Contested heritages and cultural tourism

Abstract

Abstract:The fascination with death and disaster has encouraged the development of distinctive tourism markets, the rediscovery of sites and places of past conflict and all accompanied with uneasy narratives about what they mean and how they should be consumed. The increasingly stratified tourist economy and the interplay between demand and supply has also stimulated a complex set of ontological, socio-political and indifferent responses as places and interests compete to project often selective or stylised claims for recognition. This paper reviews the experiences of tourists visiting Derry/Londonderry, the UK's first City of Culture and how they make sense of the competing interpretations of the past in museums, rituals and artefacts. The 17thC walled city, the city of violence and the post-conflict renaissance city are spatially and socially reproduced but rarely connect with each other to help make sense of the past for the present and critically, for the future. The paper concludes that the discursive content promised by the City of Culture was a missed opportunity to debate these places and events and critically, the problematized and reified narratives they each project.

Visiting Dark Murals: An Ethnographic Approach to the Sustainability of Heritage

“…In any case, a co-narrative will enable community-heritage engagement [49] and, therefore, warrant its sustainability, as opposed to a top-down model that tries to avoid ethical engagement [50] and hides a lack of open public discussion [51][52][53].…”

“…The literature around dark tourism and community narrative shows us the relationship between controversial heritage and community engagement. Controversial heritage has positive and negative attributes that need to be taken into account [48], therefore a co-narrative will be successful in creating community-heritage engagement compared to a top-down model [49] which, on occasion, avoids ethical engagement [50] and hides a lack of open public discussion [51][52][53].…”

“…"Trade union militants mobilised sweatshop workers-mostly Jewish-and dock and railway workers, many of whom were of Irish heritage". [52] (p. 340)…”

Neoliberal place competition and culturephilia: explored through the lens of