ABSTRACT
This chapter will raise a number of issues related to policy and the heritage sector1 in what has come to be termed ‘culturally diverse’ Britain.2 In many respects we have only just begun to think and speak about the meanings attached to Britain’s sense of national and cultural identity in the twenty-first century, but although what Stuart Hall has termed ‘the multicultural question’ is the underpinning of these early thoughts on policy-making within the heritage sector, my discussion has wider parameters than that might suggest.3 I want to indicate – in a necessarily schematic manner – the potential of making critical interventions in the sector through the deployment of theories and practices, and policy initiatives, in combination and separately. I am acutely aware that policy can never achieve all the objectives that we might desire, but I believe that it is essential for academics who have contributed to debates on culture, identity and representation in the sphere of the arts – especially black intellectuals and critics – to engage more deeply with cultural policy, interrogating, analysing, dismantling and reconstructing the policies, and the processes and practices of policy-making. There are a number of grounds for arguing that it is important to engage with policy in relation to the significant, rapidly developing sector both within and on the margins of the mainstream/ conventional heritage domain, and I will refer to these reasons in a later section.
