.  Gutschow (Eds.), Authenticity in Architectural Heritage Conservation: Discourses, Opinions, Experiences in Europe, South and East Asia (pp. 169–184). Springer International Publishing. Travis, A. (2015). Oliver Letwin Blocked Help for Black Youth after 1985 Riots. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/dec/30/ oliver-­letwin-­blocked-­help-­for-­black-­youth-­after-­1985-­riots Uitermark, J. (2005). The Genesis and Evolution of Urban Policy: A Confrontation of Regulationist and Governmentality Approaches. Political Geography, 24(2), 137–163. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2004.07.009 Woodhead, L. (2015). Organic Evolution. http://www.llsb.com/category/ blog/ [accessed 28/4/2015]. Zhang, Y. (2018). Negotiating Authenticity in China’s Urban Historic Preservations—The Case of the Kuan and Zhai Alleys in Chengdu. Heritage & Society, 11(2), 79–104. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159032X.2019.1587968

CHAPTER 6

Imagining Heritage Beyond Proprietorship, Contesting Dispossession Beyond the Power-­Resistance Binary: Occupy-Style Protests in Turkey, 2013–2014 Eray Çaylı

Introduction The official-institutional ways in which heritage is regulated and managed have intimately linked it to proprietorship. Cultural policies on both national and global scales imply that heritage is property that embodies culture as possessed by purportedly monolithic collectives (e.g., ‘the nation’ or ‘humanity’) each imagined as an individual proprietor (Handler, 1985; Handler, 1988; Handler, 1991; Coombe, 1997; Flessas, 2003). As Tunbridge and Ashworth have shown, ‘heritage is someone’s heritage and therefore logically not someone else’s: the original meaning of an inheritance implies the existence of disinheritance and by extension any creation

E. Çaylı (*) European Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_6

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of heritage from the past disinherits someone completely or partially, actively or potentially’ (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1995, p. 21). Heritage, then, is inherently exclusionary. Yet the very mechanism of exclusion that characterizes heritage in the official-institutional mode also defines today the lived experience of a growing part of the world’s population. Precarious working conditions, radical alterations in the use, disposition and physical layout of built and natural environments in both rural and urban areas, climate change, and armed conflict across the globe operate in interrelated ways to exclude ever greater numbers of people from experiences of safety and security for increasingly longer periods of time (Elliott & Atkinson, 1998; Standing, 2011). While this exclusion has not been altogether caused but has only crystallized due to events in this century (Ingram & Dodds, 2009), the social reaction to it has recently become more visibly unified and consolidated in the particular form of collective and bodily claim to public space that is now widely known as Occupy-style protest (Butler, 2011). In 2013–2014, Turkey saw such protest take place in two sites that various actors have listed, nominated, and/or considered as heritage—Gezi Park in Istanbul and Hewsel Gardens in Amed (officially, in Turkish: Diyarbakır)—and in both cases, the heritage quality associated with each site and the various kinds of exclusion being confronted by the protesters figured in interrelated ways. In what follows I study these ways to question the intimate link between proprietorship and heritage. I focus especially on questions concerning temporality and human-nonhuman relations whose conventional understandings have been key to this link. I argue that the protesters have mobilized, rather than just combat, the exclusionary nature of heritage, challenging the disempowerment, agency deprivation, and political immobilization associated with dispossession. This calls for a close and nuanced attention to the myriad relations between belonging and heritage, not all of which adhere to the conventions that underpin proprietorship-based understandings of heritage—especially those concerning the actors and temporalities involved in heritage production, use, and management. The empirical insights I discuss here derive from a number of extended interactions and engagements I have had with the two sites being discussed. Amed is a city where I carried out fieldwork in 2012. The initial research focus that took me there was the politics of violence rather than that of ecology. But, throughout my time in the city, I became increasingly attuned to the intimate link between the two, and eventually got to know

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activists engaged in the politics of ecology. During and after the 2014 protests, I continued my conversation with some of these activists through personal exchanges online. Istanbul’s Gezi Park, on the other hand, is a site I frequently visited during the first two weeks of the 2013 protests, therefore having the opportunity to observe first-hand heritage’s significance to them. Originally an Istanbulite myself and having studied at Istanbul Technical University’s School of Architecture located right next to the park, I had many personal acquaintances, friends, and past and future academic collaborators among the protesters, who continued to share their insights with me even after I returned to London, where I have worked and lived since 2011.

Inheriting Dispossession It is possible to narrate the public protests that Istanbul witnessed in the early days of summer 2013 as a contestation between different notions of heritage (de Cesari & Herzfeld, 2015, p. 172). Gezi Park, the epicentre of the protests, is part of a larger urban heritage site (ibid., p. 173). The bulldozer that triggered the protests by attempting to uproot trees in the park was operating as part of a government-endorsed redevelopment of Gezi and the neighbouring Taksim Square. This redevelopment was expected to include the in situ reconstruction of nineteenth-century military barracks demolished in the 1940s when the park was being built. The barracks was referred to by members of the government as ‘historical heritage’ ̇ (Çufaoğlu, 2013) and indeed officially listed as such in 2012 (Ince, 2014). Once reconstructed it would reportedly serve as a luxury residential and retail complex (Üzüm, 2013). The protesters, who gathered on 27 May to stop the works and occupied Gezi until 15 June when the park was finally and forcibly evacuated, included members of Nor Zartonk. This is an activist group consisting of Turkey’s Armenians—a community which, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was subject to various episodes of organized and state-endorsed violence, dispossession, and displacement culminating in the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and 1916 (Uğur, 2011; Çaylı, 2015). Nor Zartonk’s tents were accompanied by symbolic gravestones made of Styrofoam (Fig. 6.1) that referred to their heritage and read ‘You took away our cemetery but you will not be able to take away our park!’ The slogan referred to the Armenian cemetery that used to be located just across the street from Gezi Park until the 1940s when it began to be gradually taken over by buildings significant to the

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Fig. 6.1  Nor Zartonk’s symbolic gravestones set up at Gezi Park, June 2013, Sayat Tekir

then burgeoning nation-state project (Fig. 6.1), including the state radio headquarters, a social club for military personnel, and some of Istanbul’s first luxury hotels (Polatel et al., 2012, pp. 239–241; Watenpaugh, 2013). In their fieldnotes on the Gezi protests, Alice von Bieberstein and Nora Tataryan (2013) propose to consider Nor Zartonk’s intervention in light of Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s conversations on dispossession. According to Butler and Athanasiou (2013), one can speak of two distinct notions of dispossession that pertain to justice-seeking activism. The first concerns ‘the predicament of being moved by what one sees, feels, and comes to know’ in turn to ‘find oneself transported […] into a social world in which one is not the centre’ (ibid., p. xi). It is this sort of

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dispossession that prompts one to act and resist together with others ‘to demand the end of injustice’ (ibid.). What often underpins the ‘injustice’ in question indicates the second notion of dispossession: ‘the systematic dispossession of peoples through forced migration, unemployment, homelessness, occupation, and conquest’ (ibid.). Linking the two notions, Butler and Athanasiou then ask, ‘how to become dispossessed of the sovereign self and enter into forms of collectivity to oppose forms of dispossession that systematically jettison populations from modes of collective belonging and justice’ (ibid.)? Key to this question is a rethinking of the experience of vulnerability which results from various cases of dispossession. The contemporary pervasiveness of this experience, while highly varied in each case, calls for a shift in the way vulnerability is understood: from a disempowering deprivation into a common ground from which to seek new political alliances (ibid., pp.  1–5 and pp.  158–163; cf. Butler, 2004a, b): [T]here must be another way to enact vulnerability, without becoming socially dead from political destitution or subjecting others to a life of social death. This other way to live requires […] a world in which collective means are found to protect […] vulnerability without precisely eradicating it. (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 158)

There are at least two instances in Gezi in which the early twentieth-­ century restructuring of the area where the park is located is implicated today by certain groups of actors as having led to dispossession: the nineteenth-­century military barracks the governing authorities wished to rebuild, and the former Armenian cemetery remembered by the Nor Zartonk activists. However, the way each group dealt with past dispossession in the present is radically divergent. The heritage-listing of the barracks, and its in situ reconstruction to serve as an exclusive asset and a space of consumption that would boost a particular idea of economic development (Watenpaugh, 2013), amount to a tit-for-tat strategy of overcoming vulnerability at the expense of inflicting new vulnerabilities on others. Nor Zartonk’s symbolic gravestones, on the other hand, did not demand a physical restoration of the past but drew an analogy between the community’s historical dispossession of the cemetery and other sorts of dispossession likely to occur in this part of town due to its potential redevelopment by the authorities. The latter approach, then, is a mobilization of vulnerability rather than its annihilation, and a prompting of the

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convergence between one’s own vulnerability and that of others. Also noteworthy in this respect are the materiality and aesthetics of Nor Zartonk’s intervention. The Styrofoam, of which the symbolic gravestone was made, and the physical changes this material afforded over the course of the protests stand in stark contrast to the illusion of eternity that characterizes many an officially endorsed architectural enterprise of heritage production such as the barracks. The intervention could therefore be argued to have mobilized vulnerability not just discursively but also materially.

Mobilizing Vulnerability Through Heritage in Multiple Directions Across Time Taking the past literally versus considering it analogically to the present, and pursuing permanence versus employing temporariness: the differences between these approaches draw attention to the role of temporality in negotiating dispossession. I would like to attend to this role by way of Sarah Keenan’s concept of ‘subversive property’ (2010). This concept, in Keenan’s words, concerns less ‘the proper(tied) subject’ than an ever-­ changing relation of belonging ‘held up by the surrounding space’, which can form ‘between a part and a whole’ as well as ‘between a subject and an object’ (ibid., pp.  423–424). In developing this concept, Keenan has rethought the temporal underpinnings of conventional understandings of property. In her words: Property produces linear time by contouring space such that particular objects and bodies (or, objects and bodies coming from a particular trajectory) are likely to continue on in their position in the future. […] Subversive property disrupts the linear time produced by hegemonic networks of belonging. Through introducing things that do not belong or bodies that are not properly oriented, subversive property interferes with the long alignment of braided durations that constitute the proprietal link between past, present and future. (ibid., pp. 434–438)

As indicated in the previous section, in Gezi the barracks project was characterized by a linear structuring of national time in both its morphological teleportation of a nineteenth-century building to the twenty-first century and its serving a particular idea of economic progress. Nor Zartonk’s intervention, however, highlighted not only the fact that

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progress is selective as it requires the exclusion of certain social groups but also that such exclusions are manifold and continue to take place. In so doing it aimed to weave a temporally multidirectional network upheld by the space of Gezi Park to bring together those left out at various points along what dominant narratives may implicate as the nation’s progress.1 Nonlinearity, moreover, characterizes also the intervention’s methodology itself. This methodology challenges the idea that, in justice-seeking activism through heritage, the relation between the dispossession and (re)possession of heritage-as-property need always be construed as a binary opposition and thus as a teleological trajectory that ought to progress from the former to the latter.2 Alongside the linear time of national progress, there are two further sorts of temporality to be accounted for when discussing Gezi in light of dispossession. One of these is of a scale below national time, and the other, above. The first one pertains to day-to-day interaction and succession, which Michael Herzfeld has called ‘social time’ (1991). The second temporality concerns the impending Istanbul earthquake, which could be considered an example of ‘planetary time’ (Nixon, 2011, p. 69). The reason why these two temporalities were at work in Gezi has to do with the comprehensive and legally stipulated physical transformation of urban Turkey that has been underway since 2012. Passed on May 16 that year was ‘the Law (no. 6306) on the Transformation of Areas under Disaster Risk’ (henceforth referred to by its more popular agnomen ‘the Disaster Law’), which proclaimed to disaster-proof the country’s building stock. A detailed discussion of this law is beyond the scope of this essay (Özkan Eren & Özçevik, 2015). But suffice it to say that the Disaster Law’s definition of purview is so expansive as to be able to potentially subject any acre in Turkey to redevelopment, since the law has implications for not just the buildings and areas it designates as ‘risky’ but also the zones it identifies as ‘safe’ for new settlement.3 The Disaster Law has therefore been criticized for serving government-endorsed ‘ideological, political and economic interests’ such as the centralization of power, spatial redistribution of urban populations, managing of conflicts in cities, and reorganization of land-based interest groups (ibid., p. 221).4 Moreover, the law has implications for the everyday lives of millions, as flat-owners whose property is located in a building or area subject to redevelopment under the Disaster Law are left with two choices: either to have their property expropriated if they refuse to agree with fellow residents or neighbours on the terms of their building’s transformation, or to engage in intense negotiation,

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surveying, and market study to try and stretch those terms as much as possible (Parmaksızoğlu, 2014). According to Donna Houston (2013), disasters cause planetary time and social time to overlap one another; whereas these events are often taken for granted as belonging to a domain above and beyond ordinary people’s lives (whether to the objective world of hard science or to the metaphysical realm of the divine), when they do take place, the fact that they are experienced in vastly uneven ways by different social groups renders explicit their socio-political character (see also Smith, 2006; Swyngedouw, 2011). It is this sort of overlap upon which Houston has built her notion of ‘environmental justice for the Anthropocene, […] a project that materially and imaginatively situates environmental crisis in everyday terms, as something that we live with and strive to transform’ (Houston, 2013, p. 440). The Disaster Law and its consequences, however, demonstrate the flipside to this conflation of planetary time and social time. If the law’s triggering a radical restructuring of the city on the grounds of earthquake risk has proponed and protracted, through architectural means, the folding and unfolding of material space that would otherwise be caused instantly and in an unknown future by tectonic plates (Fig.  6.2),5 this quantitative conflation of planetary and social time has remained devoid of the qualitative counterpart required for a project such as Donna Houston’s.6 Its political potential has been channelled into a teleological structuring of time through property, whether in the form of government-endorsed narratives of a safer Turkey (Özkan Eren & Özçevik, 2015) or in that of private struggles, ambitions, and visions for capital accumulation.7 However, the Gezi protests, which took place at a time when the Disaster Law’s physical and social impact had already begun to materialize, saw an altogether different mobilization of the risk of disaster. Foremost among the reasons why the protesters wanted to stop the bulldozers was the fact that the park is one of the last remaining green spaces in Istanbul’s touristic and cultural centre, and, in that, the only site that can serve as emergency assembly area and field hospital in the case of the earthquake that is said to be imminent in Istanbul (Gedik, 2013). The contradiction between the government’s endorsement of the Disaster Law and their hostility towards Gezi was obvious to an activist, a photographer in her late twenties, who remarked that ‘they are great at abusing the risk of earthquake for gentrification but oblivious to how indispensable places like Gezi are in times of disaster’.8 According to another protester, a

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Fig. 6.2  Satellite image indicating the former Armenian cemetery (blue) and military barracks (pink) in relation to today’s Gezi Park and its environs, Eray Çaylı

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commercial agent in his early thirties, ‘people proved in Gezi that, in case of disaster, they’re likely to organize much better than the state’.9 Another activist, a high school teacher in his early forties, remarked that ‘the tents and the solidarity in Gezi reminded me of August 17th [referring here to the 7.6-magnitude earthquake of 1999  in northwestern Turkey]. […] Also, we saw, and showed, how vital such a place is in case of disaster, and how it can serve to shelter thousands’.10 The General Secretary of the Istanbul Branch of the Turkish Association of Architects Mücella Yapıcı, who was among the protesters, drew a similar analogy when she said of the protests, ‘in fact, we were using the park as if to carry out an earthquake drill’ (Gedik, 2013). Not only does this sort of incorporating the planetary within the everyday mobilize, rather than seek to overcome, vulnerability. It also envisages the human-nonhuman dynamics (Latour, 1990; Latour, 1994; Latour, 2005) involved in relations of belonging as one of mutual dependence rather than as a hierarchy of people above artefacts that reduces the latter to passive tools of capital accumulation along a linear temporal trajectory.

Rethinking the Conventions of Proprietorship-Based Heritage What forms of belonging other than those that involve a hierarchy between human and nonhuman actors could be enabled, then, by negotiating heritage through dispossession? I would like to explore this question through a second case from contemporary Turkey: that of the Tigris Valley in the southeastern city of Amed. This city is the heartland of the northern quarter of the socio-political geography of Kurdistan which is scattered across four countries: Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria (Dahlman, 2002, pp. 271–299). Since the mid-1980s, northern Kurdistan (or southeastern Turkey)11 has been the setting of intense armed conflict between the Kurdish Workers Party PKK and the Turkish Armed Forces. While throughout the 1980s and 1990s the PKK sought to establish an independent Kurdish nation-state through military offensive, over the past decade they have shifted to pursuing, through self-defence, a project of democratic autonomy within a federal Republic of Turkey (Akkaya & Jongerden, 2013a; Akkaya & Jongerden, 2013b). In 2009 the jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan started unofficial peace talks with the state, which have

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also been accompanied by a truce, constituting what is now popularly known as ‘the resolution process’ (Başer, 2014). This process, which has decelerated violence in Turkey’s southeast, has also made a substantial impact on the built environment. Using the ceasefire as an opportunity to consolidate both military and civilian infrastructure, the state has embarked on a set of projects including high-­security military outposts dubbed kalekol (‘castle-station’), hydropower dams, and airports (International Crisis Group, 2014). But new construction activity in the region has not been limited to state-sponsored projects. During my fieldwork in Amed, most controversial among the new projects was a private housing estate atop Mount Kırklar in the Tigris Valley. The name of this hill comes from the number forty (in Turkish: kırk) and refers to the forty Christian saints to whose memory a church is believed to have been built here in the fifth century (Tuncer, 2002, pp. 14 and 145; van Berchem et al., 1910, p. 166; Akyüz, 2011, p. 23; Abakay, 2012). Mount Kırklar has, therefore, long been considered sacred in Amed but all the more so by Syriac Christians, a community from this region whose local population has significantly decreased after successive episodes of violence, forced migration, and dispossession from the late nineteenth century onwards.12 The controversy around this housing project was heightened due to the diversity of the stakeholders involved, who have included not just the sort of people the locals have come to identify as adversaries, such as retired military personnel and businessmen with close ties to the state, but also actors from the pro-Kurdish political movement, such as the municipality (who after all had to authorize the construction) and people affiliated with the PKK (Doğan, 2014; Demir, 2014; Aslan & Bulut, 2014). At one point during my fieldwork it was even rumoured, perhaps to boost presales, that Abdullah Öcalan would move to this estate as soon as he is freed at the end of the resolution process. I also observed that the Mount Kırklar project had begun to cause internal conflict within the pro-­Kurdish movement. This was evidenced most significantly by a critical investigation into the housing project conducted and written by a journalist working for the pro-Kurdish media agency ANF News, which was censored almost immediately after its being published on the agency’s website.13 The year that followed my fieldwork, 2013 witnessed two important developments regarding the Tigris Valley. First, it was nominated as a UNESCO World Heritage site. Soon after the nomination, however, the state opened the valley to potential redevelopment under the Disaster Law.14 This catalysed the construction activity in the area that was already

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in the making, such as the building of an upscale restaurant and an attempt to restructure as ‘recreational area’ the centuries-old Hewsel Gardens (in Kurdish: Baxçeyên Hewselê) just across the river from Mount Kırklar (Yüksel, 2015). As the medium of violence shifted—from armed conflict between two clearly defined camps to environmental destruction by architectural construction whose stakeholders crisscrossed the political spectrum—voices of opposition began to be raised much more loudly in late 2013. Local activists protested at the Mount Kırklar estate and the nearby luxury restaurant, likening these developments to the military outposts the state has ̇ been building elsewhere in the region (DIHA, 2014a, b, c). Similar analogies were also drawn at a three-week Occupy-style protest which took place in Hewsel Gardens and referenced the Gezi events of a few months ̇ back (Yavuz, 2014; IHA, 2014; Daş, 2014). Many of the protesters as well as politicians from across the political spectrum who acknowledged the damage done by construction activity in the Tigris Valley suggested that supporting the valley’s World Heritage site bid required the demolition of such a project as the Mount Kırklar flats (Rûspî, 2015a). Conversely, the members of an eco-activist group named Bûka Baranê, who also participated in the related protests, developed a proposal to preserve the flats for use as ecological village to house Amed’s urban poor and its refugees from neighbouring war-torn Syria. The reasoning behind the activists’ proposal rested not only on the fact that demolition is as unjustly lucrative and environmentally harmful a process as construction, but also on a materialist genealogy of the project. In their spokesperson’s own words: The urban-ecological damage caused by the project is irreversible: sand was quarried from the sandpits in the Tigris Valley that have verged on eradicating the valley’s habitat; cement was produced by carving into the region’s mountains and polluting its air; iron, ceramics, copper, and aluminium were extracted from the area and transported into the construction site by carbon-­ emitting trucks; all of these materials were channeled into construction through a labor-intensive process. Demolishing the flats will not only lay waste to all this material and labor, but will also create a huge radioactive landfill—and will do so before the eyes of hundreds of homeless citizens and refugees. (Rûspî, 2015b)

Those seeking to protect the valley’s heritage quality by likening the flats to military outposts and demanding their demolition mobilized a

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notion of political belonging based on the framework of a long-standing power struggle. In simpler terms, their message was that one belongs with the state if one supports or overlooks such projects. In proposing to preserve the flats, Bûka Baranê, on the other hand, shifted focus to the vulnerability of those in direst need. The pro-demolition approach, moreover, meant to maintain many of the conventions inherent to proprietorship-­ based belonging—such as the human-nonhuman hierarchy that implicates the latter as inferior to the former—as it did not account for the possibility that belonging might be imagined as a relation between artefacts without necessarily the involvement of people. Bûka Baranê’s proposal to preserve the flats instead understood belonging as a temporally multidirectional relation among non-living matter (a materialist genealogy of the flats demonstrates they belong in the valley) as well as one between people and artefacts (the flats also belong to those in direst need).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that the protests that took place in 2013 and 2014 at two heritage-quality sites in Turkey, Istanbul’s Gezi Park and Amed’s Hewsel Gardens, mobilized an acute awareness of historical forms of heritage dispossession. In so doing, the protesters laid claims on material space towards contesting emergent forms of dispossession. Their understanding of heritage—the object of dispossession in this case—was not limited to a notion of property owned by a particular proprietor. This in turn meant that contesting heritage dispossession would not amount to aiming to secure its repossession in the form of such a property. Rather than pursue an unconditional idea of proprietorship-as-belonging, the protests mobilized vulnerability and exclusion as a common ground from which to operate in multiple directions across time to contest emergent forms of dispossession. This mobilization has important implications for the dualisms whose conventional understandings underpin heritage-as-­ proprietorship—such as possession versus dispossession, security versus vulnerability, and humans versus nonhumans. It demonstrates that, in an increasingly volatile age, the taken-for-granted hierarchies involved in these dualisms—especially, the strict association of socio-political agency with only the first half of each dualism—ought to be rethought as temporally and spatially contingent. The entangled ways in which the protesters both mobilized and contested dispossession speak directly to this edited volume’s focus on

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heritage and resistance. To echo, Massey (2005), the struggle over urban space in the global neoliberal era unfolds in ways irreducible to a binary opposition between forms of power and resistance that pre-exist political work. Heritage situated in urban contexts is no exception. This is not to argue that there is no polarization between power and resistance. On the contrary, polarization does exist and is vital. It is to say that to map this polarization neatly onto one between possession and dispossession is to deprive emergent resistance discourses and practices of the political agency they wield against power. As this chapter has shown, the political work of resistance through heritage may lay a claim to being dispossessed without necessarily aiming for possession in the conventional sense, imagined as involving an individual proprietor even when the owner is a collective. Critical analysis of resistance through heritage must, then, attend to the political agency available in so doing. It must avoid limiting the horizon of dispossession-based resistance to the long-established and pervasive notion of heritage-as-possession and possession-as-power. Acknowledgements  I would like to thank the organizers and participants of three academic events where the thoughts presented in this chapter were aired and debated: the symposium ‘Protest, Refuge, Conflict: Spatial, Material and Visual Implications Across the Middle East and North Africa’ held on 22 May 2015 at the History of Art Department, University College London; the colloquium ‘Thinking Spatial Practices with & Against Law’ held on 19 June 2015 at the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research, University of London; and the workshop ‘Heritage and Resistance’ held on 7–8 July 2017 at the School of Craft and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in a special issue of the International Journal of Islamic Architecture 5.2 (2016). I would like to thank the editors of the journal and the guest editor of the special issue for allowing me to reuse this material.

Notes 1. For a discussion of time and temporality in the Gezi protests, see Çaylı (2013, 2014a). 2. For a recent and elaborate discussion of the various ways in which heritage has been mobilized to overcome dispossession and secure possession, see de Cesari and Herzfeld (2015, pp. 181–184). 3. The Disaster Law defines three urban-architectural categories as its purview: (1) ‘risky areas’, zones identified as at risk of causing damage to lives and property due to their soil composition or the characteristics of the

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buildings they host; (2) ‘risky buildings’, buildings which, while not necessarily located within risky areas, have ‘completed their economic lifespan’ or have been ‘scientifically proven’ to be at risk of falling down or receiving severe damage in case of disaster; (3) ‘reserve building areas’, zones identified as safe for new settlement. To view the law in full, see Resmi (2012). 4. The Disaster Law has not created these processes anew but has only unified and precipitated them, as the practices it has introduced can be considered an extension of the wave of urban transformation projects that have already been taking place piecemeal across urban Turkey since the mid-2000s (Kuyucu & Ünsal, 2010). 5. Indeed, the physical results of this ‘folding and unfolding’ has in many cases been so reminiscent of the aftermath of disaster that some of the areas being transformed have served as film set for war scenes (Çaylı, 2014b). 6. This distinction between ‘qualitative’ and ‘quantitative’ builds on Gell’s (1992) concepts of ‘A-series time’ and ‘B-series time’; whereas the first concept is about dates and calendars—about time imagined as quantifiable—the second concerns temporality as it is experienced by humans in all of its possible forms. Therefore, the acts of proponing and protracting by definition belong more to the first category than they do to the second. 7. Here I use the adjective ‘private’ advisedly, to indicate both the individual-­ familial and the financial character of the enterprise. To reiterate, this is not to say that such an enterprise is altogether devoid of political character; it is to suggest that what governs this character in this case is private proprietorship. Once again, research on this front remains to be conducted but indicating potential implications is the case of a man nicknamed ‘the bullhead of Fikirtepe’, who for weeks refused to participate in the transformation of the area in which his house is located and therefore resisted the demolition of his property. Initially hailed in the press as a case of heroic resistance against the top-down transformation of his neighbourhood, the man was later denigrated as seeking personal profit by blackmailing to stop the project. However, he has argued that to ask for decent terms of transformation is itself a social and politically implicated pursuit rather than being a merely personal one. For the story of this man, see Alagöz (2012, 2014), Uzunçarşılı Baysal (2014a, b). For other cases similar to ‘the bullhead of Fikirtepe’, see Butakın (2011), Kiraz (2013), Munyar (2013), Şahin (2014), AA (2014). 8. Interview by the author, 13 June 2013. Names of the Gezi activists whose opinions are cited in this chapter have been omitted as their participation in this research was based on the condition of confidentiality. 9. Interview by the author, 14 June 2013. 10. Interview by the author, 13 June 2013.

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11. Similarly, the city of Diyarbakır is also referred to as Diyarbekir or Amed, where the latter is preferred especially by members of the pro-Kurdish political movement. For more on the politics of naming in the region, see Gambetti and Jongerden (2011), Gündoğan (2011). 12. For material-spatially oriented discussions of the legacy of the various episodes of violence to which the Syriac Christians of the Ottoman Empire (and, later, those of Turkey) have been subjected, see Biner (2011, 2014). 13. An updated version of this piece was later published on the same website in 2014 (Doğan, 2014). 14. This was due to the valley’s being declared a ‘reserve building area’, which implicates it as a zone safe for new settlement (see Note 3 in this chapter).

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CHAPTER 7

Fighting Denial of the Right to the Past: Heritage-Backed Bodily Resistance and Performance of Refugeeism and Return Feras Hammami

Every 15 May, Palestinians commemorate an-Nakba (‘the catastrophe’). On this day, they gather in public spaces, march through streets, and assemble in different forums to rehearse memories of expulsion, share stories of refugeeism, renew their commitment to the right of return to their homes, and call for the implementation of the UN (1948b), which proclaims the legality of return (Aruri, 2001; Kadman, 2015; Khalidi, 2020). The an-Nakba was first held in 1947 when, in preparation for the establishment of the Jewish State of Israel, Zionist militias embarked on the systematic ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestine’ (Falah, 1996; Pappé, 2006). They sought to strategically re-write the history and territory of the Holy Land by erasing the material witness on the collective memory of the Palestinians, projecting the biblical and Jewish history of the Holy Land, inventing new traditions, and denying the expelled Palestinians their right

F. Hammami (*) Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_7

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of return, effectively declaring their social death (Said, 2000; Mbembe, 2003; Wolfe 2006; Hammami 2020). The an-Nakba hasn’t ended, and the right of return remains a principal political cause which mobilizes and unites Palestinians who remain marginalized as internal and external exiles. A fissure in this unity, however, emerged when the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) signed the Oslo Accords of 1993 with the State of Israel. Not only was the right of return abandoned, but also the return of expelled Palestinians to lands within the present-day boundaries of Israel (known as internally displaced Palestinians, IDPs) was regarded as an ‘internal Israeli issue’ (Oslo Accords, Articles IV and VIII; Mi’ari, 2011). This served to bolster Israeli denial of an-Nakba and efforts to de-signify Palestine’s cultural landscape. At the same time, Palestinian intellectuals, refugee leaders, and civil society organizations who lost faith in the diplomacy pursued by the PLO sought to explore alternative strategies and tactics for return. Activists from the second and third generations of Palestinian ‘refugees’ have reconceived their tactics as ‘direct actions’ of return. They marched from camps located in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, towards the borders of Israel, putting their ‘bodies’ at risk of interrogation, arrest, and even death. Those who succeed to cross the borders are always deported. IDPs, however, used their Israeli citizenship to retake their original destroyed villages. Despite frequent displacement by Israeli police, they have persistently repeated the same act. The first well-organized attempt to return was made to the destroyed village of Iqrit, northern Israel. In this chapter, I brought the story of the reclaimed Iqrit into a dialogue with the broader narratives of both the Palestinian national liberation movement and the Zionist settler colonialism. It has been essential to depart this chapter from the argument that the return to Iqrit shouldn’t be viewed as an ethno-national politics—an ethnic minority resist domination, racism, discrimination, or state control over history and memory. In addition, the case of Iqrit was situated within the broader and historical context of an-Nakba, rather than describing it as a people ‘lost control over their land and became a minority’ (Ghanem et al., 1998, p. 254). In this light, the interviews with activists and analysis of their materials focused on explaining the mechanism, strategies, and impact of return to Iqrit within these broader contexts. I investigated: the heritage-making at the intersection of Palestinian liberation and settler colonial narratives; the emerging return narratives and associated memory and heritage

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production from below; and the opportunities these narratives provide for justice-making. The interviewed activists reconceived their activism as ‘direct action’ for return, rather than symbolical performance of an-Nakba and return Ghantous (2015). They referred to self-direction and organization of the struggle for return without the service of ‘middleman’ or any diplomatic efforts. Instead, they call for the implementation of their right of return by actually moving to permanently live on the site of ruins Nashef (2014), and seek to provide ‘alternatives to build future now and here’ (Sparrow, 1997). Their activism seems to have developed into ‘bodily/ embodied resistance’ to the long history of refugeeism and associated unjust effects of living in vulnerability, alienation, and discrimination (Butler et al., 2016; Carlton, 2007). While doing this, they have engaged in an active (re-)production of memory and history of an-Nakba ‘from below’ (Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury, 2014; Witz et al., 2017), contesting and challenging the official/authorized an-Nakba and return narratives. After this introduction, I will explain an-Nakba and return within the politics of forgetting and remembering and its implication for refugeeism and settler colonialism, and then focus on the struggle for return in Iqrit. Next, I will deconstruct the question of return and unpack its spatio-­ temporal spaces of history production and memorialization to explain the challenges and opportunities direct action of return entailed and encountered. I will specifically focus on the politics’ presence and risk that inspired the performance of bodily resistance to the unjust effects since an-Nakba, and how this was backed by ‘heritage works’ on the site of ruins (historic traces of expulsion, the oral history of an-Nakba). In the concluding section I assert that the question of return is a legitimate claim, and granting that right by those who enacted the displacement in the first place is an imperative moral and a symbolic act of recognition and apology.

