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Heritage (Heritage as a process (heritage is not a 'thing', but a…

- - - - Evidently, this official heritage discourse necessitates the disinheritance of particular social groups, in particular the narratives of black lives and other non-European minorities (Graham, et al., 2000)
      - At one level heritage is about the promotion of a consensus version of history by state-sanctioned cultural institutions and elites to regulate cultural and social tensions in the present - AHD limits who the legitimate spokespersons for the past are (Smith 2006)
        
        The groups who got to define ‘The Heritage’ – and in a related sense, who possessed heritage - were mainly upper or upper middle-class white people, particularly men (Dyer 1997)
- - - - Guerrilla memorialisation: the af guerilla memorialisation is not to reassure or console, but to haunt visitors with the unpleasant sensation of calling into consciousness that which has been previously repressed (Rice 2012). deliberately highlighting uncomfortable truths
      - The wider issue raised by the campaign is how we live with our history. The Rhodes case is not in isolation - there are hundreds of possibilities of heritage we could take contention with. ‘It’s the past that tells us who we are. Without it, we lose our identity’ (Hawking, 2016). History, as ‘is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudices’ (Austin, 2016). A healthy culture does not cease to remember those with whom it has come to disagree. Rather, with the help of historians, it endlessly debates and revises its assessment of them. (Lemon 2016)
        
        'Reinterpreting' instead acknowledges the original historical situation but offers a new method to process it and is far more effective – people can learn from history if there are reminders/artefacts/statues to prompt investigation, rather than censoring/physically cleansing artefacts for short term reward eg #rhodesmustfall may look dynamic on social media, but how effective is it at educating people about the colonial era? (Selway 2018)
        
        This kind of re-education is important - there is still not a single museum dedicated to the British Empire despite it being around for over 400 years. This demonstrates the extent of our amnesia, and the lack of opportunity for lay people to interact with the uncomfortable truths of our history. (Olusoga 2018)
- - - - We need to re-inherit the global lives of those traditionally excluded from the script of history
        
        Lubaina Himid (2011) highlights this expungement of black presence from Britain’s memorial landscape through her satirical art piece by making visible the extensive, but largely forgotten, contributions of black lives to Britain’s history. Suggests new monuments in European cities that reflect black contributions
        
        . Britain prides itself on the role it played in the anti-slavery movement; at one point in the 1860s claiming itself to be “the leading anti-slavery nation of the world” (Huzzey, 2012, p. 19). However, in all this self-congratulation, not only is the central role Britain played in the creation of the slave trade obscured, but the role of black abolitionists is inevitably erased (Oates, 2017).
        Whilst there are plenty of statues and monuments for white abolitionists, such as the likes of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, there “is no representation that testifies to the determined advocacy of black abolitionists” (Oates, 2017) - and women!.
        
        It's in our own interest to re-define Britain as global - for to prepare their own people for success in a global and decentred world by continuing to misrepresent Britain as a closed, embattled, self-sufficient, defensive, 'tight little island' would be fatally to disable them (Hall 1999)