Utopian Currents in Heritage

Heritage has a long-standing association with notions of continuity and preservation. However, debates in critical heritage studies stress that the very desire for continuity also requires and produces change.¹ This view informs definitions of heritage that focus on "how the past is constituted and utilized in the present" and demonstrates the extent to which our relationship with the past is being continually reconfigured.² Yet there is a future dimension implicit in this relationship that is often neglected: the sense in which heritage testifies to the hopes and aspirations of former generations.³

The futurity of heritage has recently become a more widely recognized issue, and research projects such as "Assembling Alternative Futures for Heritage," led by Rodney Harrison, investigate the shaping of future legacies across different fields of practice. If, as Harrison argues, heritage can be thought of as a form of "future-making," then this raises questions about the kinds of futures implied in different heritage practices.⁴ One way of looking at heritage as future-making is through the lens of utopianism, which is currently enjoying a resurgence in a number of disciplines, not least sociology, literary studies, law, and political theory.⁵ Given that William Morris, an influential figure in the late nineteenth-century heritage movement, was also a revolutionary socialist and writer of utopian fiction, there is, perhaps, unexplored scope for thinking heritage and utopia together. Making the utopian, future-oriented aspects of heritage explicit is both an acknowledgment of the inevitability of change and an opening for thinking about the changes envisaged by past societies. In other words, heritage practices make it possible to diagnose a history of how people imagined the future might be.

These logics of the future speak directly to alternative social and political imaginaries of heritage. For example, what sorts of political and temporal constituencies are evoked by "forever, for everyone," the slogan of the UK National Trust?⁶ How might this imaginative potential be mobilized and brought to bear on heritage decision-making processes? How are projected heritage scenarios shaped by current hopes and fears? And how might we draw out the utopian—and, indeed, dystopian—tendencies in different heritage practices? This special issue of Future Anterior, "Utopian Currents in Heritage," examines some of these questions in order to offer an alternative critical perspective on debates about sustainability and historic preservation.

In the opening article, "Mixing Memory and Desire: Exploring Utopian Currents in Heritage," Elizabeth Stainforth considers in more detail the multiple temporal perspectives embedded in the historical development of heritage in the nineteenth century with particular reference to the writings and activities of William Morris. She suggests that Morris's interest in history and his involvement in the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB) are in close dialogue with his concerns for the future and his socialism. This mixing of backward- and forward-looking impulses reveals a utopia of memory and desire, one in which the remembrance of past hopes informs the desire for future social change. Stainforth proposes that such insights have implications for contemporary heritage practices. She ends by emphasizing the possibilities for alternative temporal imaginaries of collections and building conservation and how these possibilities might enable new ways of thinking about participatory approaches to museum and heritage management.

Tracy Ireland likewise addresses the possible reimagining of heritage practices and museums in "Quotidian Utopia: Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence and the Heritage of Love." Pamuk's novel, a love story set in the urban landscape of Istanbul, is the opening for Ireland's discussion of affective objects and obsessive collecting through the character Kemal's narrative. These themes are explored further in Pamuk's Museum of Innocence curatorial project, which is a museum of everyday objects created to accompany the novel. Ireland argues that Pamuk's valuing of the quotidian materiality of people's lives can be read as a critique of the concept of heritage significance promoted by state museums. She concludes that Pamuk's work conceives of a utopian future for heritage, wherein the emotions invested in objects, such as love and happiness, may provide alternative...