Against property: The aporias of preservation and the problem with decolonizing heritage

Abstract

Abstract

The concluding commentary to Beyond Preservation? Decolonizing the Conceptual Framework of Cultural Heritage responds to this special issue's central argument that decolonization and heritage justice cannot be achieved without fundamentally interrogating the preservation regime and the paradoxical centrality of dispossession in it. Drawing on postcolonial legal theory and Indigenous studies, I pinpoint a set of related aporias or self-contradictions inherent in preservation, most notably an unresolved dialectics of possession and dispossession, and of (re)construction and destruction. Preservation has transformed Indigenous/colonized cultures into objectified heritage to be salvaged from its producers and conserved following colonizers' scientific protocols. Historically, the preservation regime has performed a double maneuver by turning Indigenous/colonized culture into (cultural) property and simultaneously dispossessing its owners as unable to care for it. The issue's contributions further show how preservation is entangled with genocide and the mass destruction of naturecultures, with gentrification and the forced displacement of people and things, but also with less visible forms of epistemic violence embedded in mundane museum and knowledge practices such as labeling and categorization. In sum, to analyze and counter heritage injustice, scholars and practitioners must confront the logic of property implying dispossession, exclusion and destruction at the heart of preservation.