‘We Won’t Forget’: Heritage of Expulsion, Absence, and Return We [Israelis] must do everything to ensure they [the Palestinians] never do return … The old will die and the young will forget. (Winstanley, 2013)

The failure of memory can occur anytime and anywhere. But engineering memory to support a settler colonial project as depicted in the prophesy of

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Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, who framed the past in 1948 to assure the Zionist migrants that Palestinians will never return, is a vicious policy geared to maintaining a vicious illusion. Even in psychological quarters, notions such as ‘repressed memory’ or ‘memory war’ are scientifically discredited and often replaced with ‘dissociative amnesia’ (see, e.g., Otgaar et al., 2019). It is therefore hardly possible that memories, including those for traumatic events, might be politicized and blocked from normal conscious recall. On the contrary, as Ahmad Sa’di (2008) suggests, memory of an-Nakba may not only survive, but also thrive within a prevailing culture of forgetfulness. Memory works often underpin or transform into activism. In refugee and diaspora studies, for example, memory narratives may pertain to the political impacts and implications of the narrated past in time and space: how narratives of the past are framed, politicized, and imbued with a just rhetoric by refugee (leaders) (Dumont, 2016), and how it is often incorporated in nationalist rhetoric and other struggles for self-­determination (Lacroix & Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2013). The level of hopelessness in these narratives might rise and develop into action when individual memories and aspirations find no spaces in broader national narratives. Forgetting shouldn’t also be confused with silence and absence. Sa’di (2008) argues that forgetting could be antithetical to amnesia. He also explains how memories of an-Nakba echo within many silent expressions of hidden pain, injury, shame, and melancholy that people—against whom the tide of history has turned away—carry (Sa’di, 2008). Indeed, one might also argue that forgetting is a generational problem, as Ben-Gurion suggested. The crux of the matter, however, is that individual and collective memories do not have the same generational impact, and the demands they proclaim may change across time and space, inspiring diverse social responses. Sayigh (2015, p. 194) explains the weak ground of the generational argument, generally and more specifically within the context of Palestine-Israel. The dying out of the generation able to remember life in Palestine before the Nakba constitutes yet another rupture with the past, generating a sense of obligation to ‘save’ history and heritage, a sentiment that did not exist when people believed in return through UN Resolution 194, or through armed struggle. The continuing separation of most Palestinians from Palestine contributes to the force of their reclamation of a national territory and national identity, as does the discrimination they face in ‘host’ countries’. (Sayigh, 2015, p. 194)

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This quote explains the emerging links between memory production from below and ‘sumud’ (steadfastness). Remembering pre-Nakba life and claiming the right to that past is becoming a new tactic deployed in the struggle against settler colonialism and Ben-Gurion’s prophesy. Everyday life in refugee camps inside and outside Palestine makes any politics of forgetting a source for activism (Gutman, 2017). An-Nakba began before the violent establishment of Israel. Khalidi (2020) links an-Nakba to the British promise, or Balfour Declaration of 1917, to establish a home for Jews in Palestine. As a declaration of war on Palestine (Khalidi, 2020), the declaration literally and verbally erases Palestine, considering them as an integral part of the built environment, or held not to exist or absent (Khalidi, 2020; Wolfe, 2006). Within the same settler colonial logic, the well-armed and organized Zionist militias prepared to embark on a process of ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Palestine, just prior to the departure of, but also enabled by, the British Mandate (Pappé, 2015). They ‘engineered’ attacks on the edges of villages and towns to force residents leave their homes with the aim of rooting settler Jews and other Jewish immigrants in their place, as if they had always been living there (Abu-Sitta, 2007; Masalha, 2012). Over the course of six months between 1947 and 1948, more than 700,000–800,000 Palestinians were forced into exile and about 600 villages and urban centres were either emptied or destroyed Khalidi (2006). In a report to his leadership, Yosef Weitz, the head of the settlement division in the Jewish National Fund (JNF), stated: We have begun the operation of cleansing, removing the rubble and preparing the land for cultivation and settlement. Some of these [villages] will become parks. (Cited in Pappé, 2015: 221)

To ensure the legal erasure of Palestine’s cultural landscape, the ruins of destroyed villages were cleared and the sites were replanted with pine and palm trees, replacing the indigenous olive and figs trees, and transforming the places into nature reserves. Stones were transported to build houses in other locations, incorporating the material and cultural landscape of Natives into an Israeli settler colonial environment. The fig and olive trees are symbolic constituents of Palestinian identity, and during the contemporary history of Palestine they came to symbolize steadfastness. People not only identify with these trees, but they also depend on them socially and economically. Unlike the palm trees, which are foreign to the Palestinian cultural geography, the olive and fig trees signify inhabited

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lands in Palestine. Furthermore, about 156,000 Palestinians who were able to remain within what became Israel were denied the right to return to their original homes, instead lived in different villages and urban centres. They were forced to either claim Israeli citizenship or join the exile (Robinson, 2013; Bauml, 2011). Those who remained were actively subjected to strict military regime and emergency regulations, and their attempts to return to their original homes were criminalized by an invented law. For example, the Emergency Regulations for the Exploitation of Uncultivated Lands (also known as the Cultivation of Waste Lands Ordinance) was issued in 1949 to allow the Ministry of Agriculture to acquire ‘uncultivated Palestinian’ land. This law relied on British Defence Regulations of 1945/Article 125 from the Mandate era and was used to declare areas closed as a pretext for denying Palestinian peasants and farmers the right to access their lands, and to finally expropriate them for being uncultivated lands (Badil, 2006, pp. 29–30). Furthermore, the Absentees Property Law (Israel Book of Laws 37/b March 1950) and the Land Acquisition Law (Validation of Acts and Compensation) were issued to anonymize the history of Palestinians and authorize the confiscation of their possessions. All Palestinians who had left their properties for any reason after 29 November 1947, even if they returned briefly after the war, were designated as anonymous and absent (the Absentees Property Law 1950, section 1); while the Zionist militias were authorized to shoot any returnee, ensuring a no-return policy (Bisharat, 1964; Sabbagh-Khoury, 2011). By law, absentees’ properties were expropriated and transferred to various state agencies (Golan, 2001), especially the Development Authority (section 19/a) and the Israeli Lands Administration. Additionally, as documented by Benny Brunner and Arjan El Fassed in their documentary film, The Great Book Robbery, at least 60,000 Palestinian books and tens of thousands of paintings, musical recordings, furniture, and other artefacts were confiscated by the Zionist militias from Palestinian homes, libraries, and other public institutions. To celebrate a moral narrative of independence, the Israeli government sealed the official archive of the 1948 War, criminalized the commemoration of an-Nakba in public, and controlled the educational system for both Arabs and Jews to rule out attempts of Nakba history from below (Rouhana & Sabbagh-Khoury, 2014). This memoricide, as Pappé terms it (2015), enabled a moral replacement of Palestinians with migrants Jews and ‘the construction of a hegemonic collective Israeli-Zionist-Jewish identity in the State of Israel’

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(Masalha, 2012, p. 89). These deliberate social and cultural evacuation of Palestine (Said, 2000) and subsequent expansion of occupation made the right of return the major Palestinian political cause, giving rise to the first Intifada in 1987–1991 which ended with a peace process. But the ‘right of return’ was abandoned in the Oslo Accords of 1993. About 100,000 of Palestine’s political elites were allowed to enter the West Bank and Gaza, rather than ending their exile and return to their original homes and lands (MPC, 2013, 1). This led to the initiation of new debates about the right of return in light of emerging top-down diplomacy and calls for nationals from below. While most of the returnees were busy building the institutions of the Palestinian authority, seeing heritage as no priority (Assi, 2012), some found in the abandoned material culture (buildings, sites, and landscapes) an opportunity to return to a denied past. They also capitalized on their transnational networks and founded NGOs to work with heritage in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (De Cesari, 2010, 54). Local community groups also partnered with these NGOs, using heritage as resistance to the occupation. As milestones in heritage activism, the Church of Nativity (2012), Battir’s Land of Olives and Vines—Cultural Landscape of Southern Jerusalem (2014)—and Hebron/Al-Khalil Old Town (2017) were included on both lists of World Heritage and World Heritage in Danger—although the Church of Nativity was removed from the latter list in 2019 (UNESCO WHS Page). A common cause in these cases is to survive Israel’s settler colonial policy (Barnard & Muamer, 2016) rather than craving a UNESCO designation to, as cities usually seek, bolster cultural and economic power. Recognizing Palestine as the location of these sites and placing universal values on them brought the sites to a new political stage of discursive heritage warfare, in which discourses of the biblical landscape are not unilateral. In the following section, I focus on a smaller case of heritage activism, in which the reproduction of memory and history from below are used as tactics of resistance, to the authorized heritage discourses that settler colonial power invented and protect to ensure the silence of an-Nakba.

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Iqrit: Direct Actions, Multiple Expulsions, and Returns In 2012, a youth activist group from the village of Iqrit, northern Israel, decided to implement their right of return, and permanently live on their site of ruins, despite the Israeli law that proclaims their settlement on what has become a state-owned land as a crime. To understand what happens on the site of ruins and how the return was implemented, I interviewed three activists from the village of Iqrit and one from another group returned to the village Kafr Bir’im, as well as reviewed their extensive reports and posts on their official Facebook pages, ‘Iqrit’ and ‘Oleno Awdate’ (‫ أُعلنُ عودتي‬- ‫)كفر برعم‬. I also interviewed two other Palestinian activists with Israeli citizenship to situate the cases within a wider context of activism. The study was conducted between July 2017 and May 2018. A visit to Iqrit and other sites of expulsions would have enriched the empirical findings, but as a Palestinian I wouldn’t be allowed to visit these sites by Israel. All interviews except one, with Ghantous who at the time of study was based in Sweden for higher education, were conducted virtually. One of the reports published by the Iqrit Community Association (ICA) explains how the residents of Iqrit were expelled and their homes and lands demolished, as follows: In November 1948, six months after the foundation of the State of Israel, the army ordered the people of Iqrit to leave their homes for a period of two weeks, as a temporary measure due to military operations in the area. In coordination with the village priest, all the inhabitants of Iqrit were collectively transported on army trucks to a nearby village. At that time, all inhabitants carried Israeli IDs and were legal citizens. Two weeks later, the Israeli authorities’ promise was broken when Iqrit was proclaimed a closed military zone and the people of Iqrit were prohibited from returning to their homes. (Spait, 2015, p. 1)

In 1951, the Israeli High Court ruled that the inhabitants of the demolished village of Iqrit have the right to return, but the Israeli army refused to comply with the decision. On Christmas Day of the same year, the army demolished the entire village (Badil, 2006). The inhabitants attempted to return to the ruins several times, but they were denied access to what became a nature reserve. Appeals by Iqrit’s property owners to the Israeli High

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Court were repeatedly either delayed or rejected. In the summer of 1972, residents of Kafr Bir’im and Iqrit refused to engage in diplomacy, deciding instead to permanently resettle on the land of their demolished villages. The Israeli police evicted them lest their endeavour set a precedent. The recurrent return-eviction dialect generated social currents of solidarity manifested in a large group of Israeli Jews, joining force with the residents to actualize the latter’s return. To some extent, this can be viewed as an important change in Israeli popular attitude, and the government rescinded all ‘closed regions’ laws in Israel—except those enforced on the villages of Iqrit and Kafr Bir‘im because of their ongoing court cases. During the late 1980s, residents of Iqrit and Kafr Bir’im began to organize summer camps in and excursions to sites of ruined villages in historic Palestine (Ghantous, 2015). The idea has always been to maintain connection to land, educate new generations about their confiscated history, and explore new means to implement the right of return. Over time, these activities declined due to unrelenting Israeli repression of emerging forms of resistance. When the right of return was abandoned in the Oslo Accords of 1993, new forms of civil society organizations evolved with a clear mission and better organized efforts to raise awareness and underline the centrality of the right of return for the entire Palestinian cause. Al-Awda-The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, which was founded by a coalition of pro-­ Palestine activists in April 2000, has been a leading civil society organization in that regard. Specific to Al-Awda is its commitment to ‘comprehensive public education on the rights of all Palestine refugees to return to their homes and land of origin, and to full restitution of all their confiscated and destroyed property in accordance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights UN (1948a), international law and the numerous United Nations resolutions upholding such rights’ (Al-Awda  – The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, 2012). Two years later, another NGO called Baladna was founded in Israel, with the purpose of stimulating the youth in debates concerning their right of return. Targeting second and third generations of Palestinian refugees, several active youth groups emerged, aspiring to make change. Among others, the Iqrit Community Association (ICA) was established to organize similar educational activities, lead the struggle of the people of Iqrit, and advocate for their right to return. As part of their engagement with the site of demolished Iqrit, youth activists planted trees, walked the original roads and passages, restored small-scale ruins, and protected archaeological sites and finds from looting. They also reconstructed the village’s

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Fig. 7.1  A sign was rooted by a local activist making the location of his house in Iqrit. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission)

map by helping the expelled residents mark the location of their houses and lands on the site of ruins, with signs displaying their names, as shown in Fig.  7.1. This engagement challenged the status quo of Iqrit as a nature reserve or as a cemetery marking the cultural death of its original community. As Walaa Sbait, a drama teacher and one of the activists who implemented the return to Iqrit, put it, ‘At the moment Iqrit people have the right to return only in a coffin, but we want to live here’ (Sherwood, 2013). Israel’s Land Authorities and police have frequently interrogated the activists and confiscated their belongings. In 2012, the violent interrogation of the youth summer camp made a few activists determined to implement a permanent settlement in Iqrit, rather than long site visits. In my interview with Amer Tomeh, a co-founder of the youth activist group who returned to Iqrit in 2012, he explained how the Israeli High Court and other official and political spaces have always been a hindrance against the realisation of return. We, therefore, decided to

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implement the right of return not only outside these spaces, but also away from the Palestinian narratives of repatriation. (Interview, Tomeh September 2017)

As gathered from the interviews with Tomeh and other local activists, ‘the return from below’ was conceived as resistance to: the continual profiling and subjectification of their identity as refugees despite their Israeli citizenship; the precarious conditions and vulnerabilities the expelled Palestinians live in; the Israeli denial of an-Nakba and right of return; and the systematic erasure of the historic traces and incorporation of Palestinian past in Zionist narratives. In addition, the political shift from the commemoration of an-Nakba as being a political responsibility towards a symbolic national performance caused youth activists either lose interest in the commemoration or resist the despair its symbolic performance brought to exile. Wassim Ghantous, the co-founder of the third-generation activists’ group from the village Kafr Bir‘im, named ‘I declare our return’ (‘Oleno Awdate’), explained their return: In 2005, we began organising annual workshops and summer camps, in addition to frequent visits. It was only in 2013 when we declared our return permanent. We were inspired by the return to Iqrit, the Arab Spring, and more importantly, the past attempts of return to Kafr Bir’im since the foundation of Al-Awda (the Return) Movement in 1982. The movement evolved during the struggle for return that began in early 1970s but the frequent expulsion of activists from the site of ruins lead to a general feeling of hopelessness, and many became convinced that negotiation with the Israeli State is the only possibility for return. (Interview, Ghantous October 2017).

The direct action of return to Iqrit and Kafr Bir‘im formed part of new waves of return organized by Palestinian refugees in Syria, Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon. New commemorative spaces of an-Nakba have grown in which the right of return is debated as resistance to the designification, erasure, and incorporation of the Palestinian history, and to the symbolic performance of return following the Oslo Accords. Among others, the cooperative project of return, named ‘awdatuna’ (Our Return), was founded in 2015 by the NGO Baladna, together with the Association for the Defence of the Rights of the Internally Displaced (ADRID), Zochrot Organisation, and the Arab Association for Human Rights. What these new commemorative spaces have brought to the Palestinian national project is new trajectories, designed, mobilized, and implemented from below. Rather than repatriation and nationalism, these trajectories seek to activate

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personal and collective aspirations and experiences, rather than singular narratives. The past years of alienation, discrimination, and criminalization, as well as the deliberate Israeli treatment of IDPs as enemy (Bisharat, 1964), directed the struggle of IDPs towards notions of citizenship, refugeeism, and reconciliation with Palestinian refugees, inside and outside exile.

We Are Not Refugees: Precarity, Disinheritance, and Citizenship In 2012, Badil, the Bethlehem-based resource centre for Palestinian residency and refugee rights, surveyed self-perception and identity issues among Palestinian youth in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. The results revealed that the majority of the respondents not only put their Palestinian identity above matters of citizenship or residency in exile, but also sought active participation in the decision-­ making shaping their political future (Kestler-D’Amours, 2013). Nadim Nashef, the former Director of Baladna, explained this by pointing to the marginalization of right of return by the Oslo Accords, the worsened living conditions in refugee camps, the Israeli denial of an-Nakba, and the loss of trust in Palestinian leaders (Interview October 2017). This explains the demands of the other interviewed activists: a reconstitution of their natural Palestinian citizenship and disinheritance of the colonial attributes foisted on them and the associated performative effect of their identity, ‘refugee’. They saw their return, though precarious and dangerous, as the beginning of a complex and interrelated process of repatriation, restitution, decolonization, and de-Zionization. Amal Obeidi, a young woman from the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Lifta, northern Jerusalem, explained how the Israeli occupation enforces psychological borders on IDPs, separating them from the Israeli society and law, and criminalizing their claims for right of return (cited in Abunimah, 2013). Ghantous also explained how these borders made the elderly and many other young IDPs believe that their return is either impossible or must be negotiated with the state of Israel. As he explained, our ancestors, individually and collectively, negotiated their return to their original homes and lands with the Israeli government, and also demanded the Palestinian Authorities to implement their return. For him, all these negotiations ended with the eruption of the Second Intifada in 2000:

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I grew up in a family that talk about, and participate in actions related to, the right of return on daily basis. My family believe that all official and political negotiation channels have already been exhausted and that direct action is the alternative. But a respectful segment of the community still advocates the traditional methods of political lobbying and diplomacy with the Israeli government, and avoids describing the destruction of these villages as part of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. We decided to liberate ourselves and implement our return. (Interview, Ghantous October 2017)

Similar to the ways anarchists advocate elsewhere, the direct action of return was implemented without any ‘middleman’ (Israeli court or Palestinian Authority). Rather it was undertaken as a goal to achieve and as an impact to share with expelled Palestinians. As Sparrow (1997, p 7) argues, ‘direct action should have such an effect that we can point it out to others as an example of how they can change—and not just protest’. Within such an understanding, the case of Iqrit has evolved as a new form of collective resistance to the settler colonial policies of dispossession and refugeeism. Critically, the declaration and implementation of return to Iqrit and other villages seem to have initiated a process of self-expulsion from the status of refugee. This was captured from the declaration of return which was posted on Iqrit’s Facebook page just before they moved into the site of ruins, ‘we are not refugees anymore—we will return’; and from the graffiti which activists placed on a corrugated sheet upon arrival to the site of ruin, ‘We will never remain as refugees, we have returned’ (Fig. 7.2). Rather than officially sponsored narratives that celebrate the ‘homeland’ as an abstract national ideal, the direct action of return provided activists with a practical vision for and a tool to implement the right of return (Interview, Nashef, October 2017). Upon arriving at Iqrit, some gazed at the ruins for long hours, while others began marking traces of passages and houses, including the olive-oil factory, main roads, and main stores. Some activists also embarked on restoring ruins, gathering stones, appropriating new living spaces in and around the church building, and planting trees. They also walked the original passages and streets, attached stories of expulsion to ruins, recalled traditional life as portrayed in their ancestors’ stories, and organized educational activities in between ruins. Moved by the affective environment of the site, the ruins and stories told there became important stimuli for bringing activists, community groups, and other interlocutors together through new forms of collective identity. Local traditions from

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Fig. 7.2  The graffiti on the corrugated sheet says, ‘We would never remain refugees, we would return’. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission)

before 1948 and contemporary cultures from Iqrit and other villages, were also used to inform the organization of a number of musical events, religious celebrations, summer educational workshops, hiking trips, guided tours, and cinema clubs (Figs. 7.3 and 7.4). The diverse nature and emotional content of these activities and events generated solidarity with the activists among IDPs, Israelis, international tourists, and activists. The growing visibility of activists on the site of ruin prompted the Israeli Land Authorities and the police to interrogate and force them to evacuate, confiscating their possessions (Fig. 7.5). The frequent cycles of interrogations, expulsions, and returns became new events of the an-­ Nakba. At the same time, this visibility prompted several human rights organizations, including Al-Awda and Baladna, to support the activists and mobilize the public opinion around their right of return. Gradually, similar activist groups, such as Suhmata, Al-Bassa, and Al-Ghabisiyya, have emerged calling for the implementation of return rather than a commemoration of an-Nakba.

Fig. 7.3  One of the summer workshops in Iqrit. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission)

Fig. 7.4  Celebrating Easter holiday in Iqrit. (Source: ActiveStills through Iqrit’s Facebook page, used by permission)

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Fig. 7.5  Israel Land Authority and police demolishing the restored ruins, removing the additional structures, and arresting activists. (Source: Facebook page Iqrit, used by permission)

Return in Time and Space: Bodily Resistance and Memory Production The activists who initiated the return understood the high level of risk they were exposing themselves to, when being physically present on the site of ruins. They, however, regarded this risk as justifiable with the

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context of their desire for a liberation from an inherited fear, and as an attempt to invert the unjust effects they lived in since an-Nakba. Their vulnerability (embodied fear, precarity, social death) has gradually transformed into a ‘resource for resistance’ (Butler et al., 2016). This speaks to the recent shift in the proliferation of the discourse on vulnerability and resistance. Butler (2014) explains how vulnerability is usually conceived as one’s needs for protection, and or exclusively understood as being negative, equated with weakness, dependency, powerlessness, deficiency, and passivity. However, she encourages us to see the instrumentality of vulnerability by understanding the difference between vulnerability and precarity (Butler, 2014). Here, she argues that people who feel precarity might perform bodily resistance that presupposes vulnerability of a specific kind, and employs it to oppose precarity (Butler, 2014; p.  4; Gilson, 2014). This perspective on vulnerability is helpful to understand the politics of risks and tactics of bodily resistance in Iqrit. For example, the frequent expulsion of activist from Iqrit by the Israeli police reminded them about the failing diplomatic efforts for return and the unjust life they lived since an-Nakba. As Tomeh explained, ‘many of us decided to leave Iqrit after being arrested and interrogated but they eventually returned and re-joined our steadfastness’ (Interview, September 2017). Activists capitalized on the hidden vulnerability of the settler colonial power through a politics of exposure: disclosing memories and history of Nakba by linking oral history to the uncovered buried traces of expulsion. A central tactic to this is their physical presence on the site of ruins. While their presence on a state-owned land and nature reserves engulfed them in fear and risk, the politics of ‘presencing’ enabled activist to disinherit these feelings which they embodied while living under settler colonialism. This politics can be viewed as a counteraction to the settler colonial policy of ‘absentness’ (i.e., the Absentees Property Law). This policy led to an authorized process of confiscating Palestinians’ properties in the aftermath of an-Nakba. Rather than only criminalizing their presence in Iqrit, uncovering the historic traces of an-Nakba through bodily resistance initiated new rhetoric in the Israeli and international public debates towards the actual motivation for activism and its relation to the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, transforming the landscape of risk into opportunities for debating injustices. To boost these opportunities through the politics of exposure, activists organized a range of cultural, education, and political programmes. They invited people from all walks of life to bear witness to the violent erasure

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of their culture and history, listen to untold and silenced stories of expulsion, and encourage them to share what was happening with their networks. They also attracted a range of TV interviews, newspaper articles, blogs, reports, and videos by locally and internationally renowned networks of human rights organizations, including Baladna, Zochrot, B’tselem, Hamla, the Association for the Defence of Internally Displaced Persons, Arab Association for Human Rights, and others. By this time, a new public sphere seems to have gradually emerged, in which the physical ruins and narratives of an-Nakba became the subject of the debate, shifting the attention from their bodies—classified as being illegally present on state-owned lands—towards the silenced dramatic events of an-Nakba and its moral consequences on the Israeli celebration of independence. In this sense, it is possible to see the bodily resistance on the sites of ruins as an affective enactment of identity restoration, and history and memory production. As expressed by an anonymous interviewee, ‘we are not only present here but also share memories, gather in and move in-between the different village areas to inspire similar actions of return’ (September 2017). While on the site of ruins, the activists felt the affective environment of their presence in the ruins and this, as explained by the same interviewed activist, ‘enabled us develop and communicate a high level of steadfastness’. A large number of reports published by different activist groups, as well as local and international human rights activist groups, give a feeling of ‘hope’. A network of solidarity and activism is taking shape. Possibly, in time it might advance the growing community-led commemoration of an-Nakba, and thereby reconcile their political identity with the broader political cause, and provide new arenas for politics of return. Indeed, for such a time to come a great deal of activism is needed. In the meanwhile, and rather than romanticizing resistance in general and heritage activism in Iqrit in particular, the crux is to identify the opportunities that heritage-­ inspired enactment of return provides for justice-making. Since its violent establishment in 1948, the Jewish State of Israel has expanded its political boundaries, incorporated Palestinian territories, culture, and natural resources. It also led to the expulsion, arrest, and death of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Against the long history of subjectification, alienation, discrimination, and expulsion the case of Iqrit suggests us to engage in that past experiences of an-Nakba and identify new means, motives, and alliances for what Qumsiyeh (2010) calls popular resistance in Palestine.

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Indeed, confrontation and exposure in Iqrit entail not only skirmishes with the Israeli Land Authority and police, but also a resistance to the law-­ backed policies of dispossession. As Amir Tomeh explained: [O]ur permanent presence in Iqrit is intended to make the return a public question again, stop the looting of archaeological remains and provide the residents of Iqrit with new hope. Every day, people from Iqrit, other villages, Israelis and tourists interested in human rights visit us to learn about the history of displacement. We show them the ruins of houses and landscape to explain the expulsion. (Interview, Tomeh September 2017)

Moved by the affective environment of ruins, activists realized the need to reconstruct the heritage of an-Nakba following their experiences of return in time and space. Gradually they articulated their tactics of embodied resistance. They worked on mobilizing activists through workshops on history and memory of an-Nakba production from below, inspired, perhaps, by post-apartheid resistance (see Witz et al., 2017). They also used the uncovered historic traces of expulsion (stones, passages, etc.) and oral history of an-Nakba (stories, literature, etc.) to document untold stories and inform activism programmes. While this supported their efforts to call attention to the injustices they have lived with since an-Nakba, over time, their ambitions, as explained by interviewed activists, have grown two-­ fold. They sought, first, a deliberate departure from refugeeism by reconstructing their identities as colonized with a legitimate right of return rather than an ethnic minority in conflict with a national project, and second, a reconciliation with the major Palestinian political cause as a response to Oslo Accords of 1993 that revealed the IDPs and their return as an internal Israeli issue. Rather than seeking a diplomatic road map for peace-making, activists saw heritage-backed direct action, collective agency, and public action as an alternative means to realize these ambitions. Critically, their efforts can be viewed as a general fear that an-Nakba history would lose its sense of urgency in post-Oslo, hence remain in refugeeism. The efforts of activists to engage in the broader politics of history, geography, and memory making revealed the ignored scales of spatio-temporalities in which refugeeism and return become contested (Butler et al., 2016). To grasp the meaning and doing of return demands a critical engagement in the thorny politics of remembering and forgetting, and how the latter is usually negotiated through a reciprocal relation to people individual and collective memories,

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claims, and rights. Expelled people encounter overlapping refugeedom (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2012), rather than a linear journey from A (homeland) to B (host society). Their lines of flight are made of a diverse social, spatial, and temporal registers of heritage of displacement. These inevitably diverse registers make forgetting anything but a rational choice or, as explained in the prophesy of Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, a policy of dispossession. In heritage studies, forgetting is primarily explored in relation to the binary of positive and negative change. DeSilvey and Harrison (2020) suggest that ‘forgetting’, conceived here as letting go and adapting, can be potentially generative and lead to a positive change. While this can be potentially viable, it often ends up irrelevant and uncontextualized similar to the explorations of the IDPs struggle for return as ethnic-national politics. For scholars of settler colonial studies, the settler colonial strategies of dispossession seek the social death of the Natives by eliminating the native difference and embody their indignity (Wolfe 2006). Forgetting, among others, is often employed by settler colonial power to manage the inevitable resistance by the Natives (Sayigh 2015; Wolfe 2006). But experiences from Palestine, Australia, and others demonstrate, as Sayigh (2015) also argues, that enforced forgetting triggers resistance. This provides an additional dimension to the relation Butler establishes between resistance and vulnerability. It is rooted in heritage activism. Reproducing the history and memory of Nakba by activists on sites of ruins can actively be viewed as a political resource and instrument to support a resurging struggle for the rights of return. Rather than reinforcing a sense of materiality in heritage, the idea is to reemphasize the agency of the expelled people, oral history, and public action as constituents of ‘from below’ struggle for return.

Closing Remarks: Arming Non-violent Resistance with Heritage? Palestinians’ return to Iqrit hasn’t ushered in a true return just yet, and there is no evidence that this will happen in the near future either. As new strategies for the enactment of the right of return, the emerging direct action, and other tactics/forms of resistance suggest a growing contestation and tension surrounding popular efforts to reclaim and re-make a denied right to past. This revived dynamic force in the realm of public history and heritage activism uncovered the silenced political landscape of

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activism in Palestine since post-Oslo. The case of Iqrit showed how their struggle for return included a performative resistance to both the settler colonial policies of dispossession and the Palestinian official symbolic commemoration of an-Nakba. What has changed is the logic and motivation for return. Since their expulsion in 1947/1948, the Palestinians struggle for their right of return. But the case of Iqrit showed that activists feared that their cultural landscape become de-signified and incorporated in the Zionist discourses, and that an-Nakba history would lose its sense of urgency, and thereby live in permanent refugeeism and on the margin of the Palestinian society and its political cause. Their activism programmes involve three main strategies. First, they used the ruins to reproduce the memory and history of an-Nakba from below, and to provide local social and political debates with new insights on the Israeli policies, and its associations with settler colonial ambitions of ‘elimination’. As Wolfe (2006) explains, settler colonialism destroys to replace. Since the declaration of war on Palestine through the promise of Balfour in 1917, the Zionist settler colonial power has sought to systematically: replace the Natives and incorporate their indigeneity to remove their Native difference; deny the right of return to silence an-Nakba and ensure an ethical celebration of independence; divorce the IDPs from the wider Palestinian society and discourses; and mobilize a politics of forgetfulness across generations. Second, they returned to reject the depiction of their struggle for human rights in the Israeli society as an ethno-national politics, and instead to reveal the long history of alienation, refugeeism, and dehumanization they lived in due to the authorized discourses of ‘absentness’. The specific findings on the politics of presence, exposure, and vulnerability can be further developed through a proper intellectual conversation with the theoretical advances in settler colonial studies. As a governmentality logic, this politics can be further investigated in light of traditional explorations within the social sciences and the humanities, that in many cases condition the presence of ‘things’ and ‘bodies’ by their tangibility, observability, and measurability. Even in resistance studies, often only visible and organized practices are regarded as resistance, while everyday practices of resistance gain little attention—see the works of James Scot, Asef Bayat, Stellan Vinthagen, and Eric Hobsbawm, for instance. Third, the return to Iqrit can be viewed as an attempt by the IDPs to reclaim their position within the Palestinian major political cause, revealing the very principle of return as a right to embody and enact rather than

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symbolically commemorate. It can also be conceived as an attempt to produce a ‘reconciliatory heritage’, which here refers to the agency of an inclusive heritage that can support efforts for making change. This was captured from the ways in which the interviewed activists engaged the ruins in their efforts to construct counternarratives to the silenced an-­ Nakba, and to share the factual information they excavated on the site of ruins with the wider public to promote new spaces of learning. Doing this revealed their presence on state-owned land as a ‘right’ rather than a ‘crime’. These three issues revealed the spatio-temporal spaces of refugeeism and the complex process of memory and history production that inform and trigger the struggle for return. These spaces and processes often go unnoticed due to the singular narratives of national commemoration, and the dominant discourses that distinguish between repatriation (persons) and restitution (things), and maintain a traditional nature-culture binary. Approaching the case of Iqrit through the heritage-resistance dialects revealed this distinction as irrelevant. Activists saw their actual return as a process of subjectification and liberation, a self-declared expulsion from refugeeism and restoration of citizenship. This, combined with the long history of fear and precarity they lived in, made their vulnerability a political resource and a shield for their bodily resistance. These findings provide important insights to the works on vulnerability and resistance, informed by a heritage studies perspective. To explore refugeeism, as argued here, demands a critical engagement in the multiple experiences of displacement, including the associated registers of heritage along the line of flight. An actual return to one’s home thus shouldn’t mean a possible forgetting, or viewed as an end to exile or an automatic path for post-colonial healing. In effect, the right of return is a legitimate claim for all forcibly displaced people, human remains, artefacts, and objects. The granting of it by those who enacted the displacement in the first place is an imperative moral practice and a symbolic act of recognition and apology.

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Pappé, I. (2015). The Nakba: A Crime Watched, Ignored and Remembered. Middle East Eye, 15 May. http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/ nakba-­crime-­watched-­ignored-­and-­remembered-­1368485987 Qamsieh, M. (2011). Popular Resistance in Palestine: A History of Hope and Empowerment. Pluto Press. Robinson, S. (2013). Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of Israel’s Liberal Settler State. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Rouhana, N. N. & Sabbagh-Khoury, A. (Eds.).(2014). The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society. Mada al-Carmel  – Arab Center for Applied Social Research. Sabbagh-Khoury, S. (2011). The Internally Displaced Palestinians in Israel. In N.  N. Rouhana & A.  Sabbagh-Khoury (Eds.), The Palestinians in Israel: Readings in History, Politics and Society (pp. 26–45). Mada al-Carmel – Arab Center for Applied Social Research. Sa’di, A. (2008). Remembering Al-Nakba in a Time of Amnesia. Interventions, 10(3), 381–399, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698010802445006 Said, E. (2000). Invention, Memory, and Place. Critical Inquiry, 26(2), 175–192. Retrieved March 26, 2019, from https://www.jstor.org/stable/1344120 Sayigh, R. (2015). Oral History, Colonialist Dispossession, and the State: The Palestinian Case, Settler Colonial Studies, 5(3), 193–204, https://doi.org/ 10.1080/2201473X.2014.955945 Sherwood, H. (2013). Return to Iqrit: How One Palestinian Village is Being Reborn. The Guardian, 15 May. Retrieved October 24, 2017, from https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2013/may/15/return-iqrit-palestinianvillage-israel Spait, S. (2015). Iqrit Community Association. Retrieved October 1, 2017, from http://stelias.homestead.com/files/Iqrit_two_pager_2015_Final_SS__3_.pdf Sparrow, R. (1997). Anarchist Politics & Direct Action. The Anarchist Library. Retrieved May 4, 2017, from https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/rob-­ sparrow-­anarchist-­politics-­direct-­action.pdf UN. (1948a). Universal Declaration on Human Rights, Article 13. Retrieved May 10, 2017, from http://www.un.org/en/udhrbook/pdf/udhr_booklet_ en_web.pdf UN. (1948b). United Nations General Assembly Resolution of 194 (III). Palestine – Progress Report of the United Nations Mediator. Retrieved July 5, 2017, from https://unispal.un.org/DPA/DPR/unispal.nsf/0/ C758572B78D1CD0085256BCF0077E51A Winstanley, A. (2013). “The old will die and the young will forget” – Did Ben-­ Gurion Say It? The Electronic Intifada, 11 August. Retrieved April 4, 2017, from https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-­winstanley/old-will-die-andyoung-will-forget-did-ben-gurion-say-it.

