Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The Heritage’, Re-imagining the Post-nation

Abstract

Stuart Hall’s ‘Whose Heritage? Un-settling “The Heritage”, Re-imagining the Post-nation’ as it was published in Third Text in 1999. Hall identified the need to unsettle ideas of British heritage from its elitist conception as a white English middle-class concern. He argued that heritage was a discursive practice, not a fixed entity, shaped by cultural and political interests and expressed through myriad means in the arts, popular culture, media and heritage institutions. Rethinking national heritage meant broadening both the representation of heritage and the practice of heritage to embed ‘other’ heritages. He called for a recognition that the ‘multi’ in multicultural constituted ‘one of the most important cultural developments of our time’, and the necessity of reimagining Britain as a ‘post-nation’ where the margins had a stake in ‘the local-in-the-global, the pioneering of a new cosmopolitan, vernacular, post-national, global sensibility’.