'Heritage Things': Materials, Place, and the Construction of Histories

Abstract

In recent years, scholars in critical heritage studies have engaged with the notion of “affective landscapes,” which focuses on the emotions and experiences generated through physical encounters with heritage places and objects (Tolia-Kelly, 2018; Ingold, 2007). These writings resonate with the “material turn” in the humanities and social sciences that challenge the poststructuralist interpretation of the world in privileging textual reading and representation. By attending to the “agency of things” in articulating new meanings and values, it is argued that heritage making is a complex process that involves the creation of affective relationships with the past via engagement with particular material objects within specific temporal and spatial settings. These materials -- referred here as “heritage things” -- play a crucial role in co-constituting novel experiences and perspectives of places in the present. Focusing on Hong Kong and Macau’s postcolonial environments, this panel builds on this new approach to heritage by examining a range of natural and manmade materials that constitute urban landscapes. By exploring the affective registers associated with these materials and interpretation about their contexts, we attempt to understand the crucial roles that material properties play in the construction of histories and senses of historicity. At the same time, we seek to examine the physical attributes of these “heritage things” and their uses over time to reveal the identity and complex histories of these materials themselves, analyzing how they have been channelled into both authorized and vernacular narratives of place. In doing so, the panel also aims to bridge two dominant types of writings on heritage: that of critical scholars who theorize heritage as parts and parcels of political and social cultural processes, and that of conservation practitioners who focus on the protection and maintenance of historical assets and their ongoing sustainability. Overall, this panel raises questions that address the often unattended but crucial relationship between material culture and the performative dimensions of identity and cultural appropriation via the making of heritage within China’s periphery. While subscribing to the concept that heritage, although tied to history, “is not history” (Lowenthal 1998), the papers gathered in this panel seek to expand the study of affective landscapes by focusing on the histories and lives of specific material objects, redeeming the idea that heritage is “more flexibly emended” to accommodate a multifaceted past.