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CHAPTER 8

Reproductions, Excavations and Replicas: New Materialities in Response to Destruction David Ayala-Alfonso

A breadth of recent art projects have taken an interest in material culture, heritage and archaeology as means for reflecting on the overflowing materiality of our contemporary world and on the meaning of producing new objects in this context—as well as to respond to the progressive destruction of the cultural and the environmental that characterizes late capitalism. The aim of this book chapter is to address such concerns, from a political-ecological approach; that is, it attends both to the materiality of the artistic practices studied here and to the cultural issues in which they are inscribed, to open avenues for reflection into the many transformations and ripple effects they create. Topics such as the cultural, the political and the ecological are addressed by tracing the lineages of cultural practices and their implications, to provide an analysis that exceeds the more traditional avenues of ideological or institutional critiques. The analysis takes place through a comparative study of two recent installations that were featured in Made in L.A. 2016, a biennial exhibition

D. Ayala-Alfonso (*) Independent Curators International, New York, NY, USA © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_8

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that surveys the artistic practices of the region-city of Los Angeles, California: Daniel R. Small’s Excavation II and Gala Porras-Kim’s untitled installation. Both cases are illustrative of contrasting forms of addressing the problem of heritage from the perspective of contemporary art, as they create forms of implicit and explicit criticality of archaeological, collection and exhibition practices. Small and Porras-Kim’s projects constitute different forms of resistance to hegemonic narratives of preservation and storytelling around museum collections, while taking different approaches to materiality, value and collecting. The presentation of each example in this chapter is then enriched by other artistic examples that complicate the discussion in productive ways and allow the reflection to bleed into different geographies. The main argument revolves around the idea of collecting both as means for creation and destruction, but also inquires into the role of the artistic and the political in further creating opportunities for generation or obliteration through the processes of framing a collection narrative.

Unexpected Archaeologies Excavation II,1 a large-scale museographic installation by Daniel R. Small, presents a series of objects from the archaeological excavation of the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes in California, three hours north of the city of Los Angeles. The objects recovered on the site are fragments of the scenography created for Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 film, The Ten Commandments, which narrates the biblical story of the Exodus, through a fable that depicts a modern interpretation of the Judeo-Christian text. The dunes served as a giant film set for DeMille’s vision, who decided to destroy the vast scenography upon completion of the film, to prevent other directors from reusing it in the future. During the last few decades, the fragments have been retrieved by archaeologists, who have organized small expeditions to salvage the objects buried in the dunes, in an effort to preserve the material history of the place. Ninety years later, the natural reserve became an unintended archaeological site that preserves the cultural memory, not of Ancient Egypt during the reign of Ramses II, but of a cinematographic recreation of it. Analog to religious paintings, DeMille’s film updates the images that constitute the biblical narrative in the collective imaginary, and as one of its first major cinematographic representations, it inaugurates and stabilizes a certain gaze on these stories, now in the more evocative medium of

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Fig. 8.1  Daniel R. Small, Excavation II (2016). Installation view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in the context of the exhibition ‘Made in L.A. 2016’. (Courtesy the artist)

moving image: a multi-sensorial experience that lends a more comprehensive form to the narrative and one which has also the capacity of reaching larger audiences (Fig. 8.1). The obsession with the images of the past lives somewhere between fascination with what is ungraspable in the present, commonly illustrated by the recurring metaphor of the ‘Angel of History’ found in Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (Benjamin, 1969, p. 249), and the passion for ruins, as the nostalgic settlement of a mythical past that underpins the present. The English expression folly denominates the ornamental constructions that were built throughout Europe, starting from the eighteenth-century English gardens and then spreading through the continent. These constructions represented fragments of ancient buildings, mainly from the Gothic era and had the particularity of being built in a false state of ruin. Because these structures merely had an ornamental function, we can say that there was a certain delight in ruin, halfway between the aesthetic and the spiritual. The Gothic ruin evokes an idealized past that captures imagination while providing a mythical origin and

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meaning to a cultural space. As in the case of the European folly and Gothic-style restoration, the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes actively produce a mythical tale that renders historic and patrimonial density to the place that shelters the buried objects. DeMille’s destruction gesture had the derived effect of preserving these objects in time, a possibility that did not escape the director. In his autobiography, DeMille wrote: ‘If, a thousand years from now, archaeologists happen to dig beneath the sands of Guadalupe, I hope that they will not rush into print with the amazing news that Egyptian civilization, far from being confined to the valley of the Nile, extended all the way to the Pacific Coast of North America’ (DeMille, 1959, pp. 264–67). These visionary words help us understand the desire of the director for this ironic form of transcendence, but also from American culture of building a collective memory around their own cultural universe. By the mid-1920s, the thriving industry of American cinema constituted a testimony of the economic and political impetus of a nation that would consolidate as a global power after World War II, two decades later. The epic proportions of the production of The Ten Commandments captured the collective, cultural, and spiritual imagination, while they also celebrated the great economic and productive potential of American industry. This became ever more evident in the acceleration of the urban development of the Western districts of Los Angeles, which responded to the infrastructural demands of the monumental scale of Hollywood cinema, and evolved with the flow of wealth associated with the film industry. Furthermore, Cecil B. DeMille’s films inaugurated many of the production conventions of historic and epic film that developed after the 1920s and that went well beyond the passing of the director, until the full emergence of computer-generated imagery (CGI).2 By reconstituting the materiality of the excavation through the strategy of the museum display, Small’s work acknowledges the ecology of factors involved in transforming the destroyed film set into a collection of objects ripe for history. In particular, Excavation II illustrates how the persistence of matter in fragmented form sets into motion different processes of value accumulation, beautifully illustrated by the writings of Jane Bennet. In her book Vibrant Matter, the philosopher and political theorist describes how worms have played a significant role in the preservation of historical artifacts. By examining Charles Darwin and Bruno Latour’s studies on the topic, Bennet explains that worms create vegetable mold as a product of digesting the different materials on soil. This process eventually creates

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new layers of soil that are assimilated by the ground and progressively bury human made objects and constructions that were on the surface: How do worms make history? They make it by making vegetable mold, which makes possible ‘seedlings of all kinds,’ which makes possible an earth hospitable to humans, which makes possible the cultural artifacts, rituals, plans, endeavors of human history. Worms also ‘make history’ by preserving the artifacts that humans make: worms protect ‘for an indefinitely long period every object, not liable to decay, which is dropped on the surface of the land, by burying it beneath their castings,’ a service for which ‘archaeologists ought to be grateful to worms.’ (Bennett, 2010, pp. 95–96)

Bennett, considering Latour, also remembers that worms have the ability to transform the conditions of soil. By adding or transporting moisture, minerals, or organic materials, soil can become more liable to host certain vegetable compounds, therefore stimulating the emergence of specific ecosystems. Because of this, and although we perceive them as static, the limits between a forest and a meadow can be transforming constantly. Due in part to the agency of worms, the forest can advance over the meadows and vice versa, according to the changes on the conditions in the soil. Such chances precipitate the prosperity or decadence of diverse species of plants—and transitively, of animals—that could transform history according to the possibilities of survival of a given ecosystem, food availability, and potential for settlement in a specific area. Although unintentional, the actions of Darwin’s worms, equally to DeMille’s gesture (as interpreted by Bennet and Small respectively), become agents of history by preserving objects that, beyond their speculated cultural value, they are simply there, available for discovery for later generations and other cultures. That availability of certain cultural artifacts, or lack thereof, determines the course of scientific investigation, as well as the intellectual, social, affective, ritual and psychic value of an object, its original culture and the space where it proliferated. Because of this, the contribution of sedentary cultures, prone to produce objects and with developed written traditions, tends to have more representation in history than those with nomadic practices (therefore with a more limited material culture) and orally centered historic traditions. Beyond the archaeological component, Small’s installation included five large-scale paintings that depicted scenes from Ancient Egypt. These images are referenced by the artist in the exhibition catalog. The source of

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the paintings is the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, a pyramidal construction saturated with Egyptian imagery, including a great sphinx on its facade. As mentioned by Small, in 2007 the hotel and casino removed its themed decoration in response to a legislative act that took place in Egypt to protect the intellectual property on their archaeological sites, temples and statues, forcing to pay royalties to anyone that would reproduce these images and artifacts or used their names. Small notes that days before the sanctioning of the new legislation, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Wafd had published the curious fact that the hotel in Las Vegas reported more visitors than the historic site from which it took its name. The money obtained from royalties was meant to contribute to the maintenance of the historical site and artifacts, but the hotel owning group MGM Resorts International decided instead to remove the themed material from its hotel as much as possible. Small’s description continues with an analysis of the images that formerly occupied the walls of the hotel in Las Vegas and that besides representing scenes from the biblical tale of The Ten Commandments, they also contain as ‘hidden hieroglyphs that intermix historically accurate characters with modern symbology, including images of alien spaceships, the resurrection of Christ, dinosaurs, casino playing cards, and personal messages from the painters’ (Green & Small, 2016). Both the acrylic paintings from the Luxor Hotel and Casino and the cast and wooden pieces from the film set at the Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes recreate a history that, while built upon narratives and iconology of the ancient past (the Christian Bible and the civilization of Ancient Egypt), creates a new brand of past or a mythology composed of cultural mash-­ ups: Las Vegas and the Hollywood film industry constitute major icons of milestone eras in American popular culture of a large part of the twentieth century, which had their golden age between the 1920s and 1950s, and today found themselves in a period of decline in the collective imaginary. Hunter S. Thompson’s novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a delirious depiction of the decay of the American countercultural movement, set in a baroque and rotten city of Las Vegas, where the splendor and luxury of the American dream have become stale and digestible versions of themselves. Similarly, the film industry has suffered rapid transformations during the last three decades, making way to on-demand content, a plethora of remakes and overindulgent digital effects, and movie theaters with exuberant amenities, in an attempt to curb the steady decline of attendance to film theaters. The Golden Age of Hollywood is behind us and is now part

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of an idealized past that crystallized in the architecture of twentieth-­ century Los Angeles, notoriously in the many semi-abandoned theaters on Broadway street in the downtown area, but also in the archaeological remains found in the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes. Both Small and the writer and director Peter Brosnan—who in 2016 completed a film on the Guadalupe-Nipomo ruins, The Lost City of Cecil B.  DeMille—describe how the fragments and the dunes have become a popular culture marvel: how it is possible to find fragments of the archaeological artifacts in houses and retail stores of the area, and how some enthusiasts have dedicated themselves to put together private collections and to create derived objects. Archaeologist Jack Green comments how, for example, there is a small exhibition of the ruins embedded to a store called Napa Auto Parts, where the pieces share vitrines with accessories and spare parts for vehicles, and where sometimes it is difficult to distinguish which pieces are part of the original set and which ones have been included into the collection spontaneously or by mistake (Green & Small, 2016). The improvised exhibition as well as the eclectic use of space at Napa Auto Parts in Guadalupe speaks broadly of the speculation with value that is involved in collections, as the objects become (more) significant through the act of being collected. It also makes visible some of the contingencies that shape our historic narrations, for example, which objects are preserved (and which aren’t) and under which circumstances these decisions were made. And finally, it reveals how the fragments whimsically sneaked into historical reports, like in the case of Napa Auto Parts, where the objects from the ruins are confounded with others that have been added to the collection, only because they look similar to those that came from the dunes. Accounts of history and memory are rarely linear; fragments of the past are often mixed with other information that is contingently added in the process, whether from the subjective experience of the account or from the unforeseeable factors involved in sourcing and remembering information. They ultimately combine in that strange amalgam that constitutes the present perspective of the past. For the inhabitants of Guadalupe, as well as for the researchers and enthusiasts of the ruins of The Ten Commandments, what was found in the dunes is inscribed as a mythical narrative, which does not correspond to the biblical tale or the represented site. It is a new history, created over the multiple layers of signification that unfolded between the historical period of Ancient Egypt and the flourishing of the cinematographic industry of southern California. This

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narrative exists as a current interpretation of historical events along with the attribution of certain mythical qualities that come from the way on which facts are evaluated: the geographical and historical proximity or remoteness, the possibility (or lack thereof) of attributing archaeological interest to the place and the objects, and even historical tendencies related to the cultural appeal of a particular object. The contemporary passion for intellectual operations like revaluation and reinterpretation, or for issues like the replica, the derived product and popular culture, can contribute to the mythification of the story that began with the construction of the film set for The Ten Commandments. Moreover, the contingency that connects these interests in the present and their coincidence with the case of the Guadalupe-Nipomo ruins is a great example of how the attribution of value is seemingly as unpredictable as the way in which memory takes shape inside the human mind.

The Threat of Disappearance But perhaps the most relevant factor that contributes to the intensification of the value of a cultural object is the threat of its disappearance. Analog to the way social psychology is instrumentalized in the consumer goods market to drive desire through portraying scarcity, a tension between preservation and disappearance is put in the service of power narratives at cultural institutions. This, for example, allows for the stereotypical colonial trope employed by Western museums, to defend their so-called right to appropriate cultural artifacts through their presumed unique ability to better preserve them while profiting socially and economically from them. But the threat of disappearance of a cultural artifact also detonates a number of effects on their nature and significance. The acts of preservation and other related operations (destruction, re-signification, restoration, standardization) profoundly transform the nature of the preserved object, and there is no greater return to preservation than the increasing of value derived from the act—or enactment—of salvaging that object from an otherwise certain disappearance. Since the mid-1990s, the Taliban Sunni Islamic fundamentalist political and military organization has attempted to destroy cultural and spiritual icons that they perceive as being exogenous and therefore dangerous to Islam. For example, in March 2001 the Taliban destroyed the Bamiyan Buddhas, two monumental sculptures carved on the cliffs of the Bamiyan Valley, some 230  kilometers north of Kabul, Afghanistan. These direct

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attacks on particular representations of the past not only caused generalized international outrage, but also generated debates within global archaeologist communities on how to protect the material witness on our collective memories especially the difficult ones. Among the debated questions that followed the destruction of Bamiyan’s structures and other similarly contested ones: should the sculptures be reconstructed? Or perhaps, is their destruction part of the historical continuum of the Buddhas and of the region, and therefore a rebuilt should not be attempted?3 In the book Textualterity, American artist Joseph Grigely analyzes how artworks and literary texts undergo changes as part of their process of dissemination: a text might be reprinted with modifications due to censorship or translation, and this produces effects in its reception; an annotated or an abbreviated version might be written afterward; or a theater or film adaptation may be written in time, opening new avenues for meaning, as well as additional visual, narrative or interpretative elements. Therefore, a text becomes the sum of its multiple versions. Similarly, a work of art undergoes decay due to environmental conditions, or changes through restoration, handling, intervention, transportation or defacement; it can also be reinterpreted by critics or new artists, or it can become a trade image of popular culture. All of the latter transforms the original constitution of the work and ultimately the experience of the spectator with the work in time. Additionally, the derived products of these works, like reproductions, copies, photographs and texts, add to the constellation of experiences, reactions and interpretations generated by a certain piece. For Grigely, a work is not its materiality in a pure or ‘original’ state, just as it was conceived by the author; rather, it is constituted by the sum of its materiality, its transformations and additions through time: ‘The fact that polychromed Greek sculptures are no longer polychromed and lack noses and an occasional arm or leg does not so much detract from their status as art but add to it perhaps even define it’ (Grigely, 1995, p. 1). The perspective offered by Grigely allows us to multiply the reach of Small’s gestures. If the archaeological approach highlights the material culture or human group of a place, it is also necessary to incorporate to this analysis a tracing of the relationships with non-physical aspects that have an effect on that materiality. Small’s installation cannot be read without bearing in mind aspects like: the temporal distance between the production of the object and the moment of its assessment and valuing as an archaeological issue; the cultural and spiritual value as a myth of origin of the imagery in DeMille’s film; and even, the cultural and material

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perspective of the specific time on which the reflection takes place. The first decades of the twenty-first century seem to be a moment in which human frontiers are put to the test: in the last ten or fifteen years, social regressions and material excesses of capitalism and military industry have generated a stark interest for reevaluating the promise of an inexhaustible scientific, technological and economic development. Climate change, the overshoot of large-scale agriculture and industrial production, armed conflict and the consequences of social inequity have made evident the finitude of physical resources, soil of human culture. Once the material excess has been exhausted, and in the midst of an accelerated process of widespread economic precariousness, the reconsideration and reuse of matter acquires prime relevance. This is reflected in the growing uses of recycled materials and renewable energies in different kinds of manufacturing; it also has repercussions in popular culture, now attracted to secondhand and upscaled clothing, vintage objects, cinematographic remakes and mash-ups, and an overall attraction to imagery of the past. Beyond the academic and patrimonial interest, the cult to the past conquers diverse realms of life, from old TV shows redistributed through streaming platforms and pret-a-porter clothing that pays tribute to 1990s fashion to the re-editing of cultural milestones, like the mythical exhibitions Primary Structures, When Attitudes Become Form, Documenta 5 or Culture in Action that were recently continued, revisited or commemorated with other exhibitions, academic forums and publications. In the world of hyper-consumption, the idea of the past progressively compresses the historical continuum to lend historical and patrimonial value to new cultural objects and events, no matter how recent or relevant they are. The digitalization of music and literature highlights the complexities and challenges behind systemic and hasty preservation: the pages of Project Gutenberg4 and the albums of iTunes and Spotify Libraries constitute a remarkable accumulation of cultural materials. However, in some cases, these only survive primarily as signs. The modeling of databases where these works are stored preserves only a specific and therefore limited set of qualities: for example, meta-information like author, year, cover and main content, in the case of the music albums, or the unformatted text with scrambled or lost order of pages and figures, in the case of books. In the effort of preserving many of these materials, they are flattened and simplified by the limits in the design of databases and authoring software. When a cultural object is subtracted from its original space, the material and immaterial values of its production process as well as the narrative on

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which this object is framed are controlled by the way on which the materials are preserved, the form and context of the collection or archive, and the discourse behind it. The cultural value of an object is radically determined by its specific participation in a cultural space. In the digital era, meta-information substitutes context in an insufficient way, transforming the interpretation of an object and therefore its understanding and relevance.

Preservation as Destruction The issue of contextual value of a cultural artifact is explored by the Colombian-Korean artist Gala Porras-Kim. In her untitled installation presented at ‘Made in L.A. 2016’, Porras-Kim used a series of pieces from UCLA’s Fowler Museum collection to raise questions on the reach of the museographic device as an agent of preservation of material culture. The objects, which were selected in collaboration with the Fowler team, lacked proper identification and therefore their date of production, precise materials or provenance remained unknown. This situation rendered their insertion in the anthropological collection of the museum impossible. Each object or group of objects is presented on a plinth with a blue wool surface, forming straight rows on the entire rectangular base. The central space is reserved for larger objects, raised on a second plinth. This collection is composed of wooden, stone and bone carvings, as well as ceramics and weavings of different fibers (Fig. 8.2). The second part of the installation consisted of drawings of diverse dimensions displayed on the four walls of the exhibition space at the Hammer Museum. The drawings visualized memories from the collection installed in the middle of the space. While a mosaic of small drawings, depicting many small-scale objects, occupied one of the walls, larger drawings occupied the other three walls. All of the drawings were made by the artist and resembled scientific depictions of biological entities and historical artifacts. Finally, the installation was cataloged in two printouts, which were made available at the entrance of the room, introducing visitors to additional details about the origin and other characteristics of the exhibited objects. When inspecting the information condensed in the printouts and the installation diagram, information previously unnoticed is unveiled: some of the objects in the installation were fabricated by the artist, particularly the larger size ones in the central area of the collection. These objects are

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Fig. 8.2  Gala Porras-Kim, Untitled (2016). Installation view at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in the context of the exhibition ‘Made in L.A. 2016’. (Courtesy the artist)

placed in a similar fashion to those lent by the Fowler Museum and there doesn’t seem to be a significant difference in the way they are presented. If it is noticeable that the objects created by Porras-Kim are larger in scale, the decision to place them in the middle seems to obey, at first glance, reasons of efficiency and order in staging their visualization. The decisions on the order of the drawings is analogous: the drawings of the smaller objects are densely organized in rows on a single wall, while the larger drawings occupy the longer walls, with more spacing between them. Each drawing is at a 1:1 scale with its object of reference. Porras-Kim’s installation holds a different ambition to that of Small’s: if in the previously referenced case the artist appealed to museographic strategies to highlight the value rendered to objects by its process of ruination and of later of becoming part of a collection, the opposite takes place in Porras-Kim’s art. Through her installation, she shows how the process of collecting is also a process of destruction. Just like in the case of digital music and literature repositories, the instant an object is subtracted from its cultural matrix it begins to rely in the metadata set that is gathered and

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preserved alongside; when this data disappears the value of the object is crucially destroyed. Porras-Kim’s installation ironizes over the paradoxical nature of the collection inside the encyclopedic museum: the institution garners importance through its collection, which is in turn composed of objects ‘torn’ from their original context. In the didactic materials of encyclopedic museums, like the Art Institute of Chicago or the Neues Museum in Berlin, a visitor learns that the exhibited objects are important because they belong to a specific geographical, temporal and cultural origin; ironically that very specificity and context needed to be destroyed in order to bring the collection into life. The collection is therefore of a different nature than the sum of its parts: it’s a narrative effort to give meaning to the process of extraction, but one that defers the responsibility of dealing with the implications of that very process. When looking at donation records in museum’s bulletins, it is common to find gaps in the history that goes between the extraction of the object until its arrival to the museum. These gaps are deliberate and have the effect of shielding an institution and its benefactors of the ethical implications of extraction of objects with heritage value from their places of origin—in many cases illegal and colonial. As historian and theorist Susanne Leeb claims, ‘[e]ven today, museums assume the metonymy that the possession of relics belonging to so-called civilizations is in itself proof of civilization’ (Leeb, 2017, p. 104). However, as it is brought forth by Porras-Kim’s work, the implications of that possession are broad and often have disastrous consequences. Here, the museums and their displaying practices that separate, organize and reframe cultural artifacts become instrumental in the cleansing of the complex and violent histories of extraction. Furthermore, by producing ambiguity in the lineages of heritage objects and their trajectory into the institution, the very practice of collecting creates uncertain degrees of separation that reframe history for the purpose of its instrumentalization. The destruction of the original narrative is a process that links colonial, scientific, political, trade and military institutions with cultural ones; this takes place through a complex process of separation and confusion that dilutes ethical responsibility by disaggregating the systems of extraction and colonization into useful categories: politics, art, cultural heritage, natural history, natural resources and so on. The question about collections that spring from the work of Porras-Kim calls for a broader epistemological inquiry on how disciplines create discrete objects of study that favor the growth of specialized knowledge, but work in detriment of the ecology of lineages,

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interactions and repercussions of the cultural materials that are the very source of their interest. The comparison between the gestures of Small and Porras-Kim is also productive to formulate questions on the interaction between cultural objects and artistic gestures. The first case, the collecting practice represented by the museographic device, constitutes an agent of creation and preservation; the second, the staging of the decontextualized collection, makes use of the museographic device to bring forth its own destructive capacity. However, Porras-Kim performs an additional operation that questions the strategy of meta-referentiality of collections: by inserting objects of her own making, the artist requests additional attention from the spectator, not only toward the archaeological objects and the museographical device, but also to her own craft. By inserting her own objects— broadly identified—within the selection of objects from the Fowler, Porras-Kim offers a reflection perhaps as paradoxical as the acts of appropriation of encyclopedic museums. Does this gesture respond to an implicit demand of art practice of producing new objects, or performing a ‘convincing’ transformation or appropriation of culture as a requisite to render value to the artistic gesture? What further meaning is offered by the act of inserting these new elements into the collection (Fig. 8.3)? A possible answer to these questions can be discerned by looking at three further examples of contemporary art: the works of Michael Rakowitz, Morehshin Allahyari and Ulrik Lopez. The first two works, which enjoy great international recognition, address the massive disappearance of heritage objects from Iraq and other Mediterranean countries, caused by the multiple consequences of the several invasions of Iraq that were perpetrated by the United States during the past three decades; the work by Lopez, who is a remarkable emerging artist of Mexican and Puerto Rican origin, is in turn focused on understanding the dissonance between the cultural usage of heritage objects in their context of emergence and their eventual transformation by means of their inclusion in a museum display. In the continuing series The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist, Rakowitz recreates looted objects from the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad, using packaging of Middle Eastern foodstuffs and local Newspapers. These objects are then presented in contemporary art exhibitions, inserted in archaeological and ethnographic collections, or displayed as public sculptures. Allahyari’s project Material Speculation: ISIS uses archive materials, crowdsourced imagery and expert accounts to reconstruct 12 original figures destroyed by ISIS in 2015, using 3D printing

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Fig. 8.3  Michael Rakowitz, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist—Seated Nude Male Figure, Wearing Belt Around Waist (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series) (2018). Installation view at the Eli & Edythe Broad Museum in East Lansing, MI, in the context of the exhibition ‘Never Spoken Again’. (Courtesy David Ayala-Alfonso)

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techniques. The resulting sculptures also carry flash drives and memory cards with the archival material that resulted from this forensic process. Finally, in his work Summon Song I, Lopez forges an archaeological excavation and a series of ceramics to create an installation that re-incorporates elements lost to the insertion of the objects into a museum display, in particular their activation through sound. Both the excavation and the ceramics hold the capacity of resonance, indicating that they were meant to interact with sound, creating a relationship between the body, the artifact and the space, by means of the human voice. The projects by Michael Rakowitz, Morehshin Allahyari and Ulrik Lopez make use of artistic gestures to resist different forms of destruction: in the case of Rakowitz and Allahyari, their work exposes the relative impossibility of a definitive obliteration of a heritage artifact, as it survives through all the material and immaterial forms of reproduction and documentation available to human culture in the twenty-first century; they are then brought into material form, now carrying all the historical trajectory of the object, but also infuse new layers of meaning through their research, production and display practices, creating further cultural resonance for the objects that were originally ‘destroyed’. Interestingly, they create an additional focus of criticality by interfering with the process of speculation that characterizes the accumulation of heritage objects, where scarcity increases the cultural and economic value of the remaining pieces in existence.5 In a different direction, Lopez mimics sanctioned forms of procuring and displaying heritage to express the limits of archaeological and institutional collecting practices, and how they erase the entire cultural ecology surrounding the collected objects, and even destroy or deactivate the objects themselves, even as their material components still rest inside the vitrines. As in the case of Porras-Kim, these three works raise a major question on the relevance of continuing the practices of subtracting heritage from its cultural matrix to be placed in collections and museum displays in the present. Through practices of appropriation, reconstruction and re-contextualization, art creates a vivid dialogue with institutions and disciplines and urges them to reformulate the validity of their current forms of existence and their methods (Fig. 8.4). It could be claimed that the gestures that gave birth to a given cultural artifact imply what are now understood as typical intellectual operations of artistic creation: representation, illustration, combination, irony and critique; however, it is through the intricate metabolism of culture, science, economy and politics how these gestures become significant. Notably, the collecting and the scientific apparatuses are primordial agents in this

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Fig. 8.4  Ulrik Lopez, Summon Song I (2018–2019). Sketches and contextual images from the project. (Courtesy the artist)

valuation process, as they are broadly understood as keepers of knowledge, culture and heritage in favor of communities, nations, and even the entire human culture. Therefore, the practices of artists like Small, Porras-Kim, and others mentioned in this text become particularly significant, not only because they engage with the issues of collecting and preserving cultural heritage, but also because they address the complex micro and macro dynamics involved in the creation of collections and value. They resist a tendency in recent art of abandoning the institutional space in search for conquering new cultural and ideological realms and return to address the institution with full impetus. Small’s installation explores the genesis and life of the archaeological object in all its density, revealing how this process fractures the integrity of a scientific endeavor and exposing the politics that determine the rendering of heritage value to a cultural artifact. In turn, Porras-Kim’s work makes visible how the acts of extracting and

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collecting privilege both the scientific process and the institution in detriment to the objects themselves and their original cultural matrix. It is particularly significant to acknowledge how artistic operations performed by the artists presented in this chapter not only make evident the inherent conflicts—both conceptual and political—existing in the practices of extraction, collecting and heritage preservation, but also create further semantic operations on their referenced materiality that complicate their understanding and create forms of knowledge that may not be accessible through more disciplined avenues of research; in this sense, these works do not act merely as evidence or illustration, but as distinct intellectual statements that are connected through their dialogue and through curatorial research, and then activated via their presentation and experience. While these projects have the false appearance of seemingly traditional works of art in museum contexts, they resist the inertia of institutional and disciplinary self-preservation to open productive avenues for reformulations of theory and practice that curb their own ethical and intellectual pitfalls. Furthermore, a critique performed through operations on materiality demonstrates the possibilities of that very materiality enacting a different agency to that of the theoretical or the literary interpretation. A reformulation of approaches to the issues of collecting, preserving and heritage involves envisioning future forms of engagement that go beyond intra-disciplinary means of critique, as well as politics of inclusion and decolonization. It requires an understanding of how the trajectories of disciplinary evolution imply an acknowledgment of the limitations brought into light by the art projects studied here; but also, an awareness that the keys to overcome such deficits already exist, not only in the recomposition of more encompassing narratives, but equally in doing so by means of the many forms of knowledge that exceed preconceived methodologies and scientific canon.

Notes 1. The title of Small’s project plays on the poetic meanings and referentiality of the project, as it acknowledges the excavation of the ruins at the Guadalupe-­ Nipomo dunes as a second excavation of the ruins of Ancient Egypt. At the time the ruins were being excavated, in October 2012, Los Angeles filmmaker Peter Brosnan had the idea of doing a documentary on the case, and the name Excavation as a potential title for a film. Brosnan’s piece was released in 2016 under the title The Lost City of Cecil B. DeMille (Conversation with Daniel R. Small).

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2. Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, from 1958, is popularly deemed to be the first film ever to feature computer-generated graphics, as it used a rigged ­anti-­aircraft computer called the M5 to create the endless spiral that can be seen in the opening credits. However, full-scale CGI would take until the late 1970s to be used prominently as part of full feature films. Source: https://www.diyphotography.net/alfred-­hitchcocks-­vertigo-­ possibly-­first-­movie-­use-­computer-­animation/. 3. While writing this text, the then president of the United States, Donald Trump, threatened to target and destroy 52 Iranian cultural sites, as part of a tense diplomatic exchange with the Middle Eastern country that began with the killing of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani on January 3, 2020. The number 52 was symbolic as it commemorated an equal number of American hostages held by Iran in 1979. Beyond the obvious considerations regarding the deliberate destruction of heritage, the threat of the American president sparked great controversy, as, according to the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 2017 United Nations Security Council resolution, such an act would constitute a war crime. 4. Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org/) is an online collection of over 60,000 ebooks of world literature, for which US copyright has already expired. It is driven by a team of volunteers who digitalize and proofread the books in order to release them to the public domain. 5. In an experimental text published in 2018 under the title ‘Glamorous Hoarding’, I elaborate on the topic of accumulation and financial speculation performed by large-scale cultural institutions; in particular encyclopedic and art museums. This piece is part of the book and exhibition project Institutional Garbage, published by Green Lantern Press in Chicago.

References Benjamin, W. (1969). Theses on the Philosophy of History, Illuminations (H. Zohn, Trans.). Schocken Books. Bennett, J. (2010). Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press. DeMille, C. B. (Director). (1923). The Ten Commandments (Film). Los Angeles: Paramount Pictures. DeMille, C. B. (1959). The Autobiography of Cecil B. DeMille. Prentice Hall. Green, J., & Small, D. (2016). Excavation II (booklet). Armand Hammer Museum. Grigely, J. (1995). Textualterity: Art, Theory and Textual Criticism. University of Michigan Press. Leeb, S. (2017). Local Time, or the Presence of Ancient Past. Text zur Kunst, 105, 98–116.

CHAPTER 9

Ethnoscaping Green Resistance: Heritage and the Fight Against Fracking Scott Burnett

Introduction An appeal to ‘heritage’ in the present often involves the discursive mobilization of symbolic resources from the past to support a particular social vision for the future (Hobsbawm, 1983; Smith, 2006). While these resources include any number of cultural artefacts, it is worth remembering that spaces and places, landscapes, and ‘worlds’ are also culturally produced, and included in what we preserve as ‘heritage’. The invocation of ecosystems, natural features, and landscapes as the ‘heritage’ of a specific group or of humanity in general is often involved in conservation discourse, and it is open to analysis that understands nature as socially constructed, picking out the ways in which it is richly interwoven with human culture and history (see Descola, 2013; Harrison, 2015). Visions of nature, as has been shown repeatedly, are inextricably wound up with social imaginaries (Büscher, 2020). The question this chapter asks is: Whose culture, and whose version of history, gets projected onto the

S. Burnett (*) University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_9

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future when specific environmental ‘resistance’ movements invoke natural ‘heritage’? In order to answer it, I will look at how activists talk about land and landscape in movements against hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’) in the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. My approach does not rely on claiming that calls for biodiversity conservation and the preservation of natural habitats are not urgent and important, nor that we should not redouble efforts to resist the ongoing extraction and consumption of fossil fuels. I do, however, claim that these projects should not be prioritized over or separated from questions of social justice. While unchecked extractivism, disaster capitalism, and climate catastrophe have gone hand-in-hand with imperialism, racism, and ethnic cleansing, elements of the mainstream environmentalist movement have been equally corrosive of the status and rights of colonized people (Mollett & Kepe, 2018). Resistance to environmental exploitation requires critical reflection on how the systems of meaning inscribed on the natural world become involved in our vision of futures for humanity. As the planet faces worsening environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change, the protection of a culturally produced poetic landscape seems set to become an even more vital part of green resistance, as rallying calls about the beauty of the land secure the emotional investment of activists, donors, and politicians. In this chapter, I aim to examine in detail how heritage works spatially and territorially in environmentalist discourse through discourse mapping of the largest anti-fracking Facebook groups in the three country contexts mentioned above. Using a postfoundationalist approach to discourse (Marttila, 2016) that seeks to identify the ‘nodal points’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985/2001) around which the discourse is organized, I draw specific attention to landscapes that are wound up in nationalist imaginaries, which assert territorially bounded ethnic identities. Because environmental problems are complex global systems requiring coordination and collaboration across communities, borders, and landscapes, I argue that these spaces—which I analyse as ‘ethnoscapes’ following Smith’s (1999) theorization, which I distinguish from Appadurai’s (1990) use of the term below—invoke histories of colonialism and ethnonationalism that threaten the human social relationships required to make environmentally sustainable futures possible.

