Unruly Heritage

According to UNESCO's definition, heritage is our legacy from the past, what we live with today, and what we pass on to future generations. While exemplary inclusive, it does not embrace the bulging unruly and obnoxious legacies that now haunt us, and which have become so conspicuously manifest that they are claimed diagnostic of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. This book targets this exclusion. It claims that the current clash between prevailing conceptions of heritage as something confined, wished for and thus worth saving, and the unruly legacies ignoring such work of purification, urges a reconsideration of strategies and rationales for how to deal with heritage. Through multidisciplinary approaches, ranging from archaeology and heritage studies to philosophy and environmental politics, the contributions bring heritage into dialogue with a wide range of topics including industrialisation, material profusion, modernist architectural material, coastal reclamations, barbed wire and naval mines. The result is a volume that profoundly challenges traditional understandings of heritage as an exclusive reserve of things selected and managed by us.