Schedule

Alison Carrol, Looking forward and looking back. The presentation of the past in the case of the Channel Tunnel

Scholarship has acknowledged that some borders are forgotten while others are commemorated, but it has not asked why some elements of borders might be remembered while others are overlooked. This paper picks up this question by exploring the presentation of the past of the Channel Tunnel. It considers the presentation of the tunnel’s history before the opening of Eurotunnel/Le Shuttle in 1994, and its subsequent commemoration, when tunnel history museums on both side of the Channel closed in the face of poor visitor numbers and a lack of interest. It asks why it was important for a project that centred the future to have a long history, and why that history has now been forgotten- and questions what remembering and forgetting means in terms of the agency that borders hold.

Anna Källén: Borders of heritage in a geneticized culture of identity and belonging

Abstract: Since the millennial turn the interest in genetic ancestry testing has grown in many parts of the world, and we have seen the emergence of a new popular discourse where DNA is key to define identity in terms of ethnicity. The parallel developments in ancient DNA research have contributed with a sense of historic depth to this new geneticized definition of identity, as in claims of having ‘Viking ancestry’ or being related to prehistoric personalities like Cheddar Man. This paper discusses the effects of a geneticized culture of identity and belonging on our understanding of heritage. It revolves around two arguments: (i) that the formats of population genetics have inspired a broad revival of ideas of essential and embodied national identity, and (ii) that the traditional focus on material objects and sites in the field of heritage studies has left it largely unprepared and unable to conceptualize these new developments, which are crucial for understanding concepts of heritage and belonging in our times.

Sybille Frank, The Heritage of Political Violence: Borders and Checkpoints in reunified Berlin

This paper discusses changing border architectures in reunited Berlin and how they mirror and shape different sociospatial relations. By constructing inside/outside divides, past and present border architectures can define territories that divide - but at the same time they constitute the border as a meaningful shared place. While border architectures have strong local impacts, they generally (also) speak of conflicts on regional, national or global scales. As architectures that are meant to divide, they may initiate and strengthen overarching networks. Their different architectures thus mediate different dimensions of sociospatial relations: 'territory', 'place', 'scale' and 'network'. By presenting the changing border architectures of Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie (intra-national border) and Breitscheidplatz (inner-city security border), different principles of organizing space and belonging in recent interpretations of political violence as heritage will be demonstrated.

Muriel Blaive, National hyphenation: the negotiation of otherness in love relationships at the Czech-Austrian, Slovak-Hungarian, and Israeli-Palestinian borders

This paper draws on oral history studies of everyday life since the fall of communism which were undertaken at the foot of the now dismantled Iron Curtain or at the border between formerly communist states, i.e. at the Czech-Austrian and Slovak-Hungarian borders. My particular focus is on cross-border love relationships. I will then oppose for an added, albeit shorter, comparison these diverse examples from the former Czechoslovak borders to two documentary films dealing with otherness in the Israeli/Palestinian space, Would You Have Sex with An Arab (Yolande Zauberman, 2012) and Love During Wartime (Gabriella Bier, 2010). The paper is a reflection on the visual and discursive negotiation of otherness in border situations and on the construction of an afferent historical narrative of the border. Indeed these case studies examined in a long-term perspective lead me to analyze the physical and cultural construction and deconstruction of borders according to specific political motivations. But they also allow me to highlight the role played by individual social actors in support or in defiance of state politics. At the intersection between (national) top down and (individual) bottom up strategies, I will point to the recurrent strategy of state powers to instrumentalize the border for the construction of a national narrative both about the past (communism, war), about the future (Europe, peace), and about the present (racism/xenophobia, refusal of immigration.)

Tatiana Zhurzhenko, Contested heritage at Ukraine’s border with Poland

This paper departs from the hypothesis that borderlands and border regions, due to their victim-intensive history, conflicting identities and often persisting geopolitical tensions, have been particular places in terms of heritage and belonging. The question of what should be remembered and preserved and what should be forgotten and erased is not only highly political; the re-drawing of borders, the changes in their political and “civilizational” meaning, the dynamics of conflict and cooperation pose this question time and again. The paper is based on my fieldwork in the Lviv region (Ukraine), at the border with Poland. In September 2021, I collected a number of interviews with the local elites in Sambir and Chervonohrad, two small towns within 50 km distance from the border. The memory of the Ukrainian-Polish conflict before and during the Second World War and dealing with the local Polish cultural heritage were among the key issues addressed. Other forms of contested heritage were approached, too, such as the Jewish heritage (the memory of the Holocaust and of the vanished local Jewish culture) which is still often seen as a competitor and not an integral part of the national heritage. Another example is the “Soviet heritage” whose meaning was re-defined during the “decommunization” campaign after the Euromaidan, and which has become especially toxic since the full-scale Russian invasion. Focussing on conflicts (and reconciliation) around local architectural sites, memorials and museums as well as non-material forms of heritage (e.g., historical symbols, cultural traditions) the paper discusses them through the prism of conflicting and overlapping “border temporalities”.

Dacia Viejo Rose & Hyun Kyung Lee, The Evolving Heritagescape of Borders: Between bellwether and heterotopia

Borders are constantly being negotiated reflecting not only fluctuating relations between nations but also changing affective narratives of collective identities. Over the past two decades, the growing field of Heritage Studies has revealed similar boundary-making uses to which heritage is put. Not surprisingly then an area of enquiry has arisen exploring the bordering effects of heritage and the heritagization of borders (Källén 2019, Harvey & Mozaffari forthcoming). Unsurprisingly, it is the effect of both heritage and borders to sharpen differences and condense othering dynamics where one identity ends and the other begins that has been the focus of attention. In this paper, we explore how a heritagescape (encompassing a geographical territory as well as a symbolic space) can act as both a bellwether of trends in identity politics and a heterotopia mirroring while simultaneously upsetting what lies beyond. To explore these dynamics, we present our mapping of the evolving heritagescape of the Demilitarized Zone of Korea (DMZ). We pay particular attention to the so-called ‘Security DMZ Tour’ that has been taking visitors to the area since the 1970s, since 2000 with the adage of ‘Peace’ to its name. Analysing the visual messages of cultural heritage sites allows us to assess the degree to which the heritagescape of the Paju DMZ contributes to the representation of peace and reconciliation that the tour aims to convey.

Nabila Oulebsir, Shared colonial/national cultural heritage : memory, borders, across France, Algeria and beyond.

Through case studies of selected places and monuments, the paper proposes to think about limits and borders of belonging of the colonial heritage which, in the current contemporary context, is the subject either of a denial, forgotten by all, or of a dispute, or is considered as transnational heritage. However, between the colonial, national and transnational, the boundaries move and evolve. The examples will be taken from France as a former colonial empire, Algeria and beyond.