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The Whiteness of Green Humanity does not bear equal responsibility for the current ecological crisis. Arguably, the Anthropocene is more accurately thought of as the ‘white supremacy scene’ (Mirzoeff, 2018). Modernity, industrialization, and European colonialism were linked processes that accumulated wealth and prosperity in the (white) West. Even as anti-modern and Romantic ideas took hold in these polities, they often served merely to undergird processes of state-formation, so that nature conservation tended to inscribe the same nationalist and colonial logic on the land as unchecked resource exploitation. Many treasured national parks in former colonies, for instance, were formed through the forced removals of Indigenous people from their ancestral lands (Kalof et al., 2002; Kepe, 2009; Spence, 1999). Complex relationships between territory and human livelihoods were resignified by fiat and vilified as squatting or poaching (Neumann, 2004). In the wake of these catastrophes, biodiversity conservation has struggled to change its spots. Racial hierarchies and other dimensions of difference are still mobilized to exclude, dispossess, and even kill (Burnett & Milani, 2017; Mollett & Kepe, 2018). Where even the proposed solutions to the environmental crises caused by Western capitalism ride roughshod over the rights of Othered and minoritized people, some argue that if an ecological tipping point is already imminent, a relational tipping point, beyond which different groups of people can no longer work together to solve problems, might already have been reached (Whyte, 2020). If coloniality and white supremacy remain as nodal points even in environmentalist discourse, there is little hope that ‘[consent], trust, accountability, and reciprocity’ (ibid.) between supposed allies in environmentalist movements will be built. Below, I will discuss instances where resistance to fossil fuel exploitation reproduces the nation as a white possession (see Moreton-Robinson, 2008, 2015). Landscape is an especially salient dimension of analysis given the power-laden ways in which space and race are co-constructed (Delaney, 2002). Modern metropolitan environmentalist movements often unavoidably rely on what are essentially urban dreams of a lost (or imminently threatened) rural idyll. So while environmentalists are often framed in the popular press as brave underdogs facing seemingly unstoppable oil and gas giants, careful attention to power relations between discursive formations and social structures must go deeper. Indeed, there is no reason to expect

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that environmentalist resistance which mobilizes specific heritages, and specific heritage landscapes should be exempted from critique under the sanctifying green mantle of ecological preservation.

Fighting for Our (Green/White) Future Worldwide activism to halt fracking has been successful in a number of cases around the world, where moratoria on exploration, or bans on extraction, have been won (see Fig, 2013). Because anti-fracking coalitions of landowners, environmentalists, and businesspeople have formed in contexts where land ownership and control is already contested, the colonial dimensions of natural resource exploitation—the issue of who gets to say what the land is used for—need to be considered as the context for this activism. The argument I will mount below builds on the salience of temporality in environmental debates. Environmentalism takes as its typical discursive terrain contestations over the future of the natural world. But as the natural and the social are inextricable in framing both environmental problems and solutions, portrayals of the future come with dense social implications. As Baldwin (2012) points out, the social reproduction of white supremacy relies on tropes related to futures that need to be avoided or delivered: tropes of utopia, apocalypse, hope, potentiality, possibility, and fear. These are also the key tropes of environmental discourse, which is at a certain level all about what kinds of future our relationship with the natural world will produce. Baldwin thus suggests a research programme that analyses whiteness as futurity, investigating the ways in which the future is mobilized in discourse to secure the durability of ‘spaces, places, landscapes, natures, mobilities, bodies … that are assumed to be white or are in some way structured, though often implicitly, by some notion of whiteness’ (2012, p. 174). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, constant discursive work must be done even in the aftermath of settler colonialism to continue to secure nations as white possessions, a move foundational to enabling the whole system of private property in colonial societies (Moreton-Robinson, 2015, p. 22, see also 2008). A thoroughgoing culture of denying Indigenous sovereignty and buttressing white entitlement to the privileges shored up both in the metropole and in the colonial periphery over centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation opens itself to analysis at the level of these gestures of ownership that work to repeat themselves into the future. In order to explore the discursive formations of the anti-fracking movement at a global level, I chose three national contexts whose histories are

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closely entwined with each other, whose cultures are more or less familiar to me, and whose futures are believed by environmental activists to be threatened in similar ways by fracking for natural gas: the United Kingdom, Australia, and South Africa. In each of these contexts I first identified the ten largest (by membership or following) anti-fracking Facebook groups or pages. I then scraped all posts from these 30 groups using a purpose-­ built Python script. This allowed me to identify the group or page with the largest volume of posts, reactions, and comments in the four years from 2013 to 2016: ‘Fracking Hell (UK)’ in the United Kingdom, ‘Lock the Gate Alliance’ in Australia, and ‘Chase Shell Oil Out of the Karoo’ in South Africa. From these groups I built a smaller corpus of all the texts, images, videos, and linked texts of the top 25 posts (by number of interactions) from each of the four years, totalling 100 posts per country context. In the discussion of the texts below, posts are referenced first through a country code (SA/AU/UK) and then numbered chronologically from 1 to 100, where 1–25 are posts from 2013, 26–50 from 2014, 51–75 from 2015, and 76–100 from 2016. As I have argued elsewhere (Burnett, 2019) this sampling methodology focuses analytical attention on the most affect-laden texts of an online corpus. Affect is especially important in postfoundational discourse analysis as it is the ‘passionate affinity’ (Marttila, 2016, p. 38) of social actors for particular articulations that underpin discursive struggles. Affect works to fix the meaning of specific items around ‘nodal points’ in an otherwise unlimited semantic field (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985/2001; Marttila, 2016). Nodal points are the values or principles that structure the internal ‘logic’ of a particular discourse (Marttila, 2016, pp. 127–128). Limited by the affordances of the Facebook platform, where online groups can be tailored in terms of their privacy settings, where affective reactions are channelled into five categories (like, love, wow, sad, and angry), and where comments, sub-comments, and further sharing are allowed, it is clear that articulation is in a constant dialogical form with identity formation (Georgalou, 2016). By analysing the top 100 posts from each of three leading national campaigns, I do not claim to represent the entire anti-­ fracking discourse of their contexts. I would, however, argue that these articulations are important signals of how passionate affinity is secured in this discourse. In what I present below, it is evident that for many environmentalists the land itself—or, more accurately, a specific vision of the landscape—plays a crucial nodal role in structuring the campaign against fracking, and inspiring the identity performances of the anti-frackers.

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These landscapes are not merely beautiful vistas to be protected, but serve as ethnoscapes that project the land as belonging to a particular group of people into the future. What is at stake, then, is securing the nation as a white possession in perpetuity.

Ethnoscapes, and Nationalism as Myth What theoretical purchase does the notion of ethnoscape offer to the study of landscape as heritage? While for Appadurai (1990) the ethnoscape is characterized by constant change as people and cultures flow around the world in processes of globalization, I use the term here in the parallel sense employed by Smith (1999), to refer to the ostensibly eternal, and thus primarily imagined, backdrop for an unfolding ethnonationalist drama against which such changes are measured and problematized. While instrumental models of nationalism explain what the nation is good for, Smith (1999) argued that they do not explain how nations secure the emotional commitment of their citizens. A nation needs people who are willing to pay taxes and send their children to die in wars. He argues that ethnic myths are crucial to binding people together into a single national story that plays out on a specific imagined landscape. These myths, if they are to be successful, must sufficiently plaster over inconvenient regional and historical messiness. Smith thus presents six myths that are central to the process of nation-state formation. The first is a ‘Myth of Temporal Origins, or When We Were Begotten’ which provides ‘[fixed] points in time [that] act as barriers to the flood of meaninglessness’ and ‘are essential gauges of collective development’ that connect the ancestors to the present (1999, p. 63). The second is the ‘Myth of Location and Migration, or Where We Came From and How We Got Here’ (ibid.) which narrates how a particular people came to occupy a particular territory. Then there is the ‘Myth of Ancestry, or Who Begot Us and How We Developed’ which relates the people to a mythical or quasihistorical figure and thus provides a symbolic kinship link between members of the community and its forebears ‘down to the common ancestor’, thus transmitting ‘certain spiritual values within the lines of descent, and thereby the solution to the problems of relationships and cohesion in modern, complex societies’ (1999, p. 64). This lineage connects the nation not just to an individual but to supposedly core national values that have guided historical problem-­solving by lionized predecessors. The fourth myth is that of the ‘Heroic Age, or How We Were Freed and Became Glorious’ which constructs the time of the ‘good old days’ when

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the founders laid out the framework of the cultural systems that characterize the group. This time serves as a ‘touchstone of virtue and heroism, to guide and give meaning to the tasks of regeneration’ (1999, p.  65). ‘Regeneration’ is salient given the fifth myth, the ‘Myth of Decline, or How We Fell Into a State of Decay’ which ‘stresses the reality of retrogressions and the role of human volition’ (1999, p. 67). If the heroic age were secure, then there would be less impetus for citizens to commit time, energy, and privation in service of national goals. The point is that the nation must continually be striven for: it is continuously in a state of becoming. This promising future is encoded in the sixth and final myth, the ‘Myth of Regeneration, or How to Restore the Golden Age and Renew Our Community as “in the Days of Old’” which Smith argues is central to all nationalisms (1999, p. 67). The importance of temporality to nationalism (and especially ethnonationalism) becomes clear in this formulation, which gets its energy and direction from the difference potential between the future renewal of past glory and the current state of decay and degeneration. It is a mythic formation that powers change, while feeding on perceptions of inertia, under-performance, and struggle. Together, these myths confer on a people a special identity, dignity, autonomy, and (most importantly for this analysis) territories (1999, pp. 68–69). As Smith points out, Ethnic myths are vital ‘evidence’ for territorial “title-deeds”; association of the people with historic events and persons resident within a particular terrain is a sine qua non of the quest for a recognized ‘homeland’ … But, equally, the title-deeds which derive their meaning from ethnic myths are charters for collective aspirations and actions; they validate, even direct, the struggle for land and recognition. (1999, p. 69)

The point here is that the national territory enters into history laden with powerful symbolism in its own right and plays an active part in national myths. It does so as a historic and poetic landscape, an ‘ethnoscape’ both imprinted with and steeped in the culture of the group, which ‘emerges over time to provide the unique and indispensable setting for the events that shaped the community’ (1999, p. 150). This process is dialogical; as the landscape becomes associated with the history of the people, so too is that history written onto the landscape itself, and the memory of the group becomes ‘territorialized’ in sacred sites and monuments. This fusion of group memory and terrain means that nature comes

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into history as a key determinant of certain events, while history itself becomes naturalized. Ethnoscapes can thus be understood as entanglements of places and people which serve to legitimize a territorial right. Although the political implications of the myths underpinning the ethnoscape are all worthy of analysis, the myth of location and migration is especially salient. As Geschiere and Nyamnjoh (2000) point out, violent conflicts that pivot on conflicting claims to an original right to occupy land are often grounded in a myth of autochthony: that is, that the people are ‘of the soil’, that they were ‘there first’. These intricate and powerful cultural connections to land, which appear to be common to human societies around the world, may be interrupted or established anew, but often with violent consequences. While certain currents of thought within Zionism fuelling ongoing settlement and conflict in Israel/Palestine serve as a clear case of the vitality of autochthonic myths, similar cases are not hard to find. Autochthony takes on a unique character in settler colonial contexts, where populations that are subjugated, minoritized, and uprooted from their lands are forced to contend with the manufactured autochthony of settlers whose cultural production works not only to construct occupied territories as terra nullius but gradually over generations to lay claim to spiritual, eternal, and autochthonic relationships to land (see Burnett, 2019, on South Africa; Garbutt, 2006, on Australia; and Hughes, 2010, on Zimbabwe). It is important to remember that the myths that infuse the ethnoscape do not depend for their power on historical accuracy, but rather on their affective role in the culture. Every white South African schoolchild who grew up under apartheid knows that Boer women from the British colony of Natal established farms in the interior after trekking kaalvoet oor die Drakensberge (barefoot over the Drakensberg)—though exactly who attempted the journey without shoes and at what time were not taught. The point was the suffering of the tough, self-abnegating Boer woman whose bloody feet sanctified the land on which she and her family were to settle. Her status as a revered cultural hero was a pillar both of white supremacy and Afrikaner patriarchy in the interior (Blignaut, 2015). The cultural practices of a group, including gender roles and systems as encoded in relations to land, are often co-constructed on the ethnoscape, a phenomenon that mirrors the ways that colonial expropriation tends to disrupt the gender orders of Indigenous communities (Connell, 2014). While ethnic myths encode cultural systems and power relations within many groups, they are also mobilized to construct relations of domination between groups.

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In the sections below, I will first examine the three country contexts in turn, before turning to a discussion of the articulations—relating to indigeneity specifically—that were common across the three anti-fracking movements.

Fracking Hell (UK): The ‘Green and Pleasant Land’ In a 2014 post attacking the proposed Infrastructure Bill, Fracking Hell (UK)’s leading activist posted an image of a hand-printed poster with the first stanza of a protest poem (Fig. 9.1). The text, which dates from 1764, contrasts the unpunished villainy of a ruling class that claims ownership of

Fig. 9.1  ‘They hang the man + flog the woman…’ (UK046)

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the common, with commoners who are hanged or flogged for trying to feed their families from it. Aspects of colonialism practised abroad by the British have domestic parallels and precedents, notable among which was the enclosure of the commons. British peasants also became ‘poachers’ on their ancestral lands when the ruling classes declared them private property, in a process that reached its height in the eighteenth century (McCloskey, 1975). The anti-­ frackers invoke enclosure at this point as part of their resistance to the Infrastructure Act which, when passed in 2015 under David Cameron, provided Big Oil and Gas–friendly provisions for hydraulic fracturing. The parallels between enclosure and fracking are drawn powerfully by group members: they are both implemented by a thieving and mendacious ruling class against the wishes of ordinary people. And this is indeed the central preoccupation visible in the corpus. The ruling classes are regularly referred to as ‘parasites’. The semiotics of Britain’s enduring social stratification are weaponized against the elite: popular memes assert that Queen Elizabeth II is a ‘benefits scrounger’ (UK040; UK061) and members suggest installing the kinds of spikes used in public spaces to prevent rough sleeping by homeless people on the benches of parliament instead (UK036). The struggles of the twenty-first century are linked to those of the eighteenth by continued resistance to upper-class arrogance and deceit. The commons that is invoked in the protest poem is imagined (with its goose) as an agricultural space. A rural and agricultural pre-enclosure idyll is also the setting for William Blake’s ‘And did those feet in ancient time’ (1804), better known as the hymn ‘Jerusalem’, which is referenced in four posts in the corpus. England’s ‘unofficial’ national anthem (Kumar, 2003, p. 294) draws a powerful contrast between the idea of building Christ’s city on England’s ‘pastures’ and ‘green & pleasant Land’ when the landscape is currently dotted with ‘dark Satanic Mills’ (Blake, 1966, pp. 480–481), and is thus often read as an early critique of industrialism. Commitment to Blake’s vision, with its rousing call for unceasing mental fight, as well as bow, arrows, and chariots of fire, accords well with an activist movement that understands itself as protector of what—with a Christian tinge—is invoked as a Holy Land. And belief in the sacred is a powerful way to separate friend from foe. The fact that a policeman sang along to Jerusalem at a protest, for example, is offered as proof that not all police personnel are enemies (UK009). While anti-frackers gain their moral authority from sacred land, their legal authority derives from pre-modern times. European Union and

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international law are appealed to at certain points by the anti-frackers, but it is significant that the British laws that are quoted as valid authorities, as opposed to oppressive impositions by the ruling classes, are the thirteenth-­ century Magna Carta (UK029) and the first-century Brehon Laws (UK040), which were Gaelic laws that governed communal access to land (Tobin, 2014). The activism of the anti-fracking movement in the United Kingdom thus builds on powerful symbolic foundations. In a national context characterized by ancient and ossified class hierarchies, sacred connection to the landscape—to green pastures dotted with druidic menhirs (UK050)— plays a central role. While Smith’s national myths are clearly present, they can be understood as reflecting not merely a British ethnicity, but also a class consciousness. During the Golden Age, ancient Gaelic peoples had their own land management law, while Anglo-Saxon commoners shared the land and its fruits. The Saxon lords encoded the rights they extracted from the Normans in the Magna Carta, but then Decline was brought about by the enclosure of the commons, which saw Heroes martyred under unjust laws. Renewal can come about only with a recommitment to the values of the Heroes: to the sharing of the land in common, and the neutralization of the ‘parasitic’ ruling class.

Lock the Gate Alliance: ‘The Wide Brown Land for Me!’ The Australian anti-fracking discourse was the most ardently nationalistic of the three. Pride in Australia, and in being Australian, is a thoroughgoing sentiment. While the corporate interests behind fracking are ‘exposed’ as foreign (typically Chinese or Indian) the problem is more frequently articulated as ‘[Australian] politicians work for foreign corporations’ (AU025). In a representative meme (Fig. 9.2), the national government’s environment minister Greg Hunt is represented as working for a Chinese mining company. One prominent political scandal involves local oil and gas magnate Gina Rinehart facilitating a deal with an Indian resource company by taking prominent Australian politicians to a luxury wedding in Hyderabad (AU021; AU061). Anti-frackers are ‘true patriots’ (AU035), ‘Australia’s great heroes’ (AU029), and ‘Real AUSTRALIANS’ (AU093), while the politicians enabling fracking are ‘traitors’ (AU038; AU047; AU069) who

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Fig. 9.2  Greg Hunt as a Chinese stooge (AU060)

don’t know ‘about the Australian spirit mainly because they are devoid of it’ (AU046). Gough Whitlam, a former prime minister (1972–1975), is lauded as the ‘last Australian PM’ (AU007). But being Australian does not only mean putting the homeland first. ‘True’ Australian anti-frackers are consistently presented as belonging to normal, nuclear families, often located on family farms. As one group member puts it: ‘excuse me, this is somebody’s farm, livelihood and home, not a “gas exploration site!”’ (AU033). As on the farm, roles on the campaign are often represented in gendered terms, with older women serving as ‘Knitting Nannas’ and younger women as ‘Climate Angels’. The multigenerational family is

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explicitly distanced from ‘dippy hippies’ (AU009) or ‘extremists’ (AU065) who are ‘trying to stop progress’ (AU082). They are instead represented as phlegmatic, stolid, unpretentious defenders of their land. Urban Australians, on the other hand, are uncaring and detached: they don’t care about the destruction of rural Australia (AU072) and have no idea where their food and water come from, as they are ‘bound by City life’ (AU045). As Schaffer (1989) observes, Australian national identity is rugged, rural, and masculine. The feminine Other to an identity centred around the family farm is both the decadent, depraved city and the untamed wilderness beyond agriculture. She argues that this specific identity arose from a sense that Britain’s colonial sons had to assert themselves against the metropolitan Father by possessing—working, exploiting—the land itself, to do which required penetrating its mortal danger and mystery. A popular vision of the feminine land appears in Dorothea Mackellar’s nationalistic poem ‘My Country’ (referenced at AU043): I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea, Her beauty and her terror The wide brown land for me! (Mackellar, 1908)

When the anti-frackers describe the beauty of Australia, they typically talk not of the ‘terror’ of the wilderness but of the perfection of tamed agricultural land. This landscape is ‘our prime farmland’ (AU042) which is ‘pristine’ (AU046), ‘idyllic’ (AU034), and ‘perfect’ (AU032). Thus is the relatively recent, and catastrophically violent introduction of colonial agricultural to the continent constructed as a fact of nature. The world order within which the white Australian family farm is at the centre is structured around property ownership that can only seem ‘perfect’ because the preceding history of the genocide and ethnic cleansing of Aboriginal Australians has been erased. Certainly, the description of white-occupied agricultural land as ‘pristine’ would be challenged by the descendants of those from whom the continent was so violently expropriated. Not all history is ignored by the anti-frackers; there are remarkably frequent references to the Eureka Stockade (AU007; AU020; AU039; AU046; AU068; AU080), an 1854 rebellion by gold diggers in Ballarat, Victoria. The stockade yielded political rights for ‘male colonists’ (i.e., white men) and its legacy has been highly contested (Beggs Sunter, 2003). While it is celebrated as a nascent expression of Australian independence

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from the authority of British colonial authority, it is significant that this event ‘initiates the first organised racist campaign against the Chinese’ (Jensen, 2005, p.  141). Given the particular contempt that the group members reserve for foreign (including Chinese) involvement in fossil fuel exploitation, the popular sentiment that ‘We need another Eureka Stockade’ (AU080) seems not only to invoke historical independence from British imperial power, but to focus anger in the present on new powers that do not rightly belong on Australian soil. Appeal to the Eureka Stockade thus works to shift symbolic value away from usurping Others and towards white, male colonists and their descendants and families. In the Eureka Stockade, the anti-frackers find their Age of Heroes fighting for liberation from the colonial yoke of Father Britain. Focus on this set of events provides founding myths that erase the autochthonous claims of Aboriginal Australians, providing a nineteenth-century starting point for what it means to be ‘Australian’. The Golden Age is asserted to have lasted until fairly recently—perhaps even until 1975—before Decline set in and political leadership became un-Australian. If the Eureka diggers defined the core values of Australia, the inheritors of these values are the farming families in their fertile and ‘pristine’ agricultural areas now, looking out over a still untamed ‘wide brown land’ on which Regeneration can happen only once true Australianness is restored—family farms are left alone, individual rights are protected, and Chinese and Indian influence and presence kept at bay.

Chase Shell Oil Out of the Karoo!: ‘Our Heartland’ The anti-frackers of the Karoo, the semi-desert that makes up the bulk of South Africa’s interior, also speak of a ‘pristine’ (SA032), ‘pure’ (SA061), ‘perfect’ (SA070), or ‘unspoiled’ (SA062) landscape while nevertheless representing it visually as bearing the marks of European agriculture, as can be seen in the Karoo scene shared at SA036 (Fig. 9.3). Wind-pumps, fences, and concrete dams, the infrastructure of colonial agriculture violently introduced into the area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are thus produced not as historical contingencies, but as necessities arising from the natural order. The explicit connection of the ‘purity’ of these scenes to God’s will (e.g., at SA045 and SA062) supplements the naturalization of agriculture with the sanctification of its constitutive social

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relations. This holiness is mirrored in language about the landscape that invokes a deep affective and spiritual connection to the Karoo, such as ‘heartland’ (SA007) and ‘soul country’ (SA037). Indeed, the Karoo has played a special role in the white imagination in South Africa: as the setting for a significant amount of the country’s early ‘white writing’ (Coetzee, 1988); as the destination of a ‘heritage’ tourism industry that inspires nostalgia for apartheid-era space, thereby reinscribing historical racial divisions (McEwen & Steyn, 2013); and as the mythical landscape from which elements of the extreme right claim that the ethnic ‘character’ of the Afrikaner emerged (Geertsema, 2006). These ways of speaking and thinking about the Karoo are thus already well established in white cultural production in South Africa, and their reproduction on a Facebook group that is overwhelmingly white is thus not unexpected (Fig. 9.3). A key text deployed by the South African campaigners is an anti-­fracking video by the popular white singer-songwriter David Kramer (SA067). The lyrics of Kramer’s song assert that to really know the Karoo, you have to know its fossil record and thus be able to read the ‘shells in the rocks’ and the ‘skeletons in the clay’ as indications of a time when the Karoo was a vast sea (author’s translation from the Afrikaans; see Burnett, 2019, for a more detailed discussion). Kramer explicitly links his own sense of belonging to this ‘ancient place’. In the context of Zimbabwe, David McDermott Hughes has observed that Lake Kariba—an artificial dam that was built in 1959 under colonial administration—changed over time in white Rhodesian writing from indexing destructive development to being imagined as a product of geological time, even (in one text) visited by dinosaurs (Hughes, 2010, pp. 36–37). In both cases the connections of white settlers and their descendants to a history far older and more distant than the recent story of dispossession and subjugation serve to cleanse the white conscience of any wrongdoing that might be linked to current claims of belonging. At least two gestures can thus be observed in the way the landscape of the Karoo is constructed by the anti-frackers: first, as pristine and perfect in its current (agriculturally inscribed) form, and second, as a primordial landscape truly knowable only through palaeontology or geology, systems of knowledge safely associated with Western scientific traditions. Both of these gestures serve to produce an ethnoscape amenable to the white South African need for belonging. White ethnic myths were interrupted by the hegemony of ‘non-racialism’ as a discourse that was established at the end of apartheid (see Norval, 1996) which foreclosed the possibility of

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Fig. 9.3  Karoo sunset (SA036)

direct appeals to ethnicity, not least because of their own psychic investments in the preservation of ignorance of the actual processes involved in settler colonialism and apartheid (Steyn, 2012). The landscape is however ‘safe’: there is no loss of face for white South Africans in adopting the typical language of environmentalism—of unspoiled and sacred landscapes; of the protection of what is pure from the forces of modernity. Although the Heroes of the Golden Age are clearly still white settlers, and the Decline

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was brought about by the opening up of the South African economy after apartheid and the advent of multiracial rule, these aspects of the myth may be plastered over with respectable green discourse. In performing their love of the Karoo, therefore, the anti-frackers can recover a sense of pride in the ethnoscape that (at least at the surface level) does not make them racists. The existing colonial inscriptions on the land, however, and their foundation in socioeconomic inequality of the racial state mean that white possession of the land is projected into the future as an inalienable part of the environment that must be protected.

Of ‘Ecological Indians’ and Colonization Anxiety In the settler colonial contexts of Australia and South Africa, discursive work must be done to assert the virtue of the colonists while accounting for the presence or absence of Indigenous populations on the land. On the rare occasions that aboriginal Australians or the Khoe and San first nations of South Africa are mentioned in the corpus, they are associated with four distinct discursive strategies. The first of these is to provide evidence of the protective role that the environmental movement (i.e., anti-fracking) plays. In the Australian corpus, Indigenous people appear on lists of things threatened by fracking: ‘the fate of […] the local flora, fauna and Indigenous People is at stake’ (AU068); ‘It’s not just about us either— there’s a big koala population and significant Aboriginal sites under threat’ (AU060); the land to be fracked ‘BELONGS TO OUR ABORIGINALS AND OUR CHILDREN’ (AU037). The land might ‘belong’ to Aboriginal Australians, but don’t forget who the ‘Aboriginals’ belong to. Indigenous people are constructed as having similar capacity to protect their own interests as do plants, animals, or children. These gestures of protection sustain a discursive regime that works to shift agency away from Aboriginal Australians and towards white anti-frackers. The representations of those who (supposedly) cannot represent themselves work, in a second and related strategy, to substitute the actual presence of their voices in the discourse, meaning that they must be represented (see Said, 1978/2004, p. 21). Indigenous Australian knowledge, though referred to sporadically, only appears in the corpus in any depth when interpreted by a white anthropologist (AU099). In the South African corpus, the absent voices of the ‘original karoo dwellers’ (SA045) or ‘people of origin’ (SA055) are dealt with by voicing concern on their behalf that water pollution caused by fracking would cause them to ‘abandon their

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land’ (SA043). The history of their violent displacement and dispossession—that is, the fact that the ‘people of origin’ do not currently own or occupy any significant part of the Karoo and were forced to abandon it many decades ago—is effectively elided in this act of speaking for them. A third gesture emulates and ultimately appropriates anticolonial struggle in its outlines, while emptying it of political content. So, while the South African anti-frackers gesture vaguely to the ‘activist [i.e., liberation struggle] legacy’ (SA080) of towns in the Karoo, there is no accompanying critique of the persistence of socioeconomic apartheid structure in the region. Similarly, the Australian anti-frackers align themselves with the civil rights movement in the United States (AU039; AU047) and with Mahatma Gandhi (AU071) without themselves explicitly opposing European colonialism or racism. Land claims by Aboriginal Australians (AU002; AU067) are used as examples to be emulated by anti-frackers, who thus borrow what is constructed as an autochthonous moral authority to decide what is done with the land, without offering any critique of settler occupation. In certain articulations, emulation shades into appropriation. Commenting on the Australian practice of acknowledging Aboriginal land ownership in formal meetings, a group member asserts that this practice should be extended to the ‘present land holders [who] feed this nation’ (AU053, Fig. 9.4). The member’s argument is that the government’s actions with respect to fossil fuel exploitation are so

Fig. 9.4  Equivalence between present and former land holders (AU053)

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damaging to farmers, and so shameful, that they deserve the same kind of moral response usually reserved for dispossessed Aboriginal Australians. The national ritual of apology and acknowledgment is continuous with an Australian politics of ‘good feeling’ where white settlers can feel ‘proud of shame’ (Ahmed, 2014, p. 16) while stopping short of addressing the legacy of settler colonialism or the cession of Aboriginal sovereignty. In this example, one of the effects of this ‘good feeling’ is visible. The responsibility at group level for present inequalities in society has been blurred, forging a moral equivalence between the claims of the settler beneficiaries and the Aboriginal victims of colonial dispossession and genocide. In this vision, Australian history is imagined as having played out between the government and different groups of ‘land holders’ past and present. White Australians are thereby able to cloak their cause in the purely symbolic assertion of the sanctity of Aboriginal land rights, without recognizing any of their moral or legal ramifications. The fourth and final gesture builds on the third and involves instrumentalizing Indigenous rights as a symbolic or legal tactic to prevent resource exploitation. In a revealing comment, one of the South African anti-frackers claims that the ‘final say’ of the ‘people of origin’ is established by the ‘copyright’ they hold on the land, as proven by the extensive rock paintings found throughout the Karoo (Fig. 9.5, SA045). On the surface, this comment confirms that the Karoo is a Khoe or San ethnoscape. Because it is their history and culture that is inscribed on it, they hold the kinds of rights associated with copyright, which ostensibly include the final say on adaptation. But the tagging of this complex formulation with a question—‘don’t they?’—reveals how convenient the absence of Khoe or San voices is for the anti-frackers. Their ‘final say’ is there to be speculated on by those who speak for them, and thus instrumentalized in service of their resistance to fossil fuel extraction. The fact that no Khoe or San permission was obtained for the colonial ‘adaptation’

Fig. 9.5  Copyright of the land (SA045)

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of the land for agricultural and then heritage tourism purposes, nor indeed for the production of the Karoo as a white ethnoscape in the first place, shows up the ‘final say’ as a ghostly voice: not consulted then, and merely instrumentalized now. Similar instrumentalization is apparent in the Australian corpus, where discussion of the status of targeted fracking sites as ‘sacred’ (AU037; AU087) and a meme showing Uluru surrounded by fracking wells (AU078) fails to progress beyond the level of a tactic to stop development. One activist suggests that protesters demand that police provide an ‘Aboriginal Liason Officer [sic]’ (AU030) from police at the Bentley Blockade, thus appropriating and mobilizing Indigenous identity as a trick to help trip up the police in an activist context. In becoming the romanticized instrument of white anti-frackers, Indigenous resistance is thus hollowed out of any decolonial or other radical political critique. While the anti-fracking movement of the United Kingdom has different narrative material to work with, and many of its members have a stronger claim to indigeneity, the Indigenous groups of other territories still play a prominent role in their discourse. A poster from the 2011 COP17 conference in Durban painted in a naïve art style with the slogan ‘Keep the oil in the soil and the coal in the hole’ (UK037, Fig. 9.6) provokes members of the group to a level of praise far more rapturous than that seen elsewhere in the corpus: ‘I love it’; ‘simply beautiful’; ‘I kiss your feet and bow down low to the. Creator of this [sic]’ (UK037). Gushing about the image, where people are painted as being ‘part of nature, not outside it’ (UK037), is supplemented by the example of Peru, where a meme about the provision of free solar power is constructed from a picture of the Machu Picchu archaeological site, and underlined with the comment ‘so appropriate for a people that worship the mighty sun’ (UK037). While the African figures in the COP17 poster are imagined as being at one with nature, modern (mostly Christian) Peru is constructed as eternally involved in precolonial Incan sun-worship. One ethnic Other is outside of history because they are part of nature; the other Other is outside of history because they are petrified in archaeological amber. The ‘colonizer’s model of the world’ (Blaut, 1993) is thus reproduced through the enthusiastic praise of an environmental movement that accepts that history, progress, and science diffused outwards from Europe to the rest of the world, even while it is couched in an anti-developmental logic that puts a supposedly positive spin on backwardness. The frequent presence in all three corpora of memes involving Native Americans is also worth focusing on here. As has been extensively

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Fig. 9.6  Poster from COP17 in Durban (UK037)

documented in the North American context, the reductive caricature of Native Americans as ‘closer to nature’ (Krech, 1999) has thrived in humanitarian, environmentalist, paternalistic, and also in more openly oppressive texts. In the discourse of the ‘Ecological Indian’ Indigenous knowledge systems are constructed as being outside of science, and Indigenous agriculture and trade as outside of industry and economy, reserving monopoly on real knowledge and progress for Europe and the West (ibid.). In the context of the United States, a fixation on representing Native Americans in settler culture has been critiqued as serving to

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‘domesticate’ the barbarism of colonial conquest, allowing modern-day Americans to forget historical massacres and current inequalities while at the same time representing Native Americans as an important part of their national story (Scheckel, 1998, p.  41). The scale and success of white North American cultural production has ensured that much of the rest of the world is now also steeped in this imagery. This kind of reductive alterity is revealed across country contexts in how Indigenous activism is semiotized by the anti-frackers. The Native American politician and environmental activist Winona LaDuke’s famous statement—‘Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesn’t make a corporation a terrorist’—appears five times across the three corpora (Fig. 9.7). While the text appears to be taken from a recent Op-Ed (LaDuke, 2013) the images used show a much younger LaDuke, probably from an address to the United Nations in Geneva in 1977 (Thoth, 2018). Why the nearly 40-year gap between the picture and the statement? The pithy power and accuracy of LaDuke’s words certainly have a lot to do with the popularity of these memes, but it is not unreasonable to suggest, given the rest of the context laid out in this chapter, that her image serves as a screen onto which sexual and racial fantasies are projected in white cultural production, what Edgerton and Jackson (1996) called the ‘White Man’s Indian’ so clearly visible in the Disneyfication of the story of Pocahontas. Not dissimilar colonial histories in other English-speaking contexts have enabled these practices to travel. For Britons, South Africans, and Australians, access through shared Anglo culture to the ‘Ecological’ or ‘White Man’s Indian’ provides an Indigenous ‘imago’ (Fanon, 1952/2008; see Burnett & Milani, 2017 for a discussion) onto which is projected an activist authenticity borne of closeness to nature that challenges industrialism, but is stripped of any decolonial or epistemological challenges to other, more insidious Western world views. Most importantly for settler colonial contexts, Native Americans when constructed in this form present an abstracted and attenuated form of autochthony that acts as a kind of discursive inoculation against the claims of Indigenous populations who are closer to home (especially) for Australians and South Africans. The appeal to the Indigenous ‘imago’ thus works to cleanse the settler conscience of complicity in the world-historical systems that have resulted in the environmental crisis.

