This paper revisits the notion of ‘community’ within the field of heritage, examining the varied ways in which tensions between different groups and their aspirations arise and are mediated. Our focus is a close examination of the conceptual disjunction that exists between a range of popular, political and academic attempts to define and negotiate memory, place, identity and cultural expression. To do so, the paper places emphasis on those expressions of community that have been taken up within dominant political and academic practice. Such expressions, we argue, are embedded with restrictive assumptions concerned with nostalgia, consensus and homogeneity, all of which help to facilitate the extent to which systemic issues tied up with social justice, recognition and subordinate status are ignored or go unidentified. This, inevitably, has serious and far‐reaching consequences for community groups seeking to assert alternative understandings of heritage. Indeed, the net result has seen the virtual disappea...

The recognition and misrecognition of community heritage

The Paranoid Style in American Politics. And Other Essays

The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1315261

The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited

For 2015 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2015)

For 2011 the bibliography continues its customary coverage of secondary writings published since 1900 in western European languages on slavery or the slave trade anywhere in the world: monographs, ...

Slavery: annual bibliographical supplement (2011)

This article examines the strategies that were used in exhibitions marking the bicentenary of the 1807 Act of Abolition to give local meaning and local relevance to the general histories of transatlantic slavery and abolitionism. Three approaches are described and evaluated: the first connects localities to the established histories of slavery and abolition; the second seeks more radically to uncover the ‘hidden history’ of these localities’ connections to slavery; and the third uses voices from the present-day community to draw meaning from the histories being considered. Reflecting on the implications of these approaches raises questions about the complex relationships between place and community, between the local and the global, and between past and present identities.

Bringing it Home: Making Local Meaning in 2007 Bicentenary Exhibitions

On the basis of an extensive survey of museum displays and exhibitions dealing with slavery and abolition, put on at the time of the 2007 Bicentenary of the Act of Abolition, this article explores, and suggests ways of analysing, the ways in which museums in Britain presented, evoked and interpreted the theme of resistance or rebellion by the enslaved. By recognising the importance of resistance, museums aimed to affirm the agency of the enslaved and to counterbalance the celebratory tendencies of abolitionist historiography; they were also, in some cases, seeking to position themselves less as authoritative purveyors of knowledge than as arenas for the articulation of competing narratives and the negotiation of social and cultural identities. Yet museums’ efforts to foreground the theme of resistance were often limited in character: the importance of the theme was announced, but treatments of it were brief and schematic, dependent on a limited range of materials, and not always convincingly woven into the larger narratives of the exhibition. The article explores some of the reasons for this, before analysing in more detail the presentational strategies of a number of exhibitions which did develop a larger or more complex handling of the theme of resistance. Here the analysis uses a distinction between ‘gestural’ and ‘expository’ presentational emphases to map similarities and differences between these displays, and in particular between the strategies two new and major permanent exhibits opened in 2007: the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool and the re-designed Wilberforce House Museum in Hull.

https://www108.lamp.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/download/162/176

Lines of resistance: evoking and configuring the theme of resistance in museum displays in Britain around the bicentenary of 1807

»Verschwörungstheorien, Geheimnis und Sicherheit im Frankreich der Restaurationszeit: das Propagieren der Jesuiten-Bedrohung«. This article explores the historical and conceptual relationships between themes of conspiracy, secrecy and securitization, firstly through a general schematic discussion of their interconnections, and then through a specific focus on the polemics and strategies of the French Bourbon Restoration period (1814-1830). The conspiracist visions of this period are contextualized by relating them to longerterm evolutions in conceptions of the state and of politics, and to the impact of the French Revolution. Comparisons are drawn between the strategies of the Right, focusing on the idea of revolutionary conspiracy and generally linked to a governmentalist agenda, and of the Left, focusing on a vision of Jesuit or theocratic conspiracy and usually oppositional in character. The final section of the article analyses the denunciations of the Jesuits in greater detail, through the lens of a model of securitization. Emphasis is placed on the ways in which denouncers of Jesuit conspiracy combined historical argument with legal attacks on the Jesuits’ corporate existence, on the fluidity of their conceptions of the conspiratorial threat, and on the ways in which denunciations of Jesuit conspiracy reflect broader liberal anxieties over power and identity in an age of political transformation.

Conspiracism, secrecy and security in restoration France: denouncing the Jesuit menace

For French political commentators and polemicists of the Bourbon Restoration period (1814–30), England's history of revolution and of royalist restoration between 1640 and 1688 offered striking and suggestive similarities to the trajectory of France's own political experience since 1789. Elaborated not just in the historical writings of men like Villemain, Guizot, and Carrel, but in a host of political speeches and pamphlets and other forms of ephemeral literature, allusions to Stuart and Cromwellian history carried a potent charge in debates and polemics over France's own political prospects. Drawing on statements by politicians and writers as diverse as Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, and Benjamin Constant, this article explores the meanings that were read into the comparison or juxtaposition of French and English histories, the ways in which these meanings were argued and contested, and the political uses to which they were put, both by critics and by supporters of the Restoration regime. If references to the Stuarts, to Cromwell, or to 1688 were sometimes politically opportunistic, they also sometimes reflected an aspiration to comprehend France's political destiny by relating its present position to broader frameworks of historical understanding – a point which the later parts of the article seek to develop by scrutinizing the ways in which French and English histories are connected in specific writings by Augustin Thierry, Guizot, and Chateaubriand.

The Political Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in Bourbon Restoration France

This issue of Museum & Society reports on some of the findings of the 1807 Commemorated Project. Four of the papers (by Cubitt, Wilson, Fouseki and Smith) are by members of the project team; the opening paper by Waterton, based on her own researches in a closely related field, provides an important context in which to view the museum activities that the project studied. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as a Knowledge Transfer Fellowship, the 1807 Commemorated Project aimed to map and to promote reflection on the ways in which the Bicentenary of the 1807 Act of Parliament abolishing British participation in the slave trade was marked in museums in Britain. (It should be noted that the 1807 Act did not abolish slavery itself: the emancipation of those held as slaves in the British Caribbean would come only in the 1830s.) Hailed by the then Minister of Culture, David Lammy, as ‘an opportunity to celebrate, educate and inform’, the Bicentenary was interpreted by many in government and in the media as an occasion to celebrate the achievements of abolitionists like William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. This ‘Wilberfestian’ mood was challenged, however, by a range of commentators and community and political groups. The response to the Bicentenary of museums and galleries around Britain was to attempt to provide a holistic account of enslavement, resistance, abolition and the consequences of the slave trade for Africa, the Caribbean and Britain. This was perceived by many in the museum sector as a particularly important task in furthering social debate about the legacies of the trade, whose significance in British society is often regarded as a ‘hidden’ history (Oldfield 2007; Dresser 2009; Paton 2009). The purpose of the 1807 Commemorated Project aimed to analyse exhibitions dealing with slavery, abolition and related themes that opened in the Bicentenary year, and to examine their impact on visitors and their contribution towards shaping public awareness of the histories and contemporary legacies of slavery and abolition. The project, based at the University of York, and supported by the University’s Institute for the Public Understanding of the Past and the Departments of Archaeology and History, was co-directed by Laurajane Smith and Geoffrey Cubitt who, with post-doctoral research assistants Ross Wilson and Kalliopi Fouseki, worked with seven partner museums during 2007-9. The official partner institutions of this project were the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery; the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol; the British Museum; the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool; the Museum of London Docklands; the National Maritime Museum; and Wilberforce House Museum, Hull. The project team worked intensively with these institutions, conducting interviews with a variety of museum staff and community representatives involved in the planning process of exhibitions marking 1807. In addition, exit interviews with visitors to exhibitions during 2007 were undertaken at each of these museums as well as at Harewood House, Yorkshire, which had mounted a temporary exhibition to commemorate 1807. To gain a broader perspective, members of the project team also visited about fifty further exhibitions, compiling a detailed textual and visual record of many of these, and interviewing some of the staff involved. Less comprehensive information was gathered for about 120 additional exhibitions. The materials gathered constitute a substantial archive and database documenting the varieties of museum practice during the bicentenary, the experiences of practitioners, and the responses of visitors. The results of the project team’s work have been discussed and disseminated at a conference held in 2008 at the University of York and at sixteen workshops held during 20082009. Eight of these workshops were undertaken with staff from partner museums, and another eight with museum staff and community representatives from regional centres across England. Seven of these latter workshops were sponsored by the Museum, Libraries and Archives

https://journals.le.ac.uk/ojs1/index.php/mas/article/download/160/174

Geoffrey Cubitt

Papers

Bringing it Home: Making Local Meaning in 2007 Bicentenary Exhibitions

Lines of resistance: evoking and configuring the theme of resistance in museum displays in Britain around the bicentenary of 1807

Conspiracism, secrecy and security in restoration France: denouncing the Jesuit menace

The Political Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in Bourbon Restoration France

Museums and the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade