Historical methods implicated in the making of ‘The Heritage'

This chapter reflects on Stuart Hall’s critique of ‘The Heritage’ and the processes underlying the social valorisation of what Hall identifies as ‘highly selective traditions’. It analyses the academic, museum and bottom-up history-writing implicated in the socially unequal dynamics of ‘heritage’. Hall understood heritage as a ‘discursive practice’ that pertains to ‘the whole complex of organisations, institutions and practices devoted to the preservation and presentation of culture and the arts’. This practice authorises and validates aspects of the past for the present, often facilitating the creation of boundaries of ‘belonging’ ( Hall, 2005 ; see also Smith, 2006 ; Ashley, 2014 ). In the background of these validations and authorisation processes is also a wider system of historical methodology and epistemology, upheld by history-writing in academia as well as museums. Using the case of minority and migration histories of Tyneside, this chapter examines how the process of history-writing, of researching and knowing the past in the present, constitutes a process of valorisation. This knowledge-making about the past is thus, as remarked by Hall, a distinctly political process that is not independent of present power relations.