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Fig. 9.7  Winona LaDuke’s recurring meme

If the colonial past haunts the environmentalist present, there is ample indication in the corpus to indicate that anxiety about the future also fixes onto a ‘new’ type of colonialism: involvement by foreign powers in domestic resource exploitation. Whether it’s a Chinese coal mine on the Liverpool Plains (AU060) sparking a discussion about Australian food security or Russian bidding for atomic energy generation capacity causing anti-­ frackers to warn of ‘nuclear colonisation’ (SA022), the idea that their governments are ceding territory to foreign interests in ways that work against the national interest is clearly a major concern for the groups. Members share reports of a kind of alien invasion: they don’t feel safe on the street with these ‘high vizz people strutting their stuff’ (AU020); these ‘vampiric ugly grubs’ (AU087); these ‘opportunistic locusts bred by communism’ (SA017) who are ‘so damned sinister’ (SA085). The Chinese will colonize Africa, muses one commentator, and Africans will realize too late that they harbour ‘no patriotism for their newly conquered lands’ (SA065)—implying quite clearly that this was not the case with the previous colonizers, who really cared for the land. So, while white settler colonial guilt is repressed in the way that Indigenous South African and

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Australian populations are dealt with, it appears instead as an external force, projected onto a new wave of imperial violence that will alienate the settlers of a couple of centuries ago from their newly occupied territory. Images of dystopic and terrifying landscapes infested with extractive machinery are shared frequently across all three country contexts; exploitation is frequently called ‘cancer’, and other pathological language is common. For UK anti-frackers, the threat of this contagion does not generally come from foreign sources; it is more typically described as inflicted on the North by the South (e.g., UK091) or on the people in general by the ruling classes. Where an external force is posited, it tends to be imagined in classic anti-Semitic terms, as centring on the Rothschild family (UK043) which ‘controls’ the world (UK017; UK043) and infects every level of culture with the money it has ‘stolen via Usury’ (UK043). Though some comments appear to have been deleted by moderators, and many users distance themselves from this fringe discourse, it is not inconsistent with the commitment to a pre-enclosure ethnoscape to demonize the financial tentacles of ‘globalism’. This spectre appears only very briefly in the South African corpus—in the form of the paranoid reading of the United Nations’ ‘Agenda 21’ as a text which aims at world ‘depopulation’ (SA043)—but is more common in Australia, where the ‘New World Order’ (AU002) is railed against, as are the ‘evil zionazi frackers’ who regard ‘Australia as nought but a quarry and its inhabitants just stupid goyim’ (AU045). This anti-Semitic theory-building is a virulent strain of colonization anxiety.

Conclusion I would like to return to some of the provocations I offered at the beginning of this chapter. The Native American scholar Kyle Whyte is clear that relations of consent, trust, accountability, and reciprocity between people are essential to coordinating any problem-solving that might prevent further environmental and climate decline (Whyte, 2020). The anti-fracking movements I examined above do not offer much hope that the work of repairing our human relationships is being taken seriously in mainstream environmental movements. Indeed, racial structure and a justificatory discourse related to colonialism seem in many cases to be reproduced. In the contexts of Australia and South Africa, discursive work is clearly being done to reproduce the nation as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). By weaving elements of specific ethnoscapes into their activism,

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some contributors to anti-fracking forums shut down possible avenues of dialogue with Indigenous and other subordinated people. This works discursively to secure the future for whiteness, to imagine nations and natures as the same kinds of white spaces they have historically been. It has been my argument that resistance to environmental degradation and climate change that fails to address the heritage of historical racism, colonialism, and capitalist exploitation wound up in the formation of nation states is self-defeating. As the ethnoscape works to territorialize the memory of a group and naturalize its culture, so too does its imbrication in environmentalist activism promise future exclusions, elisions, and genocides, as these socially constructed spaces play the role of nodal points, the governing values of specific discursive formations. Even the anti-frackers of the United Kingdom, who are protecting their own ancestral lands from the ongoing encroachment of a parasitic ruling class, engage in the reductive Othering and instrumental treatments of Indigenous people elsewhere on the globe, reinforcing the colonizer’s model of the world. Throughout the corpora, Indigenous and colonized peoples are the beneficiaries of white protection, are spoken over and for, have their struggles appropriated, and are reduced to mere means to an end. This is not the foundation for an effective environmental politics. Environmentalism that uncritically enchains heritage (especially white European and settler colonial heritage) to anti-extractive struggle must be challenged as a gesture of white space-making. I have argued that it is through the mobilization of particular poetic landscapes—ethnoscapes— as deserving of protection from fossil fuel extraction that anti-frackers construct an exclusionary environmental politics that undermine the ‘good relations’ needed to address complex global environmental problems. The ethnic myths that are associated with European nationalism have had devastating consequences for the world. A truly liberatory environmentalism must thus resist enchaining the future to these dangerous fables.

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CHAPTER 10

The Epistemic Work of Decolonization and Restitution: A Critical Conversation Ciraj Rassool, with Evren Uzer and Feras Hammami

This conversation with Ciraj Rassool seeks to engage insights from the struggle for liberation and sovereignty in South Africa in our explorations of heritage and resistance. We virtually met with Ciraj Rassool on 12 January 2021, who then was in Cape Town. Rather than seeking to canvas the bibliography of his intellectual and political development, the conversation sought to reflect on the development of his identity as a scholar-­activist during the apartheid and post-apartheid of South Africa, and across the academic, activism and applied fields of inquiry. How would you like to introduce yourself to our audience?

C. Rassool (*) University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa E. Uzer Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. Hammami Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_10

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I’m a black South African from Cape Town, with a mixed background. I was born in District Six, an area in Cape Town which experienced forced removals, and I grew up in the next neighbourhood, Woodstock. Even though my parents were not educated. I come from a family those in my grandparents’ generation were activists in the different movements. On my mother’s side, they tended to follow the Communist Party, and my communist grandfather, Daniel Crowe, was banned in 1950. On my father’s side, they tended to follow the Trotskyist movement. I’ve also had the benefit of having been taught at school by teachers who had been activists from the political movement. This was also a time when apartheid was going through quite bizarre processes of reform, where you had this simultaneity of repression and reform and were forced removals were taking place in front of our eyes. I grew up under apartheid where everything was determined by how you were classified. This began with where you lived and when you started schooling. The segregation of people included the buses you are allowed to take, the cinemas that you are allowed to go to, the trains, the university that you could go to and so forth. Everything was determined by racial classification. I come from a family that had become middle class and so we didn’t experience the brunt of apartheid in the form of migrant labour. Our family had the right to live in the city, and we escaped forced removals itself by one road. On our side of Woodstock where I grew up in, which was very mixed, the people of mixed origin which had been classified as white were forced to move. I grew up in a society that was hyper-aware of questions of race, but that was also critical of race and how it worked, of how artificial it was and how messed up it was. I grew up in the world view of the critique of race, in which race was regarded as something that was not real, and was instead something imposed, something that was done to you. Race was part of the structure of oppression. As a young activist and intellectual, one of the first questions that we needed to understand and grasp was the relationship between race and class and later on, gender. We needed to understand the relationship between oppression and exploitation. South Africa was a very peculiar kind of society because it was multiply colonized. In South Africa, there was not just a single colonialism; instead, it was a society marked by multiple colonialisms: of Dutch colonialism of a colonial mercantile Company, of a British colonialism of the era of imperialism, in addition to what was called an internal colonialism in a society that had become independent as a white dominion in

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1910, marked by a colonialism of some people over others. Also, South Africa was the regional force in southern Africa and formally ruled over Namibian people through a mandate. And so, South Africa was both a past colony and a colonizing power. So you have all of these multiple vectors of colonialism and coloniality that didn’t fit into the normal routes and the normal narratives through which we understand these things. I went to a white University. I was one of the very few black people who was allowed to study at a white University under a permit system. In a reforming apartheid you were allowed to apply for permits acquired by establishments. So, some hotels and football stadiums and sports facilities acquired blanket permits so that black people and white people could be in the same place at the same time. There was a law on amenities that made it illegal for mixing in public spaces without a permit. This applied to theatres and opera houses. All of those were subject to the permit system and the sports organizations were divided between those who worked the permit system and those who refused to work the permit system and so everything was political. The one area of life that the liberation movement allowed you to, in a sense, work the instruments of your own oppression was the university permit system, in which my parents then applied to the Department of Coloured Affairs for me to study at the white university. And the irony was that I ended up studying African history, as my permit course. I studied another course which was the old native administration course but which later became known during my time as Comparative African Government and Law. Both these courses were taught through a Marxist perspective despite all the apartheid restrictions. It was a tremendous learning experience having this strange time at the white University in which you went to class, you did your academic work, but you didn’t go and use the sports facilities, because that could have been going against the political movement. You were not allowed to live in a university residence, because those were for white students only. You are not allowed to apply for certain bursaries, because those were for white students only. So, going to university was just a strange experience. In those days, out of about 10,000 students there were maybe six or seven hundred black students. We generally spent our time together in one or two places at the university where we began to act together, politically. This was a time also of tremendous upheaval in South African society, of student uprisings, which later then gave rise to a period of mass mobilization in the 1980s and early 1990s. At the time, we made an important distinction between your studies on one hand and your political work, on

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the other. There was a clear principle for those of us on permits that you did your political work outside the university. But our generation of students also began to organize and do political work at the University. So, I am a product of the apartheid system. I come out of apartheid education, but with the benefit of being taught at school by some of the leading activists who came out of the political movement, and who became educators as part of their activism. These teachers were committed to education and they were often schooled in the political and radical intellectual structures that emerged in District Six, such as the New Era Fellowship. The activists in the political movement were forced to create their own cultural and intellectual organizations, because they, as the generation of my parents, were often excluded from being able to have academic ambition. They were excluded from the university, and so they created their own intellectual spaces outside of the university. So, one aspect of my research is on political movements as knowledge institutions: how they do knowledge; how they do mobilization; but also how at the time, their political work was also knowledge producing work, and mobilization was often fieldwork, of building knowledge of society, and engaging in acts of learning and teaching, and dissemination of knowledge through speeches and the written word. When you build a national movement, you have to acquire knowledge of the nation. A group of us has an edited volume that will come out in 2021 from Palgrave Macmillan on ‘Love and Revolution’, examining African and Asian experiences on the relationship between the politics of resistance and affect; on questions of politics and gender as well as the personal and the political. So, Political biography, gender and affect in liberation movements has been one of my research areas (Rassool, 2021). I’m a lawyer by training, who became a historian somewhat accidentally. I was admitted to the University of Cape Town, then a university only for whites, to study to become a lawyer. Along the way, I started studying African History, which was one of the courses I needed to do to get the permit from the Department of Coloured Affairs. I also decided that I did not want to practise law, while I have still appreciated having a law degree and legal training. As an activist I had become critical of legalism, and how the legal option also disempowered people in their struggles, while still valuing law as a site of struggle. I wasn’t committed to the rule of law and it was not for me to defend the rule of law. This law degree enabled me to participate in defending people in court, such as the hundreds of youths who had been detained by the police,

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charged with public violence. I worked for a radical township-based law firm, I fought public violence cases for many months. It was in doing this work that I knew that law was not for me, when I had to take statements from young people who had been charged with public violence for throwing stones. Lawyers needed to be careful, when taking statements and preparing a defence, that the accused did not admit to having thrown stones. Instead, you had to put words in the person’s mouth and create the defence without any admissions. But of course, I was more interested in why the accused had thrown that stone, in what the impact was of that act on his consciousness, and on his formation as a person. But as a lawyer I couldn’t ask those questions. So, I had to change that, and I was lucky that I got a scholarship to go to the United States, where ironically, I left the African continent to study African history in an American university, Northwestern in Evanston, Illinois. But that is the nature of imperialism. Re-constructing social history from below. How your initial years have contributed to your approach because your practice is not just scholarship but it sits inbetween, public scholarship and academia. It creates political activism. It binds in a really interesting way and contributes to many different areas at once. Can you tell a little about the public scholarship context? And maybe the ethical considerations that come along with it. Because of the potential impact that you might be bringing to people as you conduct and document this research, as well.

So obviously I was trained in different elements of, let’s call it Marxist history or materialist history. On the one hand, by the kind of people who were schooled in structuralism. And then also by approaches which were more influenced by the ideas of Edward Palmer Thompson, which a few scholars in Southern African Studies had begun to take up. These were social history scholars who were interested in questions of experience; in how it was through experience that ‘being determined consciousness’. This opened up questions of agency as experience with people not simply bound by structures, and also questions of experience that were opened up for research. I was also influenced by scholars in the field of African history, who were critical of the distinction made in resistance studies, more generally between what was called primary resistance and what was later called secondary resistance, but instead examined individual and collective consciousness.

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Primary resistance was taken to consist of the sporadic, spontaneous, last-ditch defensive acts by people and communities who were being colonized, forced off the land, and incorporated into colonial systems and structures. They struggled to defend their relationship with the land. In the narrative of South African history, we came to know that the final episode of that primary resistance was Bambatha rebellion of 1906 that occurred in the process of the colonization of Zululand, when people rose up against British rule and the imposition of taxes. Secondary resistance, according to the historiography, was taken to begin with more complex forms of national consciousness, not just defensive acts. Here, people began to see themselves as part of a nation and to identify themselves as African and not as members of tribes, or not as natives in the anthropological language through which people had been made knowable. This distinction between primary and secondary resistance was something that we became critical of as tied to nationalist narration. In contrast, there was a wonderful body of scholarship on resistance in mines and workplaces, and on individual acts of foot-dragging and sabotage, as well as avoidance of certain mines through a language of bewitchment. This work tried to step outside of the grand narrative of resistance and the building of the national movement. Within that debate, the social historians in South Africa presented themselves as able to recover the experience of ordinary people, of the oppressed and exploited layers of South African society. The social historians sought to recover these subaltern experiences and bring them into history, to recover them into the historical narrative through a ‘history from below’. Connected to this research was the work involved in the popularization of these narratives through the special skills of translation, in which the scholarship on social history was translated into texts of popular history through writing or audio-visual mediums. These were presented through slide-tape shows, theatre and exhibitions, but where the expertise was always left in the hands of the professional historian and the narratives that they ‘recovered’. The professional historian was the one who provided the narrative. These historians tended to subordinate voice to written text, in a move that my colleagues and I described as ventriloquism. This was the appropriation of voice into what was ultimately a document-based history, based in the final instance on written sources, in the conventional canon of history. Voice in itself could not present a history and in the frame of social history was only ever supplemental and needing to be verified by a written archive. All of this unfolded mainly at

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the University of the Witwatersrand in a structure that is called the History Workshop. From the late 1970s and the early 1980s, every four years, the History Workshop held a conference, organized in such a way that the experts got together and presented their research. Thereafter, they had a popular history day where the activities of the popularization history was discussed. And then they had a final day, which was a public festival. But members of the public were not allowed to go to the history conference, which was only for experts. Those distinctions and hierarchies of knowledge were maintained, and the trouble with these dynamics is that they did not work at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), where I started to teach. Ironically, I went to teach at UWC, where I was meant to have gone to study under apartheid, instead of which I received a permit to study at the white University (see Rassool, 2012). The challenges of teaching and learning at UWC were very interesting, where many students were thought of as ‘underprepared’, because of the nature of apartheid schooling. Also, the medium of education was English, which was not the mother tongue of most students, all of whom spoke more than one language. Yet, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you were also dealing with layers of students who were also anti-apartheid activists, who had developed significant political skills in the youth and civic movements. While they may not have had the polish of reading and writing, they certainly had the potential for social analysis. It was important to recognize and work with the pool of skills and experience that students had in order to enable them to become top class students. From the late 1980s, I had the privilege of being part of UWC’s History Department’s People’s History Programme, which was our version of popular history, but which was more connected to the work of political mobilization. It was more connected to what the movement called ‘People’s History for People’s Power’, where history was a domain of political mobilization, especially of students and youth. It was compulsory for all of our students to do people’s history. And in those days, we were the biggest full-time teaching department on the continent of Africa, with over 3000 students being taught by 12 faculty, but with a layer of 50 PHP tutors, who also met with all students in small groups. It was a massive educational undertaking and it was also a political intervention (see Fullard et al., 1990). … and this initiative has Archives as well?

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There are People’s History archives. It may not be very well organized, but it exists and there’s some writing about it. I had also taught at Khanya College, which was part of the South African Committee on Higher Education (SACHED), a large education NGO, led by a group of education activists, particularly the late Neville Alexander, one of the main scholars of racial capitalism. In the mid-1980s, at Khanya College, I taught African history to a class of leading youth activists from South Africa and Namibia. We conducted our own recruitment and applicants needed to demonstrate a history of activism. Khanya College was an intervention in the racial order of higher education, with its forms of systematic exclusion. The Khanya College experiment demonstrated that it was possible to take learners from ‘underprepared’ backgrounds and to enable them to be transformed within a year into extremely capable university students. (See Rassool & Witz, 1990.) At Khanya College, I had a class of youth activists and African history classes presented an opportunity to develop an anticolonial syllabus, and to investigate African pasts from a Marxist perspective. This was one of the most exciting times of my teaching life. Social history, popular history and people’s history were important approaches in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but increasingly we felt that these did not address the challenges we faced. My development as a historian occurred in close collaboration with my colleagues, and together we developed a critique of social history’s claim to recover underclass experience and the ways the findings of social historians were made accessible through popularization. In practice these approaches to pastness maintained hierarchies of academic expertise, and in practice demobilized the people. One of the things I’m thinking about at the moment as someone immersed in German museum debates, and issues of decolonization, is what this might mean in a former colonial power that did not face the challenge of decolonization. Germany did not face national liberation movements and independence struggles. This has meant that disciplines found in German museums and universities have remained largely untransformed from the nineteenth century. The consequence is that on the whole, you would struggle to find African history in German universities. African people are still not taken to be capable of history. African societies were rather studied through social anthropology and linguistics, and trapped in a colonial classificatory system that remains largely untransformed.

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Well, that’s an important question about decolonization, especially the knowledge production that you made through your work between activism and academia. So how has this influenced your identity as a scholar-activist?

The relationship between scholarship and activism was complicated and not something that could be taken for granted. I found this to be so in the mid-1990s when I went back to work with my comrades from the civic association in the 1980s on the project of making and theorizing the District Six Museum. I did not do this work in my capacity as a professional historian. I did that as someone whose family had come from the District Six area. I had gone to District Six schools and we were witness to the final years of the removals of people from District Six and of the bulldozing of their homes. Of course, I’m an intellectual and a scholar, but I was also able to learn from the activists in the course of museum work. Making the District Six Museum was not a case of those of us from the university going in and teaching people how to do that. On the contrary, it was very much the opposite. So, these questions of knowledge and expertise and where expertise should be located, and how to relocate expertise out of the University is something that was an integral part of our intellectual formation. …but this certainly was a very thorny track of activism.

Yes, it was thorny. And you were faced with challenges. For example, in Palestine-Israel Palestinian activists usually work from behind scenes, during dark nights, masked, and through a range of under-cover methods, because they are aware about the high level of risk and danger their activism put them in. We believe you also experienced similar risks and cautiousness while making your contribution in popular history production. Today you can talk about activism and mobilization, but how much was it then possible to do this in public? What challenges did you face? And how smooth was it to mobilize people? In what ways these challenges and your thorny track of activism contribute into the formation of your identity as a scholar-activist?

This is something that I’ve written about: the scholar-activists from the 1940s and 1950s and the dangers of authorship, the dangers of becoming known. Of course, people knew who the activists were, but they immersed and even concealed themselves within the collective (of the movement),

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and hid behind pseudonyms because they didn’t want to attract attention to themselves, especially since they were also advocating a politics of the collective in which the movement did not have great individual leaders. They were critical of that kind of politics. So, we were inculcated into the politics of the collective and what you did as an individual was a contribution to the collective project. During the 1980s, you made a very careful distinction between your public politics: when you stood on platforms; when you did your public political work of mobilization; and when you did the work of secrecy. You were also very careful about the steps that you needed to take in order to succeed because you were also schooled in the idea that that there was surveillance by state informers, and that you were being watched behind your back. The person next to you was potentially an informer. There are many cases of informers who were later unmasked. So, you were always very careful of, who you spoke to, and who you engaged with. Of course, you took risks because the period, mid-1980s to late 1980s was a time of risk taking. But that was also a moment in which the political movement became more and more ascendant and when the apartheid state was not always in control of its domain. Of course, the apartheid state was a repressive regime. It committed acts of murder. It mutilated the bodies of activists and concealed their disposal of the dead. We have a growing focus in our department on what we call forensic history, working on the recovery of the remains of missing activists, in which the forensic is not merely the amassing of empirical data, it also involves counteracting the acts of concealment by security police and of constituting forums for discussing and debating these questions publicly. It has also been important for us to put the missing dead body of anti-­ apartheid activists alongside the missing dead body of racial science that is being claimed from museum collections in South Africa and Europe. You’re absolutely correct, that the work of the District Six Museum and its processes of work, it’s ways of learning from ex-residents of doing things together and coming out with a product in the end has its roots in the political and cultural work done inside the liberation movement. When we ask about the roots of the District Six Museum and when it came into existence, many refer to the opening of the Streets exhibition in December 1994. However, in many ways the processual and participatory methodologies instilled by the District Six Museum came into existence inform the 1930s already. And its inscriptive methods were already being enacted on the eve of removals and demolitions when former residents turned

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their homes into proto-museums. This is when you start thinking of the museum, not as a place and not as a collection, but as a social and a transgressive act, when the museum becomes something that is done in concert. It’s something that you do together. It’s a process. It’s a process of annunciation. It’s a process of contestation, and it takes different forms. There are different knowledge genres that are all involved in this process and that is what my colleagues and I have called either public scholarship or public history. For us, public history is not what is called public history in the United States, which is a project of public education that is tied to a professional practice of history as part of a canon. In the US, it is usually practised by academically trained historians who work in relation to historic sites. In South Africa, public history is a practice of producing pasts in the public which recognizes and actively promotes expertise beyond the academy. Documenting toppling of monuments, conversations around that and also from earlier works on elevating black history comes closer to your description of public history. Looking into these efforts in a way switching that expertise and gathering different narratives. They’re very small in scale, obviously, but it’s different from mainstream narratives… We could perhaps move towards the intersection of heritage and resistance, with a focus on the productive nature and aspects of resistance. How do you see that intersection? We understand that you make particular distinctions between heritage and history, so how do you reflect on this intersection from your experiences?

I’m afraid there’s no short answer to that question because resistance, of course, is something [that is] extremely contested. Because the difficulty with resistance is that in a society such as South Africa, resistance and its history have in some places been bounded so that and the outcome of resistance is the magnificent post-apartheid democratic state. And the outcome of resistance is this thing that South Africans call ‘reconciliation’. Here, resistance has an uplifting outcome of survival and triumph. It culminates in the ‘triumph of the human spirit’. So we have these grand narratives through which resistance has been appropriated into a story of the making of the South African nation, and as its ‘Long Walk to Freedom’, and as ‘the triumph of the human spirit’. But these frames have also been a means of finding dignity of having an outcome of the resistance, where South Africans were not merely victims of apartheid. In fact, these also signalled that there were instances of overcoming your oppression in

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which you never gave up, and as a consequence, you were never defeated. It also signalled the liberation movement as always, a triumphal movement. There is an official history of resistance which has not admitted all of the fault lines, such as the distinction between leaders of the movements and the activists and footsoldiers; the tensions and conflicts of gender. Also, what happens to resistance when it becomes institutionalized? And what is the difference when it is spontaneous and it is not organized and institutionalized? It’s important to underline having a historical lens particularly crucial in this point as our look into resistance for this book focuses on everyday instances of resistance which are subtle and small and not organized but would accumulate and maybe create different structures in the long term. When you look back in with a long-term view, you see that they actually gradually build networks, alliances, and making affinity groups and they accumulate in a way. So looking through an historical lens enables us to see what is built out of these everyday resistance acts without romanticizing.

When you do so, you will be able to track those fault lines and those fissures and those contradictions, and it is important to realize that reconciliation and freedom are not necessarily always the outcome. And you have to be able to understand that possibly the resistance that unfolds is also the resistance against the new authority of the democratic state. It is important that you do not frame your understanding of resistance through the romance of the nationalist narrative, and that you understand the tragedies that unfold. We have had all of these terrains through which a resistance narrative played itself out. We had the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its failures, as well as the land commission and the process of land restitution and its failures. We had all of these ways by which the democratic state sought to settle and finalize these inherited burdens and traumas and ultimately it has not been able to do so. What has been very interesting is how one can project an understanding of resistance outside of the framework of the monumental, outside of the narrative of leaders and their biography, outside of what I’ve referred to as the biographic order (see Rassool, 2016). Here, the narrative of resistance is gripped in a biographic order of the monumental history of the biography of Nelson Mandela and fellow political leaders. And that monumentalism of history and heritage also becomes tied into the way the state operates in its governmentality through protocols and rituals of

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leadership. Here, citizenship is caught up in a framework of a commemorative state in which people are expected to be obedient. So, we need to project a concept of democracy and citizenship, which is not about obedience, but which is about the right to ask uncomfortable questions and about the right to contest the democratic state for its failures to attain the tasks of democratizing society. We have a terrible tragedy that has unfolded in the saga of a liberation movement that became the governing party. We have been in the grip of a kleptocracy, with an extreme level of thievery and stealing from the people that has become one of the biggest tragedies of our lifetime. We know that the democratization and the coming into being of democratic South Africa, which was in some sense a miracle, has quickly slid into the tragedy of a kleptocracy and state capture. Now I would like to come to questions of heritage that you asked about alongside the question of resistance. Heritage is not just the sites and objects and statements of history that we can convert into heritage resources that can be preserved for future generations. This is heritage that is turned into a form of governmentality. However, the framework of critical heritage studies has posed the idea of looking underneath the grand narratives and of looking for ordinary expressions of resistance and thereby has done exactly the same move as that made by the social historians. By holding onto expertise, critical heritage studies has not allowed for the possibility of that expertise escaping from the academy. By locating that expertise in the site of production itself does not mean that there isn’t a place for academics and other scholars to operate. There’s no denying that heritage production in whatever medium and through whatever disciplines is multifaceted. In a society such as South Africa history has been the most important heritage discipline of making a democratic society. Nations are made through granting them histories. You make a nation through a critical history and you make that nation in fact by critiquing the idea of the nation and rethinking the society on a completely different basis. Heritage is something quite frankly, that has to be taken out of the hands of the experts and out of the framework of the nation. We need to be clear about what we mean by heritage and how this is different from the terrain of memory and memorial. Heritage happens when memorials are turned into sites of preservation and made subject to governmental systems of grading, planning and regulation. Ciraj, you mentioned audio-visual documentation and recording. We would like to ask about methodology, about the archival practices or resistance, and the

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visual representations of them. And then, in some cases, that they might connect into mobilization so from the research gathering of that material they can come back and contribute to mobilization of larger movements. We’re thinking of multiple examples but one from Egypt, for instance, the anonymous collective Mosireen’s work, documenting and disseminating images of Egyptian Revolution, in 2011 and their archive work that was published in 2018 is one such example. We also saw it in a lot of different examples in Turkey as mainstream media is all pro-government. So, these activist outlets, and their documentations can be the only way to get information and document these moments of resistance accurately. Your work in South Africa and, you know, thinking of what kind of different insights that you might have and how does it impact the methodology that you work with. And there’s both an ethical consideration, but also are there considerations on how to collect this information, how to sort out to disseminate it and so on and so forth. If you can elaborate a little bit on that front methods perspective.

These are extremely challenging questions, especially when you work with museums and heritage institutions and formations of memory politics that call themselves archives. The kinds of archives we are talking about are activist archives, which are not passive institutions, the way repositories are meant to be. These continue to undertake active documentation and that intervene alongside those who are on the barricades, as it were, and who document, collect and assemble in the midst of ongoing struggles. Of course, we are talking about new technologies where these processes of archiving are not merely the collection of documents. This is a culture that is digital and multimedia at the same time. There certainly are moments where photographers and videographers have destroyed their material, their images and footage. This is because of their awareness of the impact of their work, and the potential danger this could cause for people. They have even done this when they have found themselves incorporated into a kind of a pornography of violence, in which certain images do not need to live on and be preserved in certain ways. So the archive question is not a mantra of preserving at all costs. It’s a political question and you have to make political choices and these formations would have gone through some kind of institutionalization process and they make decisions according to their principles or their vision and mission on how and what to gather. Here, there’s no formula and what’s exciting and troubling about this right now is that there’s no template, as this is part of new work being carried out where you are learning from others. Remember that for the most part, you are talking about individuals

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who call themselves activists who do the documentation. And we are also talking about colleagues and comrades who work together and try to work in an ethical relationship with each other and where these are all murky and complicated matters. All these items are newsworthy and they can also be commercialized in an instant. And everyone needs to make a living. So, you’ve got all kinds of pressures around you. We have become a little complacent in South Africa because we are protected by the Constitution, and so we go for long periods of time of not worrying about any dangers posed for activism by the organs of the democratic state. This is because we also have the judiciary on the side of justice. But these matters of principle and of right and wrong that we took for granted were profoundly disturbed at Marikana, where protesting mineworkers were killed by the police. Also this is democratic South Africa, where its citizens have also killed people from other countries because they were deemed to be a threat to jobs and were seen as outsiders. South Africa is a democratic society whose underbelly is being shown in the most perverse ways. You have new struggles that are being unleashed and new terrains of struggle. And the trouble with retaining all of these questions within the limited framework of the nation is that you lose out on all the possibilities for understanding the meaning of these unfolding questions. The questions of restitution that I have become so busy with are teaching us about incomplete sovereignty, how incomplete the sovereignty was of African independence and supposed decolonization. In a society such as South Africa it involves being able to attend to those matters along all of the vectors of its colonial history. This means, dealing with all of South Africa’s colonial histories, of it being a former African colony, from which artefacts, artworks and audio-visual forms of documentation were illegally and unethically acquired, and which need to be returned. This is an ongoing work that I am busy with in Austria (Rassool, 2020). We have the return of human remains under way in different European countries, including South Africa. And we also need to identify objects and recordings in the collections that are associated with and connected to those human remains. It is possible for us to establish those connections, such as being collected and transported together as part of the same colonial collecting expeditions. In the case of the South African collections that entered Vienna in the early twentieth century, we can also track what artefacts and forms of documentation were transported alongside corpses and skeletons that had been illegally disinterred. We can reconstruct where bodies and objects were taken from, who was involved, how they were transported, by

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ox-wagon, train and ship, and when they arrived in Europe. We can also reconstruct where collections went and how they were distributed into disciplines and collecting institutions. This is important work of restoration, recovery, healing and even decolonization. And here this was a colonial legacy between South Africa and Austria, without them having had a formal colonial relationship. But South Africa was also a colonial power in southern Africa and had authority over Namibia. As a consequence, South African museums have human remains and material culture that need to be returned to Namibia. This is very important. We are learning what the decolonization and anti-colonial museum work really means. This work is going to be with us for a long time. In fact, it will not be a complete work because decolonization is not an event with a beginning and an end. This is epistemic work and it is necessary that activists do this work as well. Where do you see that this work is leading to within the context of heritage? The work you do on reconciliation, repatriation and this return work going forward? Can you elaborate that in the future of museum work in the context of decolonization and relation to activism?

Repatriation and restitution are one of the most important arenas of cultural activism right now. We are at the beginning of rethinking what the new museum might look like in the future. We are also busy putting an end to the nineteenth-century museum of the government of artefacts placed into a classificatory system. This is also the end of the idea of a museum as a collection and as a governmental institution, placed in a building to conserve a collection for future generations. This stewardship model of the museum often conceals violence through which collections were acquired. We have been learning about the extent to which we have underestimated how objects were looted and acquired as part of the violence of colonization. We have underestimated the extent to which museums weren’t merely beneficiaries of colonization, but were indeed embedded inside of the expeditions of colonial conquest. Museums were an accomplice of colonization. So, to decolonize the museum is to do restitution, but it is also to do the epistemic work of undoing the classificatory categories of the museum. These categories are racist in the extreme that posit a narrative of civilization that stands against a narrative of supposed backwardness. Restitution and epistemic transformation are processes that have to occur together. In this field of restitution activism, you have to be working at mobilizing on

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the African continent and you have to be doing the work of influencing debates in Europe as well. We have become so aware of how Europeans have created an artificial separation between human remains and cultural artefacts, while they had been collected by the same people on the same expeditions, only later to be separated from each other. Many European countries have accepted that it is not acceptable any longer to hold on to human remains, because of an association with violence and unethical acquisition. However, they have had a more complicated provenance process when it comes to cultural artefacts and artworks. There has been a presumption of stewardship and preservationism when it comes to material culture. But now we understand how violent collecting was, and the extent to which these were looted. It has turned out that to talk of collections of loot is not just emotive and exaggerated language. We also know that amidst the process of decolonization that happened in the 1950s and 1960s when African countries became independent there were acts of removal of archives. So, the colonial archive that ‘migrated’ to Europe is also now turning up and it’s just extraordinary what is coming out of this. So, this is a time of claims-making. This is a time of attending to the unfinished sovereignty of independence and we need to make sure that this does not happen solely on the basis of the celebration of the nation. It has to happen on the basis of rethinking what museums are. Museums are not only locations of the monumental. We have the making of monumental museums as one response. A new monumental museum is being created in Dakar. There is also a new monumental museum in Cairo and another being planned by the African Union in Algeria. This has been a response to the European claim that Africans cannot care for their own objects. But the monumental framework is not the way to rethink the museum. We need to rethink the museum in anti-monumental ways, in ways that will enable the widest possible participation, in ways that make the museum a space of a forensic museology. By that, I do not only mean close-up investigation and empirical research, especially when there have been deliberate forms of concealment. By the forensic, I mean the forum of debate and contestation in the widest possible. I think such a new museology could be at the centre of new struggles for democracy in the world.

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References Fullard, M., Rousseau, N., Minkley, G., & Rassool, C. (1990). Transforming the Cutting Edge: The People’s History Programme, UWC 1987–1989. Perspectives in Education, 12, 1. Rassool, C. (2012). A Full Circle: Concerning UWC’s Academic Value. In P. Lalu & N.  Murray (Eds.), Becoming UWC: Reflections, Pathways and Unmaking Apartheid’s Legacy. Centre for Humanities Research, UWC. Rassool, C. (2016). A ‘Labour of Love’ in South Africa: Nelson Mandela’s Red Mercedes-Benz, Auto-biography, Auto/biography and Regimes of Value, Kronos 42. Retrieved January 20, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/44176050 Rassool, C. (2020). The Sounds of Violence. The Berlin Journal, 34(2020/21), 76–78. Retrieved January 20, 2021, from https://www.americanacademy.de/ wp-­content/uploads/2020/10/BJ34_spreads.pdf Rassool, C. (2021). Making and Challenging a Biographic Order: National Longing, Political Belonging and the Politics of Affect in a South African Liberation Movement. In G. Arunima, P. Hayes, & P. Lalu (Eds.), Love and Revolution in the Twentieth-Century Colonial and Postcolonial World: Perspectives from South Asia and Southern Africa. Palgrave Macmillan. Rassool, C., & Witz, L. (1990). Creators and Shapers of the Past: The Khanya College Oral History Projects. Perspectives in Education, 12(1), 96–101.

