Today, we find ourselves in a historical formation in which political, economic, and cultural disruptions increasingly appear not as anomalies but as structuring principles of everyday life. What once appeared as singular breaks, have since settled into an ordinary rhythm of socio-political…
On 24 May 1968, a 100,000-strong crowd of French students and workers, chanting “your struggle is ours,” began their march to Place de la Bastille. This conjoining of university and factory uprisings, no less through a symbolic reenactment of the events of 14 July 1789, sent chills down the spine of De Gaulle’s government. The French state, faced with the terrifying prospect of workers and students uniting to form a new revolutionary subject, sprang to action, creating a wall of police to drive the demonstrators back to the Latin Quarter. In the days that followed, the careful and tactical policing of the streets was matched by an even more calculated media operation to segregate the masses of revolting French into their constituent parts.
Whose heritage? No question could be more central when dealing with cultural heritage. For Cultural Studies pioneer Stuart Hall, it provided a point of departure to discuss how to unsettle “the heritage” as a national tale that proved increasingly incompatible with the diversity of (post)modern society. It is a question that has shaped the critical discourse on heritage for decades, becoming a—if not the—major denominator when it comes to (cultural) heritage and the representation of the past in the present. It demands considering not only who…