Susan Ashley

New Canadians and the public performance of heritage

Panel Abstract: Ideas of heritage are inherently implicated in problems of human social interactions in the public sphere. Heritage can be seen as the process by which aspects of the past are used or signified to build identities, and the attempts people make to pass these on to future generations. This panel explores different ways that the performance of heritage constitutes and shapes publics. The performance of heritage can offer meanings and affect that helps consolidate exiting social solidarities, sometimes can exclude other identities, but also offers the possibility of new public formations among diverse people. This panel examines the interrelations of heritage and performance within public institutional culture and counter-publics in Europe, North America and Asia.

Ashley’s Abstract: ‘Heritage’ is one social imaginary used to define a collective sense of history, identity and belonging. But such social imaginaries change as people and ideas circulate globally. Immigrant peoples themselves must sort out their feelings and ideas about who they are, and where they belong. This paper aims to understand ‘museum-making’ as a particular mode of public cultural performance by which immigrants make sense of, reconfigure, and declare their ideas about heritage and identity. While museums are typically seen as formalized inscriptions of national public culture, the form and practices of museums are also adopted and adapted by immigrant groups to serve their own public communicative and pedagogical goals. ‘Museum-making’ is a process by which these diverse peoples, labeled as immigrant or minority group in their adopted land, come together to enact a ‘public’. They make sense of their new world and their place within it, and strategically assert the ir voices in the public sphere. The paper explores the purpose, the practices and the negotiations involved in such museum projects, in order to theorize and analyze ‘museum-making’ as a multi-functional process of public formation and identity/heritage/ culture performance. These complex negotiations are explored through two examples, each involving the development of public heritage projects by non-mainstream, ‘new’ Canadians: the Solidaridad Museum established by Latin American immigrants, and the Next Stop Freedom exhibition developed by African-Canadians. In both cases these minority groups, perceived as ‘non-Canadian’ because of race or ethnicity, struggle to re-think heritage through museum-making processes. Publics are formed and heritage is presented ‘in-public’ in different ways: to fit in with existing Canadian identity narratives; to re-articulate identity within a broader, transnational group formulation; and/or to imagine political solidarity wi thin a new, many-cultures community.