CHAPTER 11

Methodological Insights Within the Intersection of Heritage and Resistance Research Evren Uzer and Feras Hammami With contrib. by Eray Çaylı David Ayala-Alfonso DavidWebb Jonathan Eaton Kailey Rocker Sarah De Nardi Scott Burnett

Introduction The rise of mass demonstrations and protests in the last decade has made resistance research increasingly relevant as a form of understanding the nature, demands, and changes these protests are causing. Some of the expressions of non-violent forms of resistance also revealed clear connections to cultural heritage, memory, and identity in the form of leverage for

E. Uzer (*) Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] F. Hammami Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_11

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making claims and reasoning the rights, demanding recognition, or making the invisible visible. As these intertwined resistance movements are happening globally, scholars, activists, and researchers have been trying to understand and make sense of the causes, demands, and patterns of changes. They face challenges (i.e., risks for the researchers or the subjects, ethical dilemmas) and opportunities (i.e., new perspectives provided by methods borrowed from other disciplines) that can advance the scholarly work in both heritage and resistance studies. Understanding these challenges and opportunities that emerge from the intersection of heritage and resistance requires a transdisciplinary approach to research design and methods, including data collection and analysis, and raises various ethical considerations. This chapter is a synthesis of the reflections from the contributing authors of this volume, Theorizing Heritage Through Resistance. It is intended to make the reflections presented in this chapter available as a resource for other scholars and students working in heritage studies exploring resistance as a field of enquiry. Chapters in this volume discuss epistemological arguments about how to comprehend the social and specific research techniques and practices to capture the intersection of heritage with resistance. These chapters reported from case studies that employed different methodological approaches, methods, and techniques, engaged in various ethics and reflections, and reported research findings from political and public debates, policy implications, and a range of collaboration forms between society, academics, and the governments. During the initial workshop with some of the contributing authors for this volume (held at the University of Gothenburg, July 2017), the discussions revealed the urge to go beyond the actual narrative of a case, and articulate certain challenges that go unreported. These challenges, spanning from safety and security of human subjects of enquiry and researchers’ identities to availability of data, at times pushed researchers to explore alternative methods, reframing their research questions, and so on. Also, discussions on decolonizing methodologies (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012) should be essential for heritage research to address issues of representation, inclusion, and positionality of heritage scholars. Mainstream methodological approaches used in heritage research obscure marginalized groups and perpetuate dominant narratives of “authorized heritage discourses” as Laura Jane Smith describes (Smith, 2006). In rethinking heritage methodologies, we can address issues such as justice or frameworks such as decolonization to open up the field of research and practice to these previously unseen or ignored values, approaches, and perspectives.

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We, the editors, believe research focuses on the intersection of heritage and resistance fields, necessitating resources to design methodological approaches, methods, and techniques that are sensitive not only to the situational settings of case studies but also to the diverse relations and meanings that researchers encounter and provoke during the fieldwork. How researchers prepare for their field research and how the different temporalities, moments of encounters, and contests that researchers face during the field research influence their methodological strategies and methods often go unpublished despite their invaluable contribution for future research. We hope the contributions in this chapter and the edited volume are a contribution in this direction. Departing from the importance of curricular and methodological revisions to advance scholarly work, we aim to explicate the “logic-in-use” of research practices employed in heritage research within resistance contexts. Our goal is to understand the shifting dynamics better than researchers of heritage and resistance encounter in their field research and what implications and future strategies this would have for research activism. In this chapter, we focused mainly on the challenges and opportunities of ethics and other aspects of fieldwork. Firstly, we articulate research ethics and ethical considerations that emerge from heritage and resistance research covered in this volume. These considerations are especially relevant to this volume’s subject matter due to the dynamic nature of resistance movements and the vulnerability of the interlocutors and how to approach research integrity in light of researchers’ changing identity towards a scholar-activist manner. Secondly, we explore how all contributors approached challenges and dilemmas and their reflections on potential future research opportunities from these challenges. Finally, as we articulate methodological and epistemological shifts in the last section, we need to consider moving forward in heritage research and point out opportunities that are reflected by the contributors for moving forward heritage research, such as decolonizing methodologies, scholar activism, and collective writing.

Research Ethics and Ethical Considerations Linking heritage to resistance suggests specific ethical considerations due to situated research, scholars’ role, and connection to the acts of resistance, requiring us to expand the conventional understanding and approach to fieldwork. Often, ethical considerations are limited to

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confidentiality, the vulnerability of research subjects, and consent. In this section, we explore: how safety issues diverge following the specific social and political contexts of conflict; exposure of accounts that not only protect protesters but also promote constructive dialogues rather than risking resistance groups or trigger conflicts. Also considered in this chapter are the relationships that researchers might have with protesters fair representation of the marginalized voices, critical reflections on the cause of the protesters so that we do not romanticize resistance, and a range of critical reflections on the heritage-related issues that are brought into resistance and are directly related to the politics of identity, rights, and commons. Furthermore, we focus on the effective environments that emerge due to the emotional intensity that explorations of heritage- and resistance-­ related questions would produce and the situatedness of scholar-activists regarding the credibility of research outcomes. Safety, for example, of the subjects who are interviewed goes beyond Institutional Review Board (IRB) processes, and framing the study can be drastically revised from safety considerations. What is safe is highly contested and contextually situated. Authors made some of the method-­ related decisions due to risk that occurs within fieldwork. This risk might be to the researchers themselves or the people researchers interview and/ or collaborate for fieldwork. The strategies authors have employed to address the challenges can be widened as a practice such as disclosing research subjects’ identities, creating informed consent, being clear about the research outcomes and dissemination, and direct reporting to represent protesters’ experiences and their accounts. [Hammami] Conflict zone researchers are usually confronted with various critical situations where they have to make a variety of morals-sensitive decisions. This decision-making moment becomes rather critical when the researcher does not have access to the conflict area due to a range of ­restrictions. It becomes difficult to make sense of the context, safety, and extent of exposure because of any research activity. It is also challenging to realise whether the harm conflict zone researchers may do can reach their bodies only or the people they engage in their research. This aspect is particularly apparent when the people engaged are protesters and when the research field is conducted in areas where the freedom of speech is violated.

Exposure is another ethical issue that should be taken into consideration with setting the research design. Using social media and online

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sources also create ethical considerations both in situations where consent is taken through a blanket/ambiguous permission from the users and where invisible mechanisms are used—for political gain and other purposes—to manipulate user behaviour and decision making, then how reliable is the data? However, Scott Burnett’s reflection points out the ethics of scraping Facebook data that depends on the potential effects on users and that this kind of mining of the information on activism has minimal ethical implications for the researchers. For some community groups, platforms like Facebook are the only accessible online presence. People use it as an archive for documenting their daily struggles, image repository or live streaming protests, conversations, or cultural production that help us understand social movements better. However, these sources equally, if not more, carry the political and ethical challenges of face-to-face fieldwork. [Scott Burnett] The ethics of my methodology—scraping and analysing social media posts—has come under some scrutiny after the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal. Though there are reasons for caution in social media research in general, we should remember that Cambridge Analytica[i] used Big Data to nudge user behaviour in specific political directions in a direct feedback mechanism whose point was to manipulate. The kind of discourse analysis I do here has no potential impact on the users who produce the data; the groups I study are open for public participation (Larsson, 2015), users are not directly affected or harmed by my analysis (Bryman, 2016), and I study users’ discourse, not in terms of any marginalised positions they may occupy, but in terms of powerful social positionalities (whiteness; national citizenship). I do not disclose any user identities. The utility of this kind of analysis of the imbrication of environmental discourse in nationalism, colonialism, and racism, in my view, clearly outweighs the lack of expectations users have when contributing to these forums that they will be cited in academic research papers.

Another interesting question, which was raised within David Webb’s reflection on ethical considerations, is “partnership”. Researchers might design their research based on the specific relationship with protesters. How have ethics been involved in establishing these partnerships that are part of fieldwork? What happens during the fieldwork when researchers become emotionally involved in the protesters’ cause or become confused about the diverging interest of protesters and, in some cases, self-interests? Also, the goal behind partnership, researchers’ commitment to the

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partnership while conducting research, disseminating and reporting findings, and dealing with conflicting accounts of researchers’ interpretation versus the protesters. [David Webb] our chapter grows out of a collaboration with Long Live Southbank (LLSB) and BrazenBunch, a creative collective specialising in film work. We also engaged with Winston Whitter, a skateboarder, and campaigner who is also a professional filmmaker. For us, the collaboration with these partners acted as a gatekeeper to interview skateboarders and campaigners involved in contesting the proposals to redevelop the undercroft space at the Southbank. We had initially intended to reciprocate through the production of a film that would help share the campaigners’ message as part of their bid to resist relocation, but by the time the research project commenced, the skaters had already been successful in saving the space. Therefore, the research film concentrated on explaining the views of the campaigners and improving communication between them and the Southbank centre.

One of Sussex University’s stipulations as lead institution was to be clear in contracts who owned the copyright to the material produced from the research, which helped clarify any confusion about this later down the line. In effect, it was an open licence. As researchers, we were, of course, aware that we were there to support activists who had given up much of their lives volunteering for the campaign, often at personal cost, and so were under an ethical responsibility to do no harm to the campaign and to ensure that any time we took voluntarily from those involved was worthwhile and, at the very least, resulted in professional output. I was not involved in editing, but this was a collaborative process. The PI was at pains throughout the project to avoid speaking for or trying to situate campaigners’ views in the academic literature. A real skill of her role was to be able to hold back and allow the project to develop in ways that foregrounded the voices of the skaters. There are dilemmas about who perceives they have the privilege to give others voice and any terms that might be knowingly or unknowingly imposed on that process. In effect, we worked through the skaters’ networks and by consent with the aim of developing an honest account of the community’s experiences and claims to place. We were not there to try and make a judgement as to whether the skaters of the Southbank centre were “right”, and we were not there to represent or give voice to the Southbank centre staff or representatives.

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This part of the project was relatively free of ethical dilemmas because we were aligned closely in our aims with the skaters. We maintained a good relationship with the skaters from the beginning of the project in 2013 until now. We learned something of the inside relationships within the campaign, which was shared with us in confidence and obviously did not share with anyone else.

Uzer explains how relationships with quick shifts in protests and positionalities might evolve into a situation that the researcher does not favour, and due to the political escalation of events, it becomes difficult to reverse. How to engage with protesters and how to establish a trust-based relationship, engaging in deep listening are among the important questions that Evren realized in her research. [Uzer] Yedikule Bostan, the case study I elaborated on in my chapter, is a historical edible plant garden. After centuries of use, it has rapidly diminished in size, mainly due to development and real estate pressure lack of recognition as a heritage site and protection in the last century. I initiated the first contact with an advocacy group that has already had a connection with the bostankeepers/gardeners. This approach helps in establishing rapport with the groups on the ground but at the same time carries the risk of being siloed with the initial contact (organization and/or people). The activists’ identity, who have been almost exclusively outsiders from the area, mainly scholars and others with white-collar jobs, did not create tension during the fieldwork, yet it presented an ethical challenge. Who is speaking on behalf of whom? Some of the activists’ intentions have resonated with the right to the city arguments; for the bostankeepers, the situation became very dire and very personally problematic quickly during my site visits. During the arc of the fieldwork period, Istanbul Municipality has introduced sharp rent increases on the land for bostans that resulted in some of the bostankeepers ending up with high amounts of debt that they cannot simply repay. Some of them just relinquished their rights as renters and left their lease due to these debts. In the meantime, there had been ­disagreements about the most suitable approach to work with bostankeepers within the activist group. Some suggested focusing on the immediate threat to bostankeepers. In contrast, others wanted to focus on the land itself primarily and bostankeepers as custodians to it. My initial strategy to outreach for the fieldwork and gather insights through this external group has caused me to be siloed with the same group that supports land conservation [of land] as a priority. This situation then opposed to a holistic view of the garden as a living heritage cared for by the same gardeners who have been excluded

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from the process. Fragmentation of the advocacy group, lacking a united approach contributed to Yedikule Bostan struggle to weaken.

Both in Uzer’s and De Nardi’s cases, affect and emotions proved to be a critical part of the ethical considerations. [De Nardi] In my case, the methodological possibilities afforded by the collaborative mapping endeavour outweighed the downsides or disadvantages of going into this community asking questions about a recent past that still hurts local collective pride. Mindful that everyday cosmologies of place have shifted in these areas of Northeast England in the shift to deindustrialisation, I was looking for respectful ways to engage this sense of loss of community alongside monitoring budding new collectivities in the wake of new and more challenging economic circumstances. The community who once lived alongside the Grand Electric Cinema and (later) Bingo Hall has a multitude of stories to tell about this hub of local lives. A standard ethnography would have collected individual voices or group narrations about what the place had meant to the community; I was searching for a way to reanimate the colourful associations and effects still tethered to the once-beloved, now derelict building. Firstly, I proposed the visualisation method to the Beamish Museum who had acquired the Grand Electric and would relocate the cinema to its future Fifties Town. The outreach team of the museum had become passionate about putting local perspectives and memories first in their reconstruction. However, the anonymity of the finished product was a troubling aspect of the configuration of the cinema’s part of the fictional town’s emotional and sensory economy. Adding a “biographic” composite map or visualisation to the material culture of the museum itself seemed like a good compromise.

A range of questions should be considered when research seeks to make the untold told and the silenced heard. De Nardi explains the kinds of questions that informed her reflections on methods and audience. She also explained how methods of visualization are helpful to engage people who are not used to participate in representation research and practice. [De Nardi] The first important issue I considered, as ever when doing this kind of methodology, was about the audience of the visualisations. Who was the exercise for? Who was the intended audience? Who was going to see, get access to, observe, interact with, engage with or use the maps? Would Ryhope village locals use the maps to guide outsiders in their discovery, in the museum, of their home landscape, their neighbourhoods, and would

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these insights inform visitors’ engagement with the single building at the centre of the exhibit—The Grand Electric? Going out into the community, I sought for participation in this mapping project: identifying and pinning down significant places in the wider village that may (or may not) be tied to the cinema or connected to it in some way. The cinema would be at the centre of the map, but the village of Ryhope (now a suburb of Sunderland) would be the real “protagonist” in a story told and illustrated by many voices. In order to make sure that the community co-researchers and all participants gained from the mapping experience, I gauged the extent of locals’ availability in the process. I asked what benefit there may be to the Ryhope community in doing this: the response I gained was a promising one, as members of that community were keen to produce an overview of their cultural and home milieu that would preserve a holistic sense of place in the face of changing times or circumstances, especially following the physical eradication from the area of their beloved former cinema and bingo hall.

In the face of quick evolving situations during fieldwork, one question should be incorporated to designing the methodology: how can we anticipate the necessity for alternative data collection methods and be prepared for such changes in fieldwork? How do we reflect on the sources of data? Especially when the information released by protesters is selected for their cause and when the information released from sources that are protested against is also filtered? How do we establish outreach in a way that allows us to build support and trust and capture a multitude of perspectives? How do we do no harm when we are personally invested and connected to the causes of the resistance acts? Often researchers of heritage studies believe that representing the buried and silenced memories is positive and productive. Maybe it is positive, but how do researchers take into consideration the affective environment the uncovering of these memories generates? As reported from De Nardi’s case, respectful engagement, a process using qualitative techniques such as oral history and story mapping, offered an approach that is sensitive to emotions and feelings before being designed to collect information.

Challenges and Dilemmas Some authors in this volume reported challenges focused on the temporality and evolution of information. Especially in the case of social movements, events escalate quickly, and the processes of contestations,

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negotiations and dialogue are rapid (Rocker and Eaton, this volume). Establishing trust with protesters is also among the challenges that researchers might experience. Risk is another issue that can have implications for the research design. Risk, in terms of the research ethics, as we should be employing the first principle of “do no harm” to the subjects, conflict sites and resistance situations might expand the research subjects’ vulnerabilities. In resistance research, some of the gathered information can have serious consequences on the informants. Risk can also be in terms of the researcher’s safety and well-being, creating certain limitations (Cayli and Hammami cases). These risks had implications on the methodology or the scope of research. Scott Burnett brings another tension of quantitative versus qualitative research and reflects on sampling and validity within socially engaged knowledge production. Both Burnett’s and Rocker and Eaton’s chapters of this volume offer insight into the use and process of online data as they were creating a representative analysis of their cases from social media posts. Accessibility of the source and the selection of source are among the challenges that resistance-related studies would suggest. To engage in resistance studies means exploring non-conventional sources of information. This approach does not necessarily mean a direct turn towards protesters. However, instead, researchers become more critical, explorative, and reflective. Accessibility is not limited to sources of information but also the site of case studies. This demonstrates itself by not being able to access the research site, which might lead to difficulty in establishing rapport and trust, might also lead to lack of representation of the whole picture. We can think of accessibility in terms of limited access to archives or databases or archives themselves being exclusionary due to bureaucratic or political constraints or views. Accessibility also can be discussed as data from social media and other forms of knowledge becoming highly relied upon in research. In Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff (2019) provides a shifting view of these new resources with their sinister side and their exploitation to generate “big data and smart devices” used to monitor, archive, and anticipate all sorts of consumer and networking behaviours. Research methods that utilize online data require scrutiny in terms of representation, as there may be an assumption of digital equity in terms of accessibility of these services, use, and infrastructure for these mediums, which is not available to all in an equal sense.

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Scott Burnett also raises “the coloniality of knowledge” which was also a part of the initial workshop concerns. Scholars engaged in critical heritage studies have produced some scholarly work towards decolonizing theoretical frameworks and focusing on cases that were not conventionally analysed within heritage research. The methodology is another aspect that we need to focus on to illustrate and make the changes. Recent articulations such as anthropological archaeologist Uzma Rizvi’s work on decolonizing archaeology offer a post-colonial framework to conduct research within archaeology that brings a collaboration of the researcher and communities (Lydon & Rizvi, 2010; Oland et al., 2012; Bruchac, 2014). Nick Estes’s poignant book Our History Is the Future (2019) traces Indigenous resistance from history and connects to today’s Indigenous-led fights against fossil fuel projects, where he illustrates a way to create truthful representation in scholarly writing. [Burnett] As far as the opportunities and challenges go, I would like to discuss these in terms of two important methodological tensions in the chapter, which reflect some interesting questions about socially engaged knowledge production. The first is the tension between my qualitative deconstruction of environmentalist discourses across three country contexts and a “sampling” methodology that attempts to make some argument for the relevance of this selection of data to the phenomenon under study, what in quantitative research might be termed “validity”. The second is the tension between the kinds of methods I apply, which are rooted in broadly Western debates about Marxism and the relationship between discourse/ideology and economic structure, and a decolonial framework of thinking about challenging the “coloniality of knowledge” in which these very methods are steeped. I do not think I can resolve either of these tensions, but perhaps it is useful to draw attention to them. In the rapidly growing literature on studying social media, quantitative and “corpus” approach to linguistic analysis have gained currency; there is a sense that Big Data allows analysts to plug directly into the “discourse” and identify “truths” about broad international social and political phenomena (González-Bailón, 2013). There are several problems with this trend. For one, the analysis of textual regularities is fairly meaningless without close, qualitative, and critical analysis of these regularities against their social contexts (Baker et  al., 2008). In other words, in understanding power and social change through a discursive lens, data collection at the macro-level is no substitute for focused and close reading at the micro-level. Secondly, social media data sets are always in some way skewed because of issues of access, self-selection, group and identity formation (Georgalou, 2016), and access to data allowed through the API, or

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application programme interface. Research that scrapes and processes large amount of social media data should thus never be mistaken for direct access to the discourse: it is always mediated in some way, there is always a “streetlight” effect—i.e. that we only study what is visible (Larsson, 2015, p. 149). In order to apply the kind of discursive mapping I use as a method, the recovery of the “structural topology” (Marttila, 2016, p. 134) of a particular discursive formation, where subject positions, nodal points, and particular moments in the discourse are identified, is necessarily the work of close and careful readings of specific articulations, where a phrase or linguistic construction stands in for a broader phenomenon. In arguing for a specific sample of social media texts—in this case, the top 100 Facebook posts from the most popular anti-fracking groups in each of the three country contexts I study—I am thus also arguing that my analysis picks out the most popular, the most important, the most relevant of a much larger set of articulations, specifically because they have demonstrably aroused the “passionate affinity” (Marttila, 2016, p. 38) of people, a key factor in discursive change. There are however a number of ways to problematize the theoretical and methodological framework I apply from a decolonial point of view. Many of the theorists I rely on are canonical figures of Northern theory (Connell, 2007) which reads the world from a European-colonial centre. This gesture reproduces the world-making role of Europe as an epistemological centre (Grosfoguel, 2011). Though my argument is structured around Indigenous scholarship (Moreton-Robinson, 2008, 2015; Whyte, 2020), its theoretical and methodological touchpoints anchor it in dominant Western paradigms. While the decolonial critique is that theory is made in the North, while the global periphery contributes mere data, my strategy is rather for a decolonial perspective to appropriate and twist Northern theory to its purpose, so that the dialogue is not simply linear and one-way. Theories such as Smith’s (1999) and methodological frameworks such as Marttila’s (2016) were not built to be decolonial, but my aim has been to use them in decolonial ways. In studying the cultural production of “nature” as “heritage” and the way that environmental “resistance” potentially reproduces racial hierarchies and claims to land control and ownership, I believe it is crucial that we take the study of discourse seriously, specifically because it is intimately involved in reproducing structural inequalities and justifying ongoing colonial practices and violent nationalisms. Given the importance of green politics and the escalating sense of a climate change crisis, careful and close discourse analysis of environmental movements is urgent and important.

As a part of challenges and opportunities, another theme that emerges is due to lack of accessibility or anonymizing sources because of risk-­ related issues and potential research credibility, which can be very

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common in resistance research conducted in highly contested sites, within oppressive regimes or areas with ongoing conflict. [Hammami] Since I cannot visit Iqrit and other occupied areas, I had to organise for phone interviews with activists instead of meeting them face to face, and I also had to look at different literature to obtain reliable information. [Rocker and Eaton] We found it challenging to work with new media sources—such as social networking archives which were in a state of flux and constantly presenting us with new content. We found ourselves asking the following questions: What did a new heritage expression look like on Facebook? How could we collect and store those expressions for analysis? We decided to include visual and/or textual posts that commented on the National Theatre. And we learned, over the course of the project, to screenshot, describe, and analyse posts that fell under this rubric—the data of which we kept in a detailed Excel spreadsheet. And as our spreadsheet included a plethora of examples, for our chapter, we had to select representative examples that could help the reader visualize the patterns that we noted in the online posts. [Uzer] In the Bostan case, I have approached a civil society group (Yedikule Platform) that was connected to the bostankeepers. From the initial conversations with them until I completed fieldwork, due to disagreements in activism and advocacy and separation of values and directions, the initial group decided to split. This conflict created a fragmentation which also affected the unified advocacy support. As I have been living away from the site and had to refrain from coming back for the three-year period following the final site visit, with fragmentation added, limited my access further to all but one group as it affected the rapport. [Rocker and Eaton] We faced another challenge when considering how best to write about an ongoing protest. When does the research start and stop given that the moment we are writing about is not bounded by our writing and publishing schedule? As of May 2020, the National Theatre protests are still ongoing, making this one of the longest-running protests in Albania’s recent history. While discourse is always shifting, especially as new actors become involved, it is important to acknowledge that our project is rooted at a specific moment in time (at the outset of the protest) and focused on protesters’ initial attempts to reconcile the National Theatre as a heritage object. Since our project was to explore new heritage discourses playing out through new media, it made sense for us to begin our analysis with materials

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being shared from the moment that the first public “cause” page for the protest appeared on Facebook in March 2018. [Uzer] Another challenge was that the protest was unfolding and revealing different intentions and tactics, fragmenting the sides, making it difficult to report the fieldwork. Temporality Another thing to consider perhaps is developing different forms of dissemination in tandem, which more in line with the speed of the protests as the speed of academic publishing is not as compatible.

Central to the practice of collective research, critique, and self-­reflection is a feminist approach to scholarly work, which has challenges but also provides opportunities in order to decolonize scholarly work. This book’s project, which began as a workshop in 2017 with the contributing authors to discuss theoretical and methodological reflections between heritage and resistance, has continued to a collective production and, as such, is challenged with working in different time zones and locations. Our collective work as editors of this volume and deliberation throughout the book process, initial discussions, workshop where we collectively framed the book with some of the contributing authors also reflect our approach to collective production. Similarly Rocker and Eaton’s (Chap. 3 this volume) reflection on the challenges of co-authorship, including how to mesh different modes of writing and collective writing and thinking, is something that should be explored further. Collective authorship, collective editing and research, as elaborated in Kate Eichorn and Helen Milne (2016), is consistently undervalued in academic evaluation processes. [Rocker and Eaton] Our process for co-authoring this piece was also exciting. We co-wrote the paper together on a Google Doc—a word processing file that is stored online and can be simultaneously edited by those with Internet access to it from wherever they are in the world. Between Albania, Canada, and the United States, we coordinated our writing schedules to work on the chapter in tandem—sometimes drafting different sections and, at other times, drafting and editing the same section together. As authors with distinctly different modes of writing, we were sometimes challenged by our different writing tempos and ways of working through ideas. However, we found inspiration in each other’s words, leading ultimately to the productive merging of our writing styles and ideas. [Eray Çaylı] The ethical and methodological challenges of my methodology have mainly to do with the question of whether the two cases I have brought

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together (Istanbul and Diyarbakır) are comparable or not. This is an ongoing question for me as my interlocutors in each of these fields have different senses of belonging and identity. Although we, as scholars, may often seek to question nation-states and the ways in which they shape our methodologies, in this article, I have to admit that I have brought together two cases whose main common characteristic is to fall within the borders of the same country. Therefore, perhaps there is a methodological nationalism that characterizes my text, if unknowingly. Also, in this text, I focus on the spatial aspects of protest to call all protests that took place in the early 2010s Occupy-style protest. While this inevitably results in assimilating the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring—as well as, needless to say, the protests in Turkey & Kurdistan—into the same category of the expression of socio-political dissent, from a political and sociological perspective clearly this is an oversimplification. I do not know if there is a solution to this simplification—perhaps it is inevitable, as I said, since my focus was spatial—but I still think it must be noted. The fact that people occupied a certain space as a means of protest was what, for me, united these different interventions. But then the question would arise as to whether this is the first that such an occupation occurs, which of course is not the case, and thus one perhaps needs to ask whether one must offer the historical background to such form of protest, which is something I did not do in the text.

Opportunities: Working with Transdisciplinary/ Mixed Methodologies Working with heritage and resistance calls for new methodological means. In order to make sense of the connections, communities, and perspectives that this intersection reveals, this section addresses some of the ways authors found methodological opportunities at the intersection of these two disciplines. [Hammami] Social network: the lack of trust in me as a foreign researcher prompted me to use snowballing techniques in order to arrive at the right persons. Although this might take time, and hinder the analytical selection of interviewees based on specific criteria, meeting people through tight social networks makes it easier to build trust between the researcher and the interviewee, and establish long term relationships. [Rocker and Eaton] While this project presented many challenges, it also provided an exciting opportunity to develop a method to explore new heri-

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tage expressions, which are underrepresented in discussions of heritage discourse, and interface uniquely with urban resistance. We hope that our contribution to the term new heritage as well as our method of analysing its expression will be of particular use to scholars interested in exploring bottom-­up heritage processes and heritage as co-produced through resistance. We particularly see how this framework could contribute to contemporary resistance movements that intersect with heritage discourses and objects, such as the movement to save the Emek movie theatre in Istanbul, Turkey (Ozduzen, 2018; Yasar, 2019) or the movement to deal with the history of the confederacy in the United States. [Hammami] Multiple sources of information: the obstruction of research activities and the limited access to literature and archives due to the political conditions makes the methodological strategy of multiple methods appropriate. One of the techniques that are often recommended for research in conflict zones is “triangulation”. Comparing findings from, say direct observation, interviews, and surveys help to paint a more holistic picture of the complex phenomena at stake. Validation is not limited to multiple sources of information. It also refers to the use of a combination of methods of investigation, data sources, or theoretical frameworks (Creswell 2014). It can be viewed as “a process of verification that (to) increases validity by incorporating several viewpoints and methods” (Yeasmin & Rahman 2012, 156). Using multiple sources and methods helped me better account for and overcame the limits and biases. It sometimes makes validation is the goal, while it is sometimes difficult to validate information similar to the ways in which it is done in natural science. [Hammami] Participatory observation—one of the sources that become vital in conflict zones is participatory observation. I have done this for other studies but not for this chapter. What is, however, vital here is that this method helps to break down the illusion of homogeneity. While moving the observation scale, the researcher can reveal gaps between the ideologies and practices of activism, learn hidden details, and understand some of the symbolic aspects of particular forms of resistance. Despite the vitality of this method, it entails a high level of risk, and challenge to make decisions on the extent to which the researcher can engage in the case. Furthermore, the opportunity to collect first-hand data is not always possible to gain in contexts where conflict prevails. [Hammami] Intensity and engagement—doing research in conflict zones prompts researchers into a number of emotional environments and dramatic scenes. In my research, reading about violation of human rights and direct practices of injustices, and witness similar injustices on-site provide me with

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a layer of intensity and help me to engage with the case emotionally. In several cases, this influenced my analyses and the selection of information. At the same time, such intensity has helped me to engage in the case, feel the different relations of power, and seek to explore more. [Hammami] Critical reflections on concepts and theories. Being engaged in the case and emotionally moved has always made me search for solutions to help people. Such engagement often helped me to test the theories I know and try to contextualize them. For example, Western-centric conceptions of conflict, peace and antagonism have never worked in the case of the Palestinian-Israeli context. Sometimes, the analyses from within the affective environment of a site help develop new theories informed by the particularities of the context and the researcher’s critical engagement in the case. [Uzer] Incorporating design as a negotiation tool has been an interesting addition to the approach that can be further explored as a part of possible imaginaries. The city depends on communities’ envisioning a potential future that is going beyond what is possible and could incorporate their desires and wishes for places. Design tools and methods provide an option to create an imaginary to support this sentiment or at least prompt a conversation. I peripherally incorporate design used in this case but as conditions permit in fieldwork, the design field presents opportunities for articulating how we can envision multiplicity of heritage and could be a tool for activists to generate public opinion and form allies. [De Nardi] A group of locals got together on several occasions to attempt to locate themselves and their families within the “home geography” of Ryhope, in a way that would collate and open up memories in situ. Groups of 8 to 12 came together at the Community Hall and started planning the next steps. They first tried to agree collectively on what they wanted the maps to look like: my job as the heritage professional was to create strategies that would enable multiple perspectives to blend together and appear side by side on the “final” drafts of the visualisations. I would have to be mindful of providing editing and advising suggestions without appropriating content and form. [De Nardi] In the end, we used modified versions of Google Maps produced by the university, and in successive printed and annotated versions of local areas, we used these as a blank canvas for the accumulation of memories, associations, infographics, and photographs accompanied by a legend illustrating the various “dots on the map” worded by community members themselves. The mapping method, once a weapon of colonial oppression and Empire surveillance, had thus become a humble and inclusive medium to redefine

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community and place. The mapping experiment got local people together who perhaps had not worked closely before—this kind of collaborative mapping gets people talking, exchanging understandings and perceptions which may have hitherto been taken for granted or at face value. Ultimately, in Ryhope as elsewhere, any strategy that can help make visible a local desire to “channel” and express place creatively and imaginatively is welcome, provided that we, as the coordinators of the endeavour, ensure that this technique is used to the benefit of the group we are working with. After all, the output will stay with them and be more accessible than a lengthy ethnographic monograph or an (often) tedious oral history transcription. These story maps are portable, printable, photocopiable local memories on the go. And they will grow as the community grows and changes. More importantly, these are their stories. [Ayala-Alfonso] I was highly motivated to write about these cases because they are part of a larger investigation I am carrying out on the origins of the museum and scientific collections, transiting the diverse fronts of political ecologies, critical museography and ethnography, fiction as a narrative device, and finally, alternative histories/epistemologies. The underlying issue is the political and ethical implications of sustaining different intellectual practices as they exist today, which in their current state reproduce different forms of symbolic violence and exclusion. Acknowledging the existence of intra-disciplinary forms of critique, I believe it is of the utmost importance to go beyond accepted epistemologies as well as to cross-­ contaminate disciplines in the search for ways of addressing such issues, and the idea of resistance from my standpoint is related to this issue. [Ayala-Alfonso] Here, the approach to heritage comes from analysing specific cases of recent contemporary art practice. It starts studying genealogies and lineages, but also different forms of scientific gossip, non-canonical practices and traditional knowledge. All of this happens mainly through examples that come from visual arts, but the research bleeds into different disciplines, such as anthropology, philosophy, history of science, and so on. I see the text as the opening of an opportunity to explore recombination of knowledge, pointing to different possible avenues of exploration, but at the same time acknowledging that a profound critique that goes beyond that general enunciation of the issues requires collaboration between scholars of different disciplines that can bring forth the current state of disciplinary criticism of heritage studies, philosophy of science and artistic approaches to explorations of heritage, anthropology, politics, museum studies and so on.

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[Ayala-Alfonso] Having a background in visual arts, curating, and visual culture, I took a diverse approach on how to handle the examples that constitute the spine of my argument. First, I took a look at the projects through a form of analysis that inherits some basic questions from art criticism: how do the pieces articulate? What languages or rhetorical devices are in play in order to build a discourse? What kind of visual statement is presented by the artists? Then, I delved into reflections more on the vein of visual studies/ visual culture: how is visuality organized in these projects? What are the lineages of that visuality in culture? That is, how do they connect to cultural practices, what realms of life are being referenced (popular culture, media, urban development, etc.). What visual and body regimes are these pieces imposing on the spectator? For example, the two main pieces allude to a historical/archaeological exhibition presented in a museum setting with all the museum’s complex ecology of rules and dynamics. What does this do for our experience and understanding of the installations? All of this analysis was infused by literature from various disciplines, with two ideas in mind: the first one was to find ways of positioning a discursive agenda about the limits of traditional disciplines in accounting for culture (not to mention the profound [de]colonial repercussions of their work) and the need to recombine, contaminate and experiment with all of the forms of knowledge captured/erased/ignored by scientific processes. The second idea was to produce this ambitious criticism away from traditional approaches from the arts/critical theory/visual culture (like ideological or disciplinary critiques). That means starting at the object, considering its materiality, reveal as much as that materiality is offering and begin tracing lines of connection to the repercussions of the practices those installations are addressing. Then, hopefully, the arguments (that are scattered through the text rather than built systematically) would arise from those connections. By writing the chapter I found exciting possibilities of activating artworks in new and exciting ways and of reassessing their importance beyond the apparent stagnation of the discipline in the present; that is, going beyond the political conversation of institutional critique and the intellectual riffing on the effects of a work on the exhibition space and vice-versa. Hopefully an analogue opportunity could arise from the side of heritage studies? Finally, I believe it is important to mention that I come from fields that strive for overcoming methodologies (ironically not necessarily having a fixed subject to overcome), so there is an implicit impulse in my writing to derail (productively). In many senses, the text is a creative writing piece, as it transits (smoothly or not) from art analysis to philosophy to creative passages and so on. I do pay attention to how the text “narrates”, and hence I create contexts of transition from a topic to the next: for example, I go from preserving culture to analysing technical aspects of preservation (metadata), then to the loss of fidelity of this process, and finally I connect this argument to an artistic practice that deals with all of that lineage of preservation.

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Methodological Shifts: Epistemology and Interdisciplinarity How do we design methodologies that are non-extractive and non-­ exploitative to our human and non-human interlocutors and reflexive of the plurality of heritage at the same time? What methods can we employ, and what do we need to consider to acknowledge and better understand the nuances of the communities we approach and the power structures at stake? How is heritage knowledge produced/disseminated? Who is privileged in an epistemological sense—scholar-activists, activist scholars, researchers? Who can speak for whom? Linking heritage to resistance has significant implications for heritage research in terms of approach, types of questions raised, target groups, vulnerability, and the ideological basis for the interactions with “stakeholders”. Among these issues is conflict. Each contribution in this volume, although using different approaches, engages with dissonant heritage as being productive (Ashworth et al., 2007). As a methodological approach and an ideological engagement with heritage, the contributors saw confrontation and encounter as a productive practice to reveal injustices. One important area for the future directions of heritage methodologies is incorporating power analysis and methods like power mapping into our enquiries. As Eray Çaylı powerfully states in his self-reflection on power for his chapter: Undoubtedly, even something as powerless-sounding as vulnerability is steeped in questions of power; the vulnerability that marks the discourse of the government and its supporters is not the same as that which characterizes the life experiences and practices of underprivileged sections of the population. I now feel in retrospect that I ought to have engaged with the power-laden economies of vulnerability and the different forms thereof (e.g., vulnerability as discursive trope and vulnerability as embodied experience—whether psychological or physical) and how these are distributed; unevenly across the populace.

Feminist philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler (2016) elaborates how escalating the vulnerability of the body can be viewed as an effective form of non-violent resistance. As Butler (2016) explains, “we can come to understand bodily vulnerability as something that is marshalled or mobilized for the purposes of resistance”. In his chapter,

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Hammami demonstrates how these acts mobilize vulnerability for shifting risks, danger, and focus on the body. In his case, he explores how body language and archaeology were strategically developed to claim the right of return to a confiscated home. Both Çaylı and Uzer explain how similar practices might develop to the right to access and appropriate public space in their chapters. These cases forefront equity, as well as opposing erasure by state and demanding official recognition—for instance, in forms of heritage status recognition and support—as demonstrated in other chapters. Research can be designed in a way to challenge power (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020) by analysing and exposing oppression, by framing the questions and designing methods that enable us to imagine alternatives—to the contemporary—and revealing the invisible mechanisms and outputs of oppression.

Decolonizing Heritage Methodologies Comparing the different contributions of this book revealed the urge for decolonizing methodologies. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s (1999) seminal book Decolonizing Methodologies provides a template for us to understand the West-centric research design that has historically affected Indigenous communities’ voice and identity. She articulates the complicated nature of archives from the point of one-sided representation and how the Other is coded based on the assumptions of the researcher’s assumed identity and approach (Tuhiwai Smith 1999). Tuhiwai Smith succinctly defines this observation as: “There are numerous oral stories which tell of what it means, what it feels like, to be present while your history is erased before your eyes, dismissed as irrelevant, ignored or rendered as the lunatic ravings of drunken old people” (Tuhiwai Smith: 31). Her propositions to tackle these erasures in research also include incorporating Indigenous voices to speak directly at these resources and representations. Heritage studies are inherently in need of incorporating the unheard voices of indigenous and marginalized communities and critically engaging the affective environments that emerge when asking questions pertaining to cultural representation, political recognition, rights, memory, and identity. This work requires an epistemological shift in our research framing and designing of methodologies. A shift liberates us from any disciplinary boundary and conventional technologies that distance us from these effective environments. It is a new path towards decolonizing heritage research from materiality and arranging established divides between

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official and non-official, material and immaterial, nature and culture. To do this, we need to begin by questioning and reflecting on the epistemological principles that underlay the methodologies we employ in the disciplines of heritage and resistance or within the social sciences in general. Making the shift in this sense includes not only what sources of information, and methods and techniques we use, but also how we approach a phenomenon, contextualize it, and map the different phenomena and their interpretations in relation to ethical considerations. Feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed emphasizes the need to be aware of whom we are citing in our work and why this matters in her work on politics of citation: “The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others, not even part” (feminist killjoy blog post by Sara Ahmed, 2013). Critical self-reflection on citation goes through exercises such as syllabus auditing to understand whom we cite and what we teach and by acknowledging and establishing genealogies other than those that are being constantly reproduced through our scholarly works. Nagar and Geiger (2007: 277) propose the extractive fieldwork practices to be replaced by “innovative and dynamic processes of collective knowledge production that are valued (as empowering/socio-politically pertinent) by those in the ‘field’ with whom we share political commitments”. Feminist practices of collective knowledge production (Gunaratnam and Hamilton, 2017), collective writing, and practising open and diverse forms of dissemination can provide a non-exploitative and non-extractive framework. In line with it, we need to employ methodologies of decolonization that enable direct reporting, co-writing, privileging non-Western theorizing and incorporating collaboration in research that would require a systemic change and approach to how we conduct research in academic institutions. Decolonizing methods also challenge the conventional sources of information and means of analysis. Working at the intersection of heritage and resistance inspires such attempts because of the range of challenges that researchers might encounter when seeking to access information, establish trust, and freely explore the formal and other forms of institutionalized sources of information. Facing these challenges and integrating them in the research design would certainly provide researchers with new insights, enrich reported findings and contextually situated views. Researchers often navigate unconventional data sources such as private archives, archives managed by civil society organizations, impromptu

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memorials and monuments, buried historical traces, and untold stories. However, the power relations that emerge due to exploring research questions across the disciplinary boundaries of heritage and resistance prompt the researchers to involve additional questions of ethics. Facing the new challenges that the decolonizing suggest might also support the researchers to make sense of and stand the risks and dangers their research activities expose them to when working in the intersection of heritage and resistance.

Scholar Activism This book’s contributions provide different examples of interactions between the authors and activists, put different social movements into scholarly and historical perspective, and highlight some of the ways in which heritage scholars and activists can work together towards social justice (see David Webb, this volume). The past two decades increasingly reveal activism as common to different fields of enquiry. Scholar activism is being widely debated within resistance studies (see Vinthagen, 2015; Derickson & Routledge, 2015; Chatterton et  al., 2008; Autonomous Geographers Collective 2010). In heritage studies, activism is often viewed as an advocacy work carried out by professional civil society organizations, or as a topic for research (Hammami, 2016). This reference perhaps explains why most heritage activism practices are mobilized and driven by civil society experts in heritage studies or other related fields of enquiry. A conventional take on scholar-activists suggests that scholar-activists are those “who work directly with marginal groups or those in struggle” (Autonomous Geographies Collective, 2010) and bring the learnings of this scholarship into the lives of communities. Scholar activism in a thoughtful manner could also be the response to the “crisis of the fieldwork” practised through what Nagar and Geiger (2007) call “situated solidarities” which can be an effective strategy for producing knowledge that is otherwise not included in scholarly work. In order to move away from extractive research practices, we need to rethink our conventional approaches to consent and risk (to the groups that are focused on scholarly work and to the scholars); rendered invisible histories as consequences of not employing methods that would enable the direct voice of indigenous and marginalized groups (Tuhiwai Smith). We also need to consider the different scholarly works that are not necessarily carried out through a direct relationship with the marginalized and other community groups

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who are mobilized against injustices. Scholar activism involves the research activities that moved by and reported injustices without having the researchers personally involved in the conflict. Furthermore, researchers need to reflect on their role and identity while in the field of research. While action research methodology might share common settings, what we suggest here concerns not only the double role a researcher might have but also the transformation research might be brought into because of the affective environment of research. Researchers who are working at this intersection, particularly if they are embedded in the communities they work with, are shifting between activist and researcher positions, which prompts them to expand their ethical considerations and potentially shift their positionality within and epistemological views of research. For example, researchers’ accounts as situated subjects due to their active engagement in activism and their studies can provide a new perspective and bring things like objectivity and bias into question. Not only power relations are set on the move. The information gathered from the field is both unsettled and critical. For this reason, the intersection of the disciplinary boundaries of heritage and resistance might challenge the very epistemological foundations of what constitutes knowledge.

References Ahmed, S. (2013). Making feminist points. Feminist Killjoys, 11 September. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-­feminist-­points/ Ashworth, G.  J., Graham, B.  J., & Tunbridge, J.  E. (2007). Pluralising Pasts: Heritage, Identity and Place in Multicultural Societies. Pluto. Autonomous Geographies Collective. (2010). Beyond Scholar Activism: Making Strategic Practices Inside and Outside the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 9, 245–275. https://acme-­ journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/868 Baker, P., Gabrielatos, C., KhosraviNik, M., Krzyżanowski, M., McEnery, T., & Wodak, R. (2008). A useful methodological synergy? Combining critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the UK press. Discourse & Society, 19(3), 273–306. Bruchac, M. M. (2014). Decolonization in Archaeological Theory. In C. Smith (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology (pp.  2069–2077). Springer Science and Business Media. Butler, J. (2016). Rethinking Vulnerability in Resistance. In J. Butler, Z. Gambetti, & L.  Sabsay (Eds.), Vulnerability in Resistance (pp.  12–27). Duke University Press.

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Chatterton, P., Fuller, D., & Routledge, P. (2008). Relating Action to Activism: Theoretical and Methodological Reflections. In S.  Kindron, R.  Pain, & M.  Kesby (Eds.), Participatory Action Research Approaches and Methods: Connecting People, Participation and Place (pp. 216–222). Routledge. Connell, R. (2007). Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Cambridge; Malden, MA: Polity. Creswell, J. W. (2014). Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. 4th ed. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications. D’Ignazio, C., & Klein, F. L. (2020). Data Feminism. MIT Press. Derickson, K., & Routledge, P. (2015). Resourcing Scholar-Activism: Collaboration, Transformation and the Production of Knowledge. The Professional Geographer, 67, 1–7. Eichhorn, K., & Milne, H. (2016). Labours of Love and Cutting Remarks: The Affective Economies of Editing. In D. Irvine & S. Kamboureli (Eds.), Editing as Cultural Practice in Canada (pp. 189–198). Wilfred Laurier Press. Georgalou, M. (2016). ‘I make the rules on my Wall’: Privacy and identity management practices on Facebook. Discourse & Communication, 10(1), 40–64. González-Bailón, S. (2013). Social science in the era of big data. Policy & Internet, 5(2), 147–160. Grosfoguel, R. (2011). Decolonizing post-colonial studies and paradigms of political economy: Transmodernity, decolonial thinking, and global coloniality. Transmodernity, 1(1), 1–36. Gunaratnam, Y., & Hamilton, C. (2017). Introduction the Wherewithal of Feminist Methods. Feminist Review, 115(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1057/ s41305-­017-­0023-­5 Hammami, F. (2016). Issues of Sharing and Mutuality in Heritage—Contesting Diaspora and Homeland Experiences in Palestine. International Journal of Heritage Studies, 22(6), 446–465. https://doi.org/10.1080/1352725 8.2016.1166447 Larsson, A. O. (2015). Studying Big Data—Ethical and methodological considerations. In H. Fossheim & H. Ingierd (Eds.), Internet research ethics (pp. 141–156). Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk. Retrieved October 1, 2017, from https://press.nordicopenaccess.no/index.php/noasp/catalog/book/3 Lydon, J., & Rizvi, U. Z. (Eds.). (2010). Handbook of Postcolonial Archaeology. Left Coast Press. Marttila, T. (2016). Post-foundational discourse analysis: From political difference to empirical research. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Retrieved June 13, 2016, from https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&scope=site&db= nlebk&db=nlabk&AN=1091345

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Moreton-Robinson, A. (2008). Writing Off Treaties: White Possession in the United States Critical Whiteness Studies Literature. In A. Moreton-Robinson, M. Casey, & F. Nicoll (Eds.), Transnational Whiteness Matters (1st ed., pp. 81–96). Lanham, MD and Plymouth, U.K.: Lexington Books. Moreton-Robinson, A. (2015). The White Possessive: Property, Power, and Indigenous Sovereignty. University of Minnesota Press. Nagar, R., & Geiger, S. (2007). Reflexivity, Positionality and Identity in Feminist Fieldwork Revisited. In A. Tickell, E. Sheppard, J. Peck, & T. Barnes (Eds.), Politics and Practice in Economic Geography (pp. 267–278). Sage. Oland, M., Hart, S.  M., & Frink, L. (Eds.). (2012). Decolonizing Indigenous Histories: Exploring Prehistoric/Colonial Transitions in Archaeology. University of Arizona Press. Ozduzen, O. (2018). Cinema-Going During the Gezi Protests: Claiming the Right to the Emek Movie Theatre and Gezi Park. Social & Cultural Geography, 19(8), 1028–1052. Smith, A. D. (1999). Myths and memories of the nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, L. (2006). Uses of heritage. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group. Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books. Vinthagen, S. (2015). A Theory of Nonviolent Action: How Civil Resistance Works. London: Zed Books. Whyte, K. P. (2020). Too Late for Indigenous Climate Justice: Ecological and Relational Tipping Points. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change. Yasar, Z. (2019). “Emek is ours, Istanbul is ours”: Reimagining a Movie Theater Through Urban Activism. The Velvet Light Trap, 83, 46–59. Yeasmin, S., & Rahman, K. F. (2012). Triangulation Research Method as a Tool of Social Science Research. BUP Journal, 1(1), 154–163. Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.

CHAPTER 12

Heritage and Resistance: Theoretical Insights Feras Hammami and Evren Uzer

Introduction Uprisings, riots, and political struggles over space, territory, authority, and representations have always given new shapes to the political terrains of cities and societies. Acts of protest and resistance involve people questioning power and naming and shaming injustices (Oldfield, 2014). Many of these protests inspire particular interests, such as those related to the protection of ‘heritage’ (Mozaffari & Jones, 2020), in addition to protests that saw in heritage discourses new pathways to weaponize their protests. Since before the eighteenth century, many conservation movements have emerged in response to the modernization of medieval neighbourhoods in several European cities (Hou & Hammami, 2015). In Paris, Haussmann’s plan to modernize Paris entailed not only a transformation of urban infrastructures, but also the construction of a whole new urban

F. Hammami (*) Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] E. Uzer Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1_12

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way of life and of a new kind of urban persona. Many working-class neighbourhoods were demolished to make way for boulevards, parks, monuments, and squares. Paris became ‘the city of light’—the great centre of consumption, tourism, and pleasure (Harvey, 2008). The politicized selection of properties and areas for demolition or protection, however, led to protests. While they couldn’t stop Hussmann’s plan, protesters generated new political interests in the conservation of cultural heritage, which led to the first law for the protection of historical monuments in 1877. In Stockholm, the first open-air museum ‘Skansen’ was founded in 1891 in order to protect Swedish traditional life, which was threatened by rapid urbanization and other processes of restructuring that became distinct during the late nineteenth century. During that period, several other cities located in Japan, Northern America and the UK witnessed similar struggles, marked by the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movements. Most of them stood for traditional craftsmanship using heritage styles and decoration patterns, against the industrialized way of living and arts, and the ignorance of the hand-crafted art that focus on the aesthetic value of utilitarian objects and processes of collective creation. Another remarkable wave of protests erupted during the post-industrial period, against the spatial cleansing of neighbourhoods and structures that served industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, protests erupted in New  York against the demolition of Pennsylvania Station—the city’s monumental Beaux-Arts building—to make way for the construction of a new sports arena and an entertainment complex. The protesters failed to stop the demolition plan, but they gave rise to new debates on the city’s history and characteristics. Through these debates, the preservation movement took shape and a new legislation for the protection of NYC’s architectural heritage was issued in 1965. The 1960s also witnessed the emergence of new calls for social inclusion and representation. Different minority groups demanded their right to have their histories and cultures represented in the collective imaginary ‘commons’ of their nation-states. Here, a number of examples can be drawn from the right to the city movement (Lefebvre, 1967; Harvey, 2008). That right emerged in response to the existential pain of a withering crisis of everyday life in the city, and as a demand to create an alternative urban life that is less alienated, more meaningful and democratic, but also open to conflicts that surround the processes of becoming (Harvey, 2012). Non-Lefebvrian movements also fought against social and cultural

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inequalities. The Landless Workers’ Movement emerged in Brazil in the 1980s in order to address the historic inequalities that evolved during 500 years of imposing monoculture in rural areas. Collectively squatting on and farming unproductive land under the slogan ‘Occupy, Resist, Produce’ resulted in a new constitution and a progressive process of democratization (Plummer & Betsy, 2002). In other examples, recent protests in Taiwan against the demolition of historic landmarks led to the legal protection of heritage sites during the 1990s, and in Palestine, a new conservation law that provides official protection to sites older than 50 years as resistance to the Israeli occupation. These groundswells of mobilization and political practices emerged in response to the violent displacement and expulsion of people from their homes and lands, as well as the destruction of their social commons, places of memory, and other spaces of familiarity. Despite their varying levels of ‘success’, these protesting groups initiated debates concerning social and economic inequalities, authoritarian regimes, and austerity policies, whether in cultural heritage conservation or other related fields. They also inspired analysis, providing new insights into the theorization of social conflicts in, and the political terrains of, the city. The aim of this chapter is to theorize on the intersection of heritage and resistance, and to articulate the implications for heritage research and practice. Both heritage and resistance are approached here as processes, rather than defined entities in space and time, and in relation to the broader politics of identity that transcend both policy arenas and everyday life conduct in cities. Similarly, each contribution to the book explores the intersection using specific situations of conflicts in which people’s diverging rights to heritage are contested, negotiated, or even violated. The analyses of their cases illustrate: the (political) agency of heritage (Hammami); reframing heritage through ephemeral/temporary acts (Webb); rights to heritage and citizenship (Uzer); rights to (dis)possession of heritage (Cayli); reconstructing heritage through media (Eaton and Rocker); art-inspired insights on preservation as destruction (Ayala-­ Alfonso); uncritical positivism in activism (Burnett); community heritage mapping as activism (De Nardi); and political movements as knowledge institutions (Rassool). Inspired by these contributions, this chapter is grounded in three interlinked theoretical constellations and arguments: • Heritage is a verb and a process rather than a static artefact associated with defined values and significance. Its politicization generates

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dynamics of inclusion and exclusion. Hence it has a doing and an influence. Resistance, in the same fashion, is not solely against power and resides between rights and evil. It is a process through which change occurs. Linking heritage to resistance might therefore provide new possibilities for change. • Heritage issues expand into areas of life and policy that are normally thought of as having to do with conflicts rather than heritage. Similarly, there is a pressing need to understand resistance in relation to inherited forms of everyday life and how resistance itself has become an everyday practice, directed towards, for example, claiming the right to the city. Approaching social conflicts in cities through this perspective might provide a new explanation of the deeply structured dynamics of power that trigger and maintain conflicts in cities. • Uncritical engagement in the intersection of heritage and resistance can lead not only to unnoticed processes of biases, exclusion, or racism, but can also jeopardize their potential for the production of socially equal and just spaces. In the light of these arguments, we first summarize the theoretical landscape over which heritage-resistance terrains have developed in their respective fields of enquiry, before moving on to present the diverging views of the contributions of this book on heritage and resistance. Second, we mapped and identified the discourses and practices that articulated and challenged heritage-resistance relations as being reported in recent research within the fields of heritage and resistance studies, including the contributions from this volume. This provided us with a theoretical lens, empirical background, and a tool of critique to unpack the complex processes of normalization and depoliticization at the intersection. Third, while searching for the spectres of (radical) politics that continue to haunt the relations between the two, we identified their emancipatory potentials and articulated their limitations. Comparing the theoretical and empirical findings from the different contributions of this book has led us to three interlinked concepts, justice, value, and right. It has also inspired a theoretical reframing of heritage through resistance which can be further advanced to support the (re)emergence of erased, buried, manipulated, forgotten, altered, and destroyed heritage narratives and aspects.

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Heritage and Resistance: Background, Definitions, and Intersection Heritage and resistance studies have both grown significantly in recent years; however, this growth in interest has occurred independent of each other. Indeed, how they relate and what backgrounds they have in common remains under-researched. In this chapter, we explore how each is engaged within the other’s field of enquiry, before going onto illustrate their intersection in the following section.

On Heritage and Its Links to Resistance Resistance, as a concept and movement, is under-researched in heritage studies. Genealogical analyses of resistance within heritage studies, however, have revealed important relations between the two. David C. Harvey (2001) explains how a process of ‘heritagization’ has since the mid-­ nineteenth century been defining the narrative of value for heritage and the politicized technologies for its conservation. People’s diverging interpretations of the past and ethnic backgrounds have been assimilated and/ or violently incorporated into the singular narratives of the highly exclusive projects of nationalism and colonialism. In several cases, as Smith (2006) argued, the values associated with the ‘sense of the new Modern Europe’ were made prevalent through the foundation of museums, the conservation of monuments, and the enactment of heritage-related legislation. European powers also imposed these values in their former colonies through ‘modernization’ programmes. They have also been transferred to other countries after World War II through peace (a state of no war) discourses, international development, and ‘prospects through globalization’ (White, 2006). The establishment of the United Nations, as well as the emergence of a global political system defined by universal agreements and conventions, has also formed a platform for the transfer of these values to the different parts of the world. The top-down enforcement of values and processes of de-­contextualizing site-specific interventions has mobilized local values as a currency for activism (Ahmad, 2006; Askins, 2009). Activism is generally rooted in social inclusion and human rights, while protesters in most of these cases were interested in fighting injustices (personal or collective) and diversifying the single narrative of the nation-state. The adoption of the Convention concerrning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage

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(WCNH) by UNESCO in 1972, and its criticism of being ‘Eurocentric, restrictive and excluding’ (Londres Fonseca, 2002, p. 9; Bennett, 2004), paved the way for new forms of heritage-led activism at both local and national levels. According to the WCNH, valuable heritage should be monumental, aesthetic, and old, associated with the experiences of uppermiddle and ruling classes, recognized by the cultural elites, and scientifically assessed. Anything that falls outside this narrative of value will be forcefully erased, dehumanized, invisibilized, and silenced (Hammami & Laven, 2017; Baillie, 2013). Consequently, the Burra Charter1 (1981), which was originally drafted in 1979 by Australia ICOMOS, came to broaden the scope of heritage so that it includes all types of places of cultural significance, including natural, indigenous, and historic places of cultural value. In addition, UNESCO’s report (1996) ‘Our Creative Diversity’, which demanded that all member states grant equal rights to sub-cultures, paved the way for the declaration on ‘Creative Diversity’ (2001), the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage (2003), and the Faro Convention in 2005. In policy and political terms, calls for diversifying representation and decentralizing governments can be compared with Žižek’s (1997, p. 42) argument that we are witnessing ‘a reverse process to the nationalization of the ethnic’ and the beginning of the ‘ethnicization of the nation’ (1997, p. 42). Considering the prevailing ethnic-state contestation, several cases analysed by researchers in heritage studies and in this volume refer in different ways to pluralism in cities through an indirect link to Žižek’s logic. By now, half a century of heritage-contestations has challenged the dominant framework of heritagization and its related imaginary commons of universal values. In the process, the ambitions of modern states to sustain homogenized forms of cultural representation are, in several cases, failing, and attempts are increasingly made to acknowledge peoples’ rights to plural pasts. Ashworth et al. (2007) described how politics of multiculturalism have become a coping mechanism for migration and conflicts, especially in former colonial societies. While multiculturalism narratives in the UK celebrate the present without acknowledging struggles of inequality in the past, in the US it is mobilized to generate pride in the society’s diversity and its success in managing its differences without recognizing that most of these racial differences were originally produced through colonialism and later by dominant race and culture discourses (Ashworth et al., 2007). Some of these issues are further explained in a number of recent explorations within heritage studies. New attention is increasingly

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given to a range of non-Western, non-national, non-elite, non-material, and other from-­below notions of heritage and conservation (Walters et al., 2017; Harvey, 2015; Ashworth, 2007; Smith, 2006; Mozaffari, 2015; Hammami, 2016; Harrison, 2013). Heritage, at least in theory, is no longer limited to the visible, material, historic, aesthetic, and any authorized collective representation of the production of humans as cultural beings. Following Lowenthal (1998), heritage can be anything and can also exist anywhere. It can be personal and collective, official and unofficial, global and local, historic and contemporary, individual and collective, painful and hopeful, dark and light, and many other things that fall within and beyond these established divides. Yet, professional heritage practices are still dictated by the deep structural relations of ‘heritagization’ and other structuring processes within societies at large. In addition, the inclusion of resistance in heritage studies remains limited to the forms of resistance that are visible, collective, public, and loosely organized counteraction to violent practices against unofficially regarded material cultures. In terms of agency, it is usually focused on the advocacy work carried out by professional forms of civil society organizations (Hammami, 2016; Tlili, 2014). More specifically, it is about the role that professional NGOs might play in challenging authorized heritage discourses (Mozaffari, 2015; Madgin et al., 2018), giving little attention to other microforms of everyday and non-professional responses to, for example, exclusion and assimilation. Much of the discussion on heritage and resistance in heritage studies views resistance as ‘radical’ actions against modernization and marginalization (Hertzfeld, 2015; Desmond Hok-Man, 2015). Less discussion, however, has been given to how heritage and resistance feed into each other and how strategies of resistance can sometimes be inspired by notions of tangible and intangible heritage; and how that might lead to a new political landscape within heritage management (Hammami & Uzer, 2018). There is also a tendency in heritage studies to link heritage to conflict: explain how heritage incites conflict or becomes targeted in conflicts (see, e.g., Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996; Smith et al., 2011, Stig Sørensen et al., 2019), rather than exploring the potential of heritage in fighting injustices (Walters et  al., 2017; Gibson, 2019). Such analyses remain site-related or entangled in the culture of working with heritage in and/or through heritage institutions.

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On Resistance and Its Links to Heritage Similarly, heritage, as a concept and discourse, is under-researched in resistance studies. It is also ambiguously addressed in the different agendas of social movements. Rather than discipline- and movement-related development of intersection between heritage and resistance, heritage in resistance studies is usually addressed as a context exposed to threats. When the conflict in question is related to a place, building, artefact, any spatial elements that are officially recognized as ‘heritage’, the language of heritage becomes naturally included in the resistance strategies. In other cases, heritage may become part of resistance when that context in conflict becomes included on lists for officially categorized heritages (e.g., national and global)—a heritagization process that entails systematic denial of ordinary members of the public from their right to freely access those places. This can be explained by the aforementioned examples of protests against the spatial cleansing of several industrial heritage structures during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hammami & Uzer, 2018). How heritage is related to the politics of identity, how intangible aspects wrap around physical objects, and how heritage inspires resistance remain under-explored, if not ignored, in resistance studies. One explanation for this omission or ambiguity could possibly be that resistance studies still view heritage through the aforementioned Western-­ centric frameworks: a material culture that is highly regulated by nationstates and taken care of for future generations. Moreover, the emphasis that the protection of heritage should be done by experts and based on science undermines the power of ordinary people versus the authorized heritage discourse and limits the role of heritage in activism. Another explanation can be related to the conception of resistance. Often, resistance is viewed as fighting against evils (van Huis, 2019) and in defence of freedom, democracy, and humanity (Pile & Keith, 1997); as a counteraction to power (Johansson & Vinthagen 2020; Baaz & Lalja, 2017; McAdam et  al., 2001); as intentional and publicly manifested practice (Pile & Keith, 1997); as collective and based on shared interest (Mayer et al., 2016); or as hidden (Scott, 1985; Tilly, 1991). James C. Scott (1985) also argued that resistance is often reduced to visible, organized, and collective actions. Such views miss the subtle forms of ‘everyday resistance’ or what he calls, ‘hidden transcripts’. His

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investigation into the ways peasant and slave societies respond to oppression/domination reveals that their rebellions are invisible and non-­ organized everyday forms of resistance, such as ‘foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage’ (see also Charles Tilly, 1991). Scott’s take on resistance can be compared and developed through Asef Bayat’s conception of non-violent everyday resistance. Bayat (1997) investigates the ways through which the silent, patient, protracted, and pervasive advancement of ordinary people on the propertied and the powerful as a means to survive hardships can better their lives (Bayat, 1997, p. 57). Similar ideas are further developed in, amongst other scholarly platforms, the new Journal of Resistance Studies. Here, scholars explore resistance beyond any strict divide between hidden and visible, individual and collective, everyday and publicly manifested forms of resistance (Vinthagen, 2015). They establish an explicit differentiation between power and resistance, in order to empirically describe and explain resistance. In this, non-­ subaltern practices that may embrace forms of power would not be called resistance but instead conceived as ‘power struggle’ (Baaz & Lalja, 2017). In this differentiation, conflict is reduced to violence and destruction, and the impact of resistance as immediate, linear, regular, non-relational, and win-seeking.

On the Intersection of Heritage and Resistance These theoretical sketches reveal that there is no inherent peace in heritage (Hammami & Laven, 2017), and that heritage and resistance are entangled in different situations of conflicts. Although resistance in the cases reviewed in the previous section might be conceived as a counteraction to power, often against evil, both resistance and heritage should not always be limited to conflicts. In this chapter, we explore the potential of both to provide new opportunities for justice-oriented change. We situate ourselves within this intersection to uncover new pathways to weaponize forms of non-violent resistance that could support fighting all forms of ‘domination’. These forms do not only include ‘the particular territorial configuration of power relations that we call “the state”, but the exploitative practices, commodification, fetishism, alienation, and economic injustices of capitalism, the discursive truth regimes and normative orders of status quo, and the gender, race, status, caste, and caste hierarchies of the sociocultural sector’ (Vinthagen, 2015, p. 7).

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Working at this intersection is also inspiring to challenge current focus in heritage studies on conflict and war, rather than peace and peacebuilding (Walters et  al., 2017). This focus has critically led to the burial of ‘histories of peace’; and singling out the potential of these histories from any debate on productive conflict, and conflict management instead of conflict resolution. What we propose in this chapter is to move towards a new language of, for example, ‘dissonance’ (Tunbridge & Ashworth, 1996), and a new understanding of heritage that reveals it to be essentially constructed from ‘narratives of conflict’ (Daly & Chan, 2015, p. 492) and that heritage is about the negotiation of ‘conflicts’ (Smith, 2006, p.  82). Similarly, we need to critically reflect on ‘practices from below’, so that we do not take them for granted as being justice-seeking. People might join social movements without considering the outcomes of the movement and its impacts on society. We also view resistance and change in relational terms. Success of resistance is not based on whether the resistance in question has achieved its envisioned goals. Rather, it is based on what has emerged from the process in the organization of time and space. The theoretical and empirical advances that this book contributes to at the intersection of heritage and resistance are brought into focus and unpacked in this chapter. On the one hand, the authors build on the critical value of the theoretical literature on heritage studies, especially those who drew on the field of critical heritage studies, and seek to employ its critical enquiry, identifying the dynamics that link heritage to complex and ever-changing societies. On the other, the authors are highly critical of the proliferation, drawing on specific case studies of politicization, depoliticization and repoliticization to argue that the conceptual apparatus of heritage and resistance is inadequate for undertaking a critical analysis of the present political predicament. All, however, build on the conceptual framework of this book, by either linking both or separating concepts of resistance and heritage. Their take on both concepts also varies, following their disciplinarity, political experiences, societal discourses, case studies, and other geopolitical questions. In their analyses, the authors have unsettled the relations between the two to liberate them from any dominant discourse and conceptual apparatus. The book’s contributions bring to these debates several important inspirations. The first two chapters by Uzer, and Kailey and Eaton focus on emerging forms of heritage and activism within the struggle for the right to the city. In ‘Exercising Our rights to the Past: Emergent Heritage

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Activism in Istanbul’, Evren Uzer elaborated heritage activism as a part of exercising right to the city and right to appropriation, through insurgent and emergent activist urban practices. She describes heritage activism as various acts of civil disobedience which leverage heritage and collective ‘alternative’ past narratives. She used the case of a historical edible plant garden, in Istanbul, Turkey, as a setting to discuss the notion of heritage activism as a demonstration of rights and claiming of public land. She highlighted both rapid unfolding activism, its changing alliances in relation to conducting research, and bridged the current displacement and dispossession practices to heritage-related activism. In the subsequent chapter, ‘Acting Out the Future of the Albanian National Theatre: New Heritage at the Intersection of Resistance and New Media’, Kailey Rocker and Jonathan Eaton investigated the role of the media in challenging and changing the dominant discourses and spatial practices of heritage and resistance. Focusing on urban development in Tirana and the preservation of Albania’s National Theatre, Eaton and Rocker explained how online social networking platforms like Facebook can weaponize non-violent resistance against the authoritative processes of heritage-making. Their analyses of the heritage discourses that have been produced and reproduced in different media sources revealed how critical engagement with heritage and resistance via new media arenas can play an important role in heritage making and the representation of people and their pasts in cities. The following two chapters share experiences from community-based activism and action research within urban change and resistance. In her chapter, ‘Mapping More-than-Nostalgia of the “Pits”: Heritage Co-production as a Creative Resistance to Deindustrialization’, Sarah De Nardi demonstrated the power of community mapping to express local, grassroots forms of resistance to mainstream ideas of heritage, and how using it in her community-based mapping research to re-interpret the Grand Electric Cinema, and through collaboration with the Beamish Museum where the Cinema was reassembled, uncovered new values that heritage institutions had insufficient capacity to recognize. In the subsequent chapter, David Webb used action research to critically explore the political work of heritage research and its situation within urban struggles. He specifically looked at how a community of skaters brought their skating experiences into a process of heritagization through ‘action art’ on the south bank, London, and how this supported the mobilization of the communal heritage in the dispute. While doing this he explored the relationship between authenticity, as a concept capable of legitimizing

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heritage value, and resistance within urban renewal. What was officially recognized as a dirty place was challenged by a present-centred authentic reconstruction from below which transformed it into a heritage site. A tying together of cultural ethnography with political history in this chapter made the call for an increased reflectivity on the part of heritage researchers and practitioners, and potentially provides a critical resource for social movements. Other forms of heritage politics and activism were explored in Chaps. 7 and 8, with a particular interest in notions of dispossession, alienation, and colonization. Eray Çaylı takes us to Turkey, where activism at Istanbul’s Gezi Park and Amed’s Hewsel Gardens mobilized an acute awareness of historical forms of heritage dispossession. His empirical analysis showed that ‘the entangled ways in which the protesters both mobilized and contested dispossession reiterates the importance of thinking the struggle over urban space beyond a binary opposition between power and resistance to instead consider agency as the product of this entanglement’. This mobilization, as he explained, has important implications for the dualisms of conventional understandings that underpin heritage-as-­ proprietorship—such as possession versus dispossession, security versus vulnerability, and humans versus nonhumans. The politics of heritage play an important role in the production and reproduction of agency and these dualisms. Feras Hammami takes us to Palestine to explore from-below mobilization of the right to heritage and against dispossession. He looks at the heritage works that inspire community-based performance of an-­ Nakba commemoration and the right of return in the demolished village of Iqrit, northern of Israel. While identifying and characterizing the heritage-­ backed forms of resistance that recently emerged against the silencing of an-Nakba and the right of return, the case of Iqrit revealed the efforts of activists to their history’s sense of urgency. This sense resides in both the individual and national narratives and stories of expulsions; however, it plays an important role in the politics of vulnerability and precarity that refugees lived in. Losing this sense means a growing fear of a permanent life in exile, while protecting it gives the feeling of presence and hope. This perhaps explains why the direct action of return emerged as a counteraction to both the settler colonial strategies of dispossession and the Oslo Accords of ‘peace’. The case of Iqrit showed that the return to one’s past is an imperative moral practice and a symbolic act of recognition and apology, rather than a collective project of diplomacy.

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In Chaps. 8 and 9, the explorations of heritage and resistance are directed towards the challenges, limitations, and troubles brought by the past to the present, and the significance of heritage making processes for the decolonization of conservation movements. The chapter by David Ayala-Alfonso explores these issues from the perspective of contemporary art. He looks into two artistic practices, biennial exhibition and an archaeological excavation, that critically engage in discourses of value as being produced and reproduced as part of archaeological, collection and exhibition practices. He considers the heritage-making processes in fictitious film scenarios and other artistic interventions that engage in past experiences of material culture production in art, and how these interventions can develop into platforms for confronting the destruction processes associated with urban conflict, war, uprooting, gentrification, and colonial violence. For him, these practices compel different forms of usage and interaction from the audiences and communities they interpolate, creating temporary rules and spaces of dialogue that displace the regular interaction with space and awaken a sense of criticality on the material culture of everyday life. In the chapter by Scott Burnett, the impact of colonial past on the present and future is investigated within the discursive practices of the anti-fracking movements in Australia, South Africa, and the UK. His analyses of ethnoscapes within anti-fracking movements demonstrated how unnoticed reinforcement of the histories of colonialism and ethnonationalism in the movements can threaten the social relationships required to deliver environmentally sustainable futures, and indirectly foreclose possible avenues of dialogue with indigenous and oppressed peoples. Burnett’s analyses of heritage and resistance remind us about the incomplete processes of decolonization and their possible impact on social movements. Chapter 10 presents a conversation with Ciraj Rassool who is a scholar activist, professor of history and director of the African Programme in Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Through this conversation we seek to further theorize the intersection of heritage and resistance inspired by Rassool’s experiences from South Africa. We specifically focused on the development of Rassool’s identity as a scholar activist under apartheid and in post-apartheid South Africa to tease out lessons from his intellectual, political, and applied work. Notions and processes of epistemology, restitution, politics of resistance, history from below, and the engagement in political movements as

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knowledge institutions in the post-apartheid South Africa were particularly important to the exploration of heritage and resistance in this book. In light of the different socio-political contexts and approaches reviewed in the contributions of the book, we explored the realms of heritage and resistance through their contingency with regard to context and being open to possibility. These explorations implored us to engage more fully with the politics and power geometries, which their intersection reflects as well as proclaims. In many ways, the dynamics, power relations, values, and constellations that develop at their intersection are framed and inspired by issues of affect, geopolitics, and spatial scale. They might erupt, take shape, and intensify in relation to a specific situation, but they may also escalate to other locations within the same city or even within or outside national borders. As explained in the different contributions of this book, the intersection of heritage and resistance is informed by historical, colonial, neoliberal, other socio-cultural processes, which themselves function as conceptual and legal apparatuses within heritage practices. This might explain why the broader and mosaic context of heritage often becomes reduced into site-specific interventions, ignoring the multiple narratives that constitute its history and materiality, and the influence of that intervention on its broader context. Rather than uncritically supporting authorized heritage practices, we must embrace context-related practices to encourage more open and progressive processes of selection, valuation, and projection of heritage. This can lead to unpacking the broader politics of heritage practices and associated processes of exclusion, marginalization, erasure, manipulation, forgetting, and destruction. This is further discussed in the following section through a theoretical shift towards the concepts of justice, rights, and values.

Theoretical Framework Shifts: Values, Rights, and Justice Working with heritage often leads to inevitable conflicts. Including heritage within a narrative of value (material value, and value that determines the preservation of object, sites, etc.) that is not solely a rational or one-­ sided practice of inclusion or exclusion. This practice often implies the projection of the self in addition to the exclusion, or even the suppression of ‘the Other’. The past six decades have witnessed the growing number of minority and indigenous groups who have called for their rights to be included in the respective national narratives of value in heritage.

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Challenging the single narratives of nation-states resulted in different situations of (violent) social and political conflicts. Internationally, the Western-centric nature of the authorized heritage discourse (Smith, 2006; Waterton, 2010; Harrison, 2013) gave rise to a range of conceptual and legal developments for the valuation and presentation of heritage and their association with human rights (Logan, 2012; Coombe & Weiss, 2015). The 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage specifically refers to the International Bill of Human Rights in its preamble, while Article 2 states that the Convention considers solely cultural traditions and expressions compatible with existing international human rights instruments. Moreover, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was the first international human rights instrument that explicitly recognized heritage rights in 2007. Meskell (2015) explains that human rights are perhaps ‘the only authoritative normative discourse available to counter the excesses of neoliberalism’. ‘It affords a powerful set of rhetorical resources through which understanding of power and injustice may be expressed’. Following Wilson (1997, p. 13), Meskell suggested for heritage scholars to explore the ‘ways in which human rights vocabularies provide rhetorical resources with which to protest injustice, insist upon new forms of social justice that challenge dominant normative position and distribution of social benefits (Fainstein, 2010), and assert distinctive understandings of human dignity in diverse social fields’ (Coombe & Weiss, 2015, p. 53). This shift mirrors some of the recurrent value-related questions in heritage studies: How should the past be valued; what values should be promoted; for what purpose; and on what basis should they are evaluated? Within the context of this chapter, the involvement of values in the politics of ‘othering’ is more relevant than exploring the values of heritage, and with the possible agency that values might entail when working at the intersection of heritage and resistance. It builds on Harvey’s (2009) critical analysis of justice in terms of distribution of social benefits as a prime target in city development. His argument is that the desired city is inseparable from what kind of people we want to become (Harvey, 2009, p. 45) and ‘a Just City has to be about fierce conflict all of the time’ (Harvey, 2009, p. 47). A just city, as Sandercock (2003, p. 2) also suggests, involves ‘politics of possibility and hope’. A hope that stems from a predetermined search for an inclusive city in which people can change themselves by having the right to change their city (Harvey, 2009). Similarly, we see the

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importance of developing the value of heritage through a dialogue between inclusion and social justice. This is particularly vital for the transformative and purposeful power of heritage that we engage with in this book. This power resides in the capacity of heritage to provide spaces for dialogue and learning—though often lead to conflict and war—about the past and the Other. We are aware about the shortcomings of this view on heritage and its value, and how this view may not enable a direct engagement with the dominant discourses on human rights, including those often endorsed in scholarly activism. The ambition, however, is to give rise purposeful justice-making language and tools that support the (re)emergence of the erased, silenced, manipulated, and altered narratives and stories. As examples on the heritage-inspired change the cases of Gezi Park, Skate Park, and the Grand Electric Cinema explained how the protests supported the adjustment of the dominant frameworks of the official heritage discourses and added new values to the established ones. The protests perhaps haven’t led to individual goals but they have responded to the common needs of the protests by changing the general political rhetoric. The success of the cases reported in the book is proportional and indeed relative. There is certainly no standard set of criteria to assess success. It is, however, important to, as Burnett explains in his contribution to this book, consider the past histories and discourses that inspire social movement. Certainly, each individual and collective in a social movement has own objectives and interests according to which success is assessed. But we should also critically engage in the social, economic, cultural, and political returns of social movement: the new conditions and climates that enable change; and the kind of change that is produced. In this light, what’s important for this book is the question of ‘right’ and its relation to the politics of identity. In heritage studies, scholars interested in questions of inclusion and diversity often focus on questions of representation. Our approach to right in this book, however, is different. Inspired by the ‘right to the city’ discourse (Lefebvre, 1967; Harvey, 2008), especially those who potentially made a collective turn within the politics of environment, labour, gender, and minorities, we are interested in the right of people to change themselves by changing the ways in which heritage is managed. Thereby, this chapter calls for both a collective and an individual right to heritage. Our explorations of the right to heritage generally speak to the emerging interest in rights-based approaches to heritage, not only by national

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and local governments, but also in the politics of world heritage. Rather than granting people the rights to access official heritage sites and objects and provide their perspective on their selection, valuation, and preservation, we are interested in people’s rights to change in heritage and its management. This shouldn’t mean a subscription to the category, formal or official heritage. Instead, heritage exists everywhere and anywhere and can take different forms and roles in people’s everyday life. This is transpiring in a context of bottom-up pressures and expectations for more inclusive, democratic, and socially just forms of heritage governance. Indigenous peoples, minorities, and other disadvantaged groups are increasingly framing their demands on heritage issues within the human rights discourse in order to gain legitimacy and international support. The cases of return to Iqrit (Hammami), uncovering the Armenian history at Gezi Park (Cayli; Uzer), the protection of the Skate Park (Webb), and the inclusion of unofficial memories in the Grand Electric Cinema (De Nardi) provide different examples on the significance of heritage and people’s right to heritage to the politics of identity, inclusion, and decolonization. These and the other analysis reported in the book prompt us into many questions, including: Would providing the right to stay ensure the eradication of existing ethnic, racial, and class-related exclusions that have long plagued communities in cities across the globe? What implications does the transformation of a popular space into a ‘heritage place’, as an outcome of protests, have for protesters? And to what extent could the reinterpretation of the values protesters attach to a place and the consequent recognition of that place as a heritage site result in the cooption of activism? Why does a process of heritagization begin when a language of heritage is used by activists to support their cause? While the values used to initiate a process of heritagization may become officially recognized, the often-ignored question is what happens to the rights of the protesters to the claimed heritage? The proliferation provides several examples on the outcomes of urban resistance and other forms of protests against violent change of the physical environments that locals conceive with cultural and social values. The recognition of the values of these environments not always implies the recognition of the interest of protesters (Hammami & Uzer, 2018). Despite the growing calls within heritage studies to decolonize authorized heritage practices, professional heritage management is still guided by these practices. The interest in the physical attributes of heritage all too frequently dissociates people from any heritage-inspired change. In this chapter, we recognize the

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transformative power of heritage and the webs of relations and experiences that wrap around physical objects. Heritage thus is explored through its potential for ‘doing’, while the success of heritage activism is assessed through the contextual relevance of the change it brought about. It is here where heritage and resistance meet and become entangled. Working at the intersection of heritage and resistance entails a new landscape of activism that challenges historically rooted injustices, contextualizes impact, and calls for a collective right to the past, present, and future.

Conclusion: Shifting Disciplinary and Practice Silos Theoretical conversations between researches from heritage and resistance studies and empirical findings reported in the contributions of this book have illustrated three key theoretical insights into heritage studies. Firstly, linking resistance to heritage not only exposed the ways in which heritage becomes exploited for injustices, but also provided new insights on the potential of heritage to support the fighting of injustices. By taking a relational view of both heritage and resistance as immanent and open-­ ended processes, the relationship between heritage studies and cultures of activism provides a nexus through which purposive and future-orientated practices can be outlined—which may have transformative potential (see Harvey & Perry, 2015). Working with heritage from below can inspire the orientation of transformation towards a more just and context-sensitive change. The idea is not only to uncover the unnoticed and ignored biases, racism, and violence that are practised in the name of authorized heritage practices, but also weaponize non-violent forms of resistance to find new means that support the (re)emergence of erased, manipulated, changed heritage narratives, destroyed spaces, and forgotten stories. Thus, the role of heritage within the construction and solidification of collective identities needs to be analysed with a view to outlining a space of justice, inclusion, and a sense of social fulfilment. Secondly, scholar activism should be conceived of as a future direction for critical heritage studies. The contributions in this book provide important cases on the interactions between the authors and activists, put different social movements into scholarly and historical perspective, and highlight some ways in which heritage scholars and activists can actually work together towards social justice. The past two decades increasingly

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reveal activism as common to different fields of enquiry. In heritage studies, activism is often debated as an advocacy work carried out by professional civil society organizations, or as a topic for research. Emerging research from the intersection of heritage and resistance that enquires into resistance movements and their incorporation of issues of heritage, identity, and memory also responds to a gap that has long existed in the heritage discipline on being disconnected from practice and people’s everyday experiences. This disconnection is due to the construction of heritage as a top-down concept, operationalized in connection with national identity and implemented by experts drawing on scientific discourses. Heritage practices therefore follow a framework that is largely shaped by authorized heritage discourse and lack sensitivity to everyday forms of resistance. As explained in most of the contributions, resistance is a constituent and an inherent value of heritage. Uncritical reflections on it continue to disassociate heritage from its wider context. The operational gap thus demands a change in the scholarly approach by repositioning the researcher to take a stance and role in activism, and critically reflect on the ways in which the researcher’s role and position relate to the values of heritage involved in the activism. Doing this would expand the doing of heritage towards a more societal approach and liberate it from its current Western-centric description and framework. Thirdly, working at the intersection of heritage and resistance gives rise to new research questions, provides scholars with new levels of intensity and engagement, uncovers silenced power relations, unfolds new target groups, and enables the construction of explanatory discourses on multiple scales. As further explained in the chapter ‘Methodological Insights Within the Intersection of Heritage and Resistance Research’, the explorations of heritage and resistance in different situations of conflicts expose scholars to a number of ethical considerations, where traditional questions and methods of enquiry appear inadequate. Working at the intersection thus suggests heritage scholars and practitioners must to find new methods of enquiry, analytical approaches, and modes of engagement with heritage. It also inspires new opportunities and challenges for heritage research and supports the exploration of unnoticed contestations and negotiations of values, roles, and representations in conflicts. Finally, the key theoretical insights that stemmed from this chapter, and the book in general, urge us to unsettle the stability of heritage as a concept and field of enquiry, and decolonize its foundations in theory and practice. Through contestations of different site-specific heritage

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interventions and heritage-related legislative documents, non-violent resistance and other forms of protests highlighted the lasting impact of authorized heritage practices on societal development. These protests exist alongside the debates about the less visible legacy of Smith’s AHD in contemporary power relations and the ongoing exclusions and oppressions they sustain. The attempts of protesters to diversify Western-centric and culturally hegemonic practices revealed both deep-rooted and structural challenges against any proposed change, and the potential of heritage to provide new opportunities for challenging these structures. Therefore, what these protests realized was not only highlighting that heritage is a battlefield for negotiating difference, identity, authority, and superiority, but also showing people have the right to freely access and enjoy their narratives, language, stories, and associations.

Note 1. Although the Burra Charter was specific to the context of Australia, it was internationally adopted to undermine the WCNS.  It supported a shift towards ‘place’ instead of monuments and sites, and this resulted in the inclusion of new historic places on the list of outstanding universal value. Despite these changes, the focus on the ‘tangible’ aspects of heritage continued to prevail in both international and national politics of heritage. New calls have also emerged demanding the recognition of the heritage values of non-monumental societies (loose-foot communities, tribals and Bedouins) (Smeets, 2004, p. 39).

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Index1

A Aboriginal Australians, 198, 201–204 disempowerment, 201 knowledge, 201 Action art, 109, 111 collectivist interpretation, 104 history, 111 Activism activist archives, 226 activist-local dynamics, 34, 35 community as activists, 27 consolidation, 105 cultures of, 274 eco-activism, 128 and ethnic cleansing, 155 face-to-face, 105 grassroots, 75, 267 justice-seeking, 123 reinforcing inequalities, 21 reinforcing power, 21 romanticization, 33

youth, 146 Ahmed, Sara, 252 Albania’s National Theatre, 12, 42, 48, 52, 267 Albania's National Theatre protests, 47, 52–56, 64, 65, 243 Al-Khalil, see Hebron Allahyari, Morehshin, 178, 180 Amed, 118, 126–129, 132n11, 268 An-Nakba, 6, 139–141, 143, 149, 152, 155–157, 159, 268 authorised, 141 criminalisation, 144 denial of, 149, 150 from below, 141 and heritage works, 141 historic traces, 155 memory of, 142, 157 narratives of, 156 silencing, 145, 159, 160, 268

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 F. Hammami, E. Uzer (eds.), Theorizing Heritage through Non-Violent Resistance, Palgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflict, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77708-1

281

282 

INDEX

Anthropocene, 187 environmental justice, 124 Anti-colonialism, 202, 220 museum work, 228 Anti-fracking, 14, 186, 188, 189, 193, 195, 199, 201, 204, 208, 242, 269 anti-frackers, 189, 194–199, 201–204, 206–209 anti-fracking movement, 14, 188, 195, 204 coalitions, 188 conspiracy theory, 208 justification, 201 'nuclear colonisation,’ 207 racism, 207, 208 virtue, 203 Apartheid, 2, 157, 192, 199, 201, 213–216, 219, 222, 223, 269 socioeconomic, 202 Appropriation, 11, 178, 180, 202, 218, 267 abstraction, 180 of museums, 178 of space, 108 right to, 11, 172 value, 21 Architecture capable of evolution, 109 environmental destruction, 128 life of buildings, 110 Art depoliticisation, 99 governance and marketisation, 101, 103 inclusive, 106 politicisation, 100 Assemblage Theory, 94, 111 Authenticity, 12, 47, 86, 91, 92, 206, 267 agent of history, 94 as resistance?, 82 authentic practices, 92

legitimising, 111 and political struggle, 109 re-imagining, 111 theorising, 93 universalist understandings, 110 weaponization, 92 Western notions, 92 Authorised heritage discourses, 9, 110, 145, 263, 264, 271 Autochthony, 192, 206 B Bamiyan Buddhas, 5, 172, 173 Beamish Museum, 72, 74, 75, 79, 80, 82, 85–86, 88, 238, 267 Belonging, 199 and heritage, 118 collective belonging and justice, 121 political, 129 sense of, 87, 199, 245 Biodiversity conservation, 186 colonialist, 187 Biopolitics, 8, 9 Black Lives Matter, 1 Bostankeepers, 28, 32 precarity, 35 Bostans, 27 farmed by migrants, 28 Ottoman heritage, 33 Built environment, 127, 143 Bûka Baranê, 129 Butler, Judith, 120 C Chase Shell Oil Out of the Karoo, 189, 198–201 CHS, see Critical heritage studies Civil rights, 75, 202 Climate change climate catastrophe, 186, 242 historical racism, 209

 INDEX 

Coal mining, 74, 76, 86, 207 Collective memory destruction, 139 Colonialism, 235, 242, 261, 262 agriculture, 197, 198 collection and destruction, 177, 178 colonial administration, 199 colonial archive, 229 colonial histories, 14, 206, 227, 269 colonised people, 186 'colonizer's model of the world,’ 204 European, 187, 202, 214 of knowledge, 241 mapping, 247 virtue of, 201 Commons access to land, 195 as seeds, 36 commoning, 35 'new commons,' 24 Community mapping, 72–74, 76, 156, 267 Conservation stewardship model, 228 Consumerism, 97, 101–103 consumer-driven governance, 102 COVID-19, 2, 10, 42, 72 Critical heritage studies, 6, 9, 225, 241, 266, 274 Cultural artefacts abstraction, 175 Cultural artifact, 172, 175, 180 D Decolonisation, 206, 227, 269, 273 authorised heritage practices, 273 decolonise education, 2 decolonising, 71, 232, 233, 241, 251, 253

283

decolonising methodologies, 251 decolonising methods, 252 heritage, 269 non-western theorising, 252 process of, 229 Deindustrialisation, 71–88, 238, 267 resisting stereotypes, 85 DeMille, Cecil B., 166, 169, 171, 173, 182n1 Demolition, 4, 49, 52, 128, 131n7, 258, 259 De-placement, 57, 59, 64, 65 De-time, 57, 59, 64, 65 Digital activism, 12, 105 Facebook, 12, 43, 48, 52, 53, 56, 64, 66n4, 66n5, 189 petition, 49 Twitter, 43 weapomizing non-violent resistance, 267 Disappearance threat of, 172 Disaster, 124 Disaster capitalism, 186 Disaster Law, 124, 127, 130n3, 131n4 Dispossession, 120, 121 accumulation by dispossession, 102–103 colonial, 202, 203 displacement, 160 emergent forms, 129 and (in)justice-making, 13 systematic dispossession, 121 temporality, 122, 123 vulnerability, 121 District Six Museum, 214, 221, 222 Don’t Touch My Mosque, 5 E Edible plant garden, 12, 237, 267 Elitism, 99, 103

284 

INDEX

Environmentalism exclusionary politics, 209 and heritage, 209 language of, 200 liberatory, 209 resistance, 243 Ethnic cleansing, 10, 139, 143, 151, 186 Aboriginal Australians, 197 Ethnonationalism, 14, 186, 191, 269 Ethnoscapes, 14, 186, 190, 201, 208, 209, 269 white, 204 Eureka Stockade, 197, 198 Europa Nostra, 42, 49, 64 Everyday resistance, 8, 54, 55, 103, 224, 264 Extractive research practices, 253 Extractivism, 186 F Festivalisation, 102–104, 109 Festival of Britain, 99, 102, 103 Fieldwork building trust, 237, 239, 240, 245, 252 vulnerability, 250 Floyd, George, 2 Fossil fuel extraction, 187, 198, 202, 203, 209, 241 resistance, 187, 203, 241 Fracking, 201, 204 Fracking Hell, 189, 193–195 G Gezi Park, 3, 13, 118, 119, 121–124, 128, 129, 268, 272, 273 Armenian cemetery, 3, 119, 121 occupation, 25–26 Gezi Park protests, 13, 120, 124

Grand Bingo Hall, 83, 84, 238 Grand Electric Cinema, 74, 77–87, 238, 239, 267, 272, 273 Grigely, Joseph, 173 Guadalupe-Nipomo dunes, 166, 168, 170, 182n1 H Harvey, David, 22 Hebron, 6, 145 Heritage for change, 7 contested, 2, 119 destruction and reconstructionn, 173 entanglements, 6 and exclusion, 118 exclusionary, 118 exclusionary heritage, 118 heritage-making, 12, 43, 54, 64, 73, 140, 267, 269 ownership, 104 politicized, 26 process, 44, 54 produced through violence, 25 proprietorship, 117, 118 reconciliatory heritage, 160 top-down, 73, 88 Heritage activism, 11, 145, 156, 158, 253, 266–267, 274 Heritage and resistance, 1, 4, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 44, 130, 213, 223, 232–234, 244, 245, 252, 259, 260, 263–267, 269, 274, 275 disciplinary boundaries, 10, 254 entanglement, 11 ethics, 14 political agency, 130 Heritage and resistance studies, 10, 232, 233, 260, 274

 INDEX 

Heritage-as-proprietorship, 13, 123, 129, 268 Heritage-based resistance, 45 Heritage discourse symbiosis and harmony, 109 Heritage from below, 11 Heritage-led activism, 262 Heritage management, 91, 118, 263 authenticity, 91 participatory, 23 Heritage object(s), 44, 59, 243 authenticity, 46 future imaginaries, 43 Heritage practice future value, 112 Heritage production, 118, 122, 140–141, 225 Heritagisation, 11, 75, 261–264, 267, 273 Hewsel Gardens, 118, 128, 129, 268 History political conflict, 94 History from below, 2, 144, 145, 217, 218, 269 Homogenization of the past, 82 Hope hopeful change, 11 hopeful future, 79 Houston, Donna, 124 Human-nonhuman relations, 13, 118, 126, 129 Hydraulic fracturing, see Fracking I Identity politics, 1, 65 Indigenous, 14 activism, 206 appropriation of identity, 204 as nature, 204, 205 eracing, 159, 187 ‘imago,’ 206

285

instrumentalisation, 209 instrumentalizing rights, 203 invisibilisation, 253 resistance, 204, 241 scholarship, 242 subordination, 188 voice and identity, 251 Islamophobia, 5 J Journal of Resistance Studies, 8, 265 Justice-making, 11, 13, 141 language and tools, 272 Justice-oriented change, 265 K Kramer, David, 199 Kurdish Workers Party (PKK), 126, 127 L LaDuke, Winona, 206, 207 Landscape as heritage, 190 biblical, 145 dystopian images, 208 and memory, 71 poetic, 186, 191, 209 primordial, 199 pristine, 198, 199 of risk, 155 sacred connection, 195 space and race, 187 Late capitalism, 165 hyperconsumption, 174 Liberation struggle, 202 LLSB, see Long Live Southbank Lock the Gate Alliance, 189, 195–198

286 

INDEX

Long Live Southbank (LLSB), 95–97, 100, 104, 105, 111, 236 Lopez, Ulrik, 178, 180, 181 M Mapping collaborative, 238, 248 discursive mapping, 242 map-makers, 83 participatory deep mapping, 77 Marxism, 215, 217, 220 Memes, 194, 204, 206 Memory reproduction, 145 visualisations, 76, 80 Modernisation, 29, 31 Monuments, 2, 3, 49, 51, 56, 57, 65, 191, 223, 253, 258, 261, 276n1 Confederate, 65 cultural monuments, 48–49 Kruja Castle, 58 Morris, William, 97, 111 Mount Kırklar, 127, 128 Movements, 219 environmental movements, 201, 208, 242 Landless Workers' Movement, 259 liberation movements, 140, 215, 222, 224, 225 metropolitan environmentalism, 187 Occupy movement, 52, 245 Rhodes Must Fall, 2 women-led, 36 Museography, 166, 175, 176, 178 Museology, 229 forensic museology, 229 Museums anti-monumental, 229 Myths ethnic, 190–192, 199, 209 heroic, 58, 192 national, 191

N Nationalism gendered, 192 National Theatre protests, 52 Nature cultural production, 242 Neoliberal urbanism, 22 Neoliberalism, 44, 130, 270, 271 economic development, 10 governance, 109 policies, 25–27 resistance to, 3 Neoliberal urbanism, 4, 45 New Heritage, 12, 44–47, 57–63, 267 discourses, 65 New Media, 12, 41–65, 267 Northern theory, 242 Nor Zartonk, 3, 119–122 Nostalgia, 12, 71–88, 199, 267 nostalgia industry, 75 O Öcalan, Abdullah, 126, 127 Oral history, 46, 76, 80, 86, 88, 141, 155, 157, 158, 239, 248 Oslo Accords, 140, 145, 147, 149, 150, 157, 268 Othering, 209 Ottoman Empire, 49, 62, 132n12 farming practices, 28 P Palestine cultural landscape, 143 Gaza, 140, 145, 150 landscape of activism, 159 West Bank, 140, 145, 150 youth activism, 148 Palestine-Israel, 6, 13, 142, 221, 247

 INDEX 

Palestinians activism, 147 exile, 143–145, 149, 150, 160, 268 expulsion, 3, 6, 139–141, 146, 148, 149, 151, 155–158, 160, 259 refugees, 140 with Israeli citizenship, 146 Participation as heritage process, 23 participatory processes, 23 transformative, 23, 27 Participatory art, 99, 103 Participatory design top-down, 104 Participatory research, 55, 73, 77, 87, 103, 104, 222, 246 co-authoring, 244 ethics, 77, 86 Peace, 6, 11, 145, 247, 261, 265, 266, 268 peacebuilding, 266 peace-making, 157 unofficial peace, 127 Pit village, 79, 86 PKK, see Kurdish Workers Party Place attachment, 94 authentic relationship, 111 emotional attachments, 93 of inclusivity, 107 of nurture, 106 perspectives, 80 place and memory, 71 sense of place, 72, 74, 75, 77, 78, 82, 85, 86, 239 Police brutality, 1, 148 Politics of citation, 252 of inclusion, 182 of vulnerability, 268 Politics of identity, 7, 9, 11, 234, 259, 264, 272, 273

287

Porras-Kim, Gala, 166, 175–178, 180, 181 Postfoundational discourse analysis, 189 Preservation, 23 approach to heritage, 91 limits of, 180 preservationism, 229 subaltern activities, 92 Privtisation public assets, 31 Proprietorship-as-belonging, 129 Protests against statues, 2 anti-apartheid, 2, 219 Blue Heart of Europe, 55, 64 Occupy-style, 13, 117–130, 245 R Racism, 2, 100, 140, 186, 201, 202, 235, 260, 274 racial divisions, 199 Rakowitz, Michael, 178–180 Reciprocal relations, 208 Redevelopment, 92, 106 Refugeeism, 13, 139, 141, 150, 151, 157, 159 spatio-temporal spaces, 160 Refugees, 6, 128, 149, 151, 268 Re-memory, 76 Research activism, see Scholar-activism, scholar-activist Resistance and change, 9 for civic rights, 19 creative resistance, 12, 71–88, 267 destruction of artefacts, 3 green resistance, 14, 185–209 to mainstream media, 76 to modernisation, 263 movements, 11, 47, 232, 233, 246, 275

288 

INDEX

Resistance (cont.) narrative of, 218, 224 non-violent, 7, 10, 231, 250, 265, 274, 276 politics of, 7, 216, 269 power and resistance, 130 primary resistance, 217, 218 resistance research, 231, 240, 243 secondary resistance, 217, 218 and vulnerability, 158 vulnerability and resistance, 160 Resistance studies, 159 Rhodes, Cecil, 2 Right for appropriation, 31 Right of return, 3, 6, 139–141, 145–147, 149–152, 157, 158, 160, 251, 268 implimentation, 147 return to Iqrit, 140, 148, 149, 151, 158, 159, 273 youth activism, 147 Right to appropriation, 22, 36 Right to the city, 11, 45, 237, 258, 260, 266, 272 Right to the past, 13, 274 Rising land value, 49 Ruling class, 193–195, 209 Ryhope, 72, 74–88, 238, 239, 247, 248 S Scholar-activism, 233, 253, 254, 274 history, 14 scholar-activist, 14, 213, 221, 233, 234, 250, 269 Settler colonialism, 140, 141, 143, 145, 159, 188, 192, 201, 206, 209 apartheid, 200 convenience of absence, 203 dispossession, 199

Israeli settler colonialism, 6, 13, 140, 143 legacy of, 203 occupation, 202 policies of dispossession, 151, 158, 159 policy, 145 policy of absentness, 155 politics of exposure, 155 settler colonial studies, 158 strategies, 268 white guilt, 207 Shrine of Jonah, 5 Skateboarder skateboarding-campaigners, 109 Skateboarding, 12, 92, 94, 97, 104, 107, 108 as art, 104 community, 105, 107 as living heritage, 109 non-hierarchical, 107, 108 place attachment, 106, 107 skateboarder-campaigners, 104, 110 Small, Daniel R., 166, 168–170, 181, 182n1 Smith, Laurajane, 44 Smith, Tuhiwai, 242 Social justice, 1, 59, 75, 186, 253, 271, 272, 274 and change, 75 and inclusion, 272 South bank authenticity, 92 site of activism and resistance, 111 Southbank Centre, 95–97, 100, 101, 104, 106, 112n1 downplaying commericialism, 103 Spatial cleansing, 10, 44, 258, 264 Srebrenica, 6 Structural inequalities, 242 Subaltern heritage discourses, 44, 64

 INDEX 

Surp Hagop cemetery, 26 Sweden Husby, 1, 2 T Temporality planetary time, 123, 124, 126 pursuing permanence, 122 social time, 123, 124 The Ten Commandments, 166, 168, 170, 171 Tigris Valley, 126–128 Timbuktu mausoleums, 5 Tomeh, Amer, 148, 149, 155, 157 U Undercroft, 94, 97, 102–110, 112n1, 236 value generation, 110 UNESCO, 92, 127, 145 World Heritage Site, 6, 127, 128, 145 World Heritage Site in Danger, 145 Urban change, 4, 267 development, 4 diversity and public space, 24 heritage, 130 renewal, 44, 268 spaces, 44 Urban agriculture park, 32, 33 Urban development, 12, 43, 51, 55, 57, 59, 65 Istanbul, 123

289

Los Angeles, 168 Tirana, 60, 63, 267 Urban resistance, 11, 43–44, 52, 246, 273 V Vulnerability, 122, 129 and exclusion, 129 mobilizing, 122 resource for resistance, 155 W Western scientific traditions, 199 world views, 206 White supremacy, 2, 187, 188, 192 purity, 199 tropes of the future, 188 whiteness as futurity, 188, 209 white possession, 187, 190, 201, 208 Y Yedikule Bostan, 237, 238 Yedikule Bostanlari, 20–22, 25, 27–29, 31–33, 35, 36 activism, 30 site of learning, 31 Yedikule Platform, 243 Z Zionism, 139, 140, 142–144, 149, 150, 159