Introduction ‐ The heritage and decoloniality nexus: Global exchanges and unresolved questions in sedimented landscapes of injustice

Abstract

More than ever, heritage narratives, policies, and objects are being questioned because of the colonial legacies that still permeate public spaces (e.g., Knudsen et al., 2022).From the eruption of protests and claims to heritage objects, places, and monuments in former colonial powers, to the emergence of Indigenous peoples' heritage curatorship of land, and resources activism, new efforts are challenging racialized social orders and persistent exclusionary regimes.Protests echo long-running questions about social structure, voice, and ability to shape lives and the future, linking heritage to broader questions of rights, resources, and redistribution.Both academic scholarship and grassroots politics prompt us to interrogate the entrenched politics of representation, socio-material interactions, and the unfinished business of decolonizing heritage institutions and practices.This conversation started within the framework of a networking seed grant project promoted by the University of Geneva and the University of Exeter. 1 The project aimed to broaden the conversation on the intersections of cultural heritage, identity, and landscape sustainability by bringing together scholars addressing different configurations of heritage regimes, discourses, and practices from various regions of the world (Figure 1).Focusing on the connections, as well as contradictions, that characterize social spaces caught up between local and global policies and practices, this led to a powerful interdisciplinary and comparative outlook on the complexities of decoloniality.The anthropologically informed multiregional focus enabled us to explore the entanglements between place-based research, long-term practices of inhabiting and remembering, and the transnational valuations and expectations underpinning official heritage management (see Dominguez, 2017).The complexity of "authorized heritage discourse," as originally defined by Smith (2006), is arguably augmented in contemporary frictional spaces of developmentalism, from the widening of global extractive frontiers on natural, cultural, and intellectual materials, to the spaces into which Indigenous peoples and ethnic or rural minorities are pressured to conform to international organizations' and state-sponsored development models (e.g., Coombe and Baird, 2016;Larsen et al., 2022).The collective effort, as this dossier reveals, led to the identification of unexpected commonalities as well as new horizons for collaboration across disciplines, areas of practice, and diverse perspectives.The exchanges on heritage and decoloniality taking place across several meetings revealed a common aspiration to unpack heritage politics through their multiple historical, juridical, emotional, and spatial dimensions.Colonial heritage matters are not merely historical events and material remains of the past that can simply be acknowledged or rejected.Rather, they emerge from the remediation of difficult pasts that radically challenge the hierarchical taxonomies and practices used to categorize people, objects, and landscapes.This discussion resonates with the call for "a rhizomatic cosmopolitics" (Papailias and Gupta, 2021, 964) to the extent that it aspires to disclose opportunities for more equitable worldings through anthropological knowledge.