The Heritage Industrial Complex
Heritage in itself is difficult. What are the reasons for hanging on to the past? In this paper I argue that heritage in the Western world should be understood as a colonial modern phenomenon born in the context of White supremacy, which began as Christian White nationalism in Europe (Mignolo 2002, 2008; Robinson 1983). Whereas the military and prisons are used to manage populations, and they are justified through racist ideology, the heritage industrial complex is used to teach colonial biopolitics to the public through leisure and thus manages White supremacist capitalist patriarchal (hooks 1984) ideology itself. Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues that colonialism operates through “the racialized application of disciplinary knowledges and regulatory mechanisms” (129), where Whiteness is conceptualized not as a right of White people but, following Foucault, as the reproductive method of racial thinking and practices of racial subjugation. If mass incarceration and war are the two most thoroughly implemented social programs of our time (Davis 1998), Heritage is the third. The heritage industrial complex is entrenched in a lucrative political economy of tourism but also the body and in nature, seductive because it is paired with beauty and pleasure. But White nationalist historical storytelling doesn’t have to pervade leisure spaces. We should start by calling Heritage what it is—it is not contested or difficult, it is White supremacy.
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