The Making of Transnational Heritage

This online conference focuses on the phenomenon of transnationality in heritage. It asks what makes heritage transnational in the first place, and what follows when heritage is constituted through relations that exceed or complicate national frameworks.

It is not simply concerned with heritage that crosses political borders. Transnational heritage may take shape through multiple forms of association, including institutional designation, migration and diaspora, diplomatic engagement, cultural circulation, professional networks and Indigenous relations. These bring together different actors, institutions and claims, producing different arrangements and, potentially, quite different political and institutional effects. A UNESCO serial property, a diasporic cultural practice, a diplomatic heritage initiative and an Indigenous network may all be transnational, but not in the same way. More often than not, several of these processes intersect.

The thematic areas below are not intended as fixed panels or as separate fields of study. Migration, diplomacy, Indigenous heritage, international organisations, cultural circulation and transboundary heritage are not simply topics placed alongside one another. They provide different settings in which to pursue the same broader problem: how does heritage become transnational, how are those relations organised, and why do the differences between them matter?

Furthermore, we do not assume that transnational heritage weakens the nation-state or necessarily produces cooperation. Relations extending across national frameworks may reinforce state authority just as readily as they may complicate or bypass it. They can produce new forms of coordination, but also disagreement, fragmentation and disruption. In other words, transnationality is not, in itself, cosmopolitan, open or liberating.

Some heritage relations precede contemporary national frameworks. Others operate across several political scales, or through institutions, affiliations and axes of identity that do not correspond neatly with the nation-state. The conference therefore also leaves open the question of whether “transnational” is always the most useful category, and where its limits might lie.

Thematic areas

1. Making Heritage Transnational: the conceptual problematic

What makes a heritage relationship transnational rather than international, transboundary, transcultural, global or universal? How do different scales interact? How do historical relations, institutional arrangements and cultural practices produce transnational formations?

We welcome conceptual and methodological work, but also empirical studies that show how transnationality is produced rather than simply assumed.

2. Institutions, Policy and Governance

This theme concerns the institutional organisation of transnational heritage.

It includes UNESCO and other international organisations, regional bodies, joint management arrangements, heritage policy, professional networks and administration across jurisdictions.

The question is not only how transnational heritage is governed. Governance may itself shape what becomes recognised as heritage, who participates in its management, what kinds of expertise carry authority and where responsibility lies.

3. Mobility, Diaspora and Cultural Circulation

This theme examines heritage constituted through movement and sustained relations of exchange and circulation between places.

It includes migration, displacement and diaspora, but is not limited to human mobility. Practices, objects, memories, images and resources also circulate, sometimes over long periods and through repeated acts of transmission, repetition and adaptation.

Contributions might ask how continuity is maintained through movement, how cultural practices change as they circulate, and what happens when dispersed forms of heritage encounter national systems of recognition and administration.

4. Diplomacy, Geopolitics and International Relations

This theme situates heritage within interstate and wider international relations. It includes public diplomacy, cultural statecraft, regional influence, civilisational claims, and international competition and cooperation.

The concern is not simply with heritage as soft power, or with what is sometimes loosely referred to as “heritage diplomacy”. It is with the wider relations through which heritage acquires political significance. For what purposes is it mobilised? By whom? And what roles do states, international institutions, communities and other actors play?

5. Authority, Jurisdiction and Custodianship

Transnational heritage often complicates established relationships between cultural affiliation, political authority and legal jurisdiction.

This theme includes questions of ownership, custodianship, restitution, representation, legal responsibility and the authority to define or manage heritage. It is particularly relevant where heritage is dispersed across jurisdictions, or where several communities and institutions make claims upon it.

The broader question is how different transnational formations distribute authority and responsibility, and what happens when those arrangements are contested.

6. Colonial Histories, Indigenous Relations and Non-State Formations

This theme provides space for heritage formations whose histories or spatial configurations cannot be adequately understood through contemporary national frameworks alone.

These may include Indigenous communities and trans-Indigenous relations, colonial and imperial histories, religious and linguistic networks, customary forms of association, and other relationships that extend across or precede present political boundaries.

Contributions might examine how these relations interact with states and international institutions, how authority and responsibility are negotiated, or whether “transnational” adequately describes the relations involved.

7. Infrastructures, Expertise and Political Economies

This theme focuses on the infrastructures that make transnational heritage relations possible and help sustain them.

These may include public and private funding, research funding, professional expertise, conservation programmes, tourism, museums, digital platforms, universities, international development and other networks of labour, resources and knowledge.

It asks what makes transnational heritage practically possible. How do resources and expertise shape participation and authority? And what happens when these supporting arrangements change, weaken or disappear?

8. Everyday Experiences

This theme focuses on the lived experiences of transnational heritage. Focussing on the scale of grounded and everyday actions and experiences, it considers how transnational heritage relations are encountered at the level of individuals and situated communities. These may include both progressive or critical and reactionary or conventional motivations and feelings.

It asks how transnational heritage is experienced “from below”, and how these experiences may be interpreted as progressive, conventional — or both.

Three connected questions

Across these themes, the conference is particularly interested in three questions.

1. How does heritage become transnational?

Through what histories, movements, institutions, practices and relationships is transnationality in heritage produced?

2. Who organises these relations, and through what arrangements?

Which actors are involved? Through what institutional, legal, administrative, professional or other arrangements are their relations organised and sustained? Where do mediation, negotiation or contestation occur?

3. What changes in the process, and what follows from it?

How are authority, responsibility, recognition, custodianship, continuity or belonging reinforced, redistributed or contested? What becomes possible, what is constrained, and what may be disrupted?

Contact

For queries, please contact both HTN co-conveners:

Ali Mozaffari
heritageinwestasia@gmail.com 

David C. Harvey
David.Harvey@cas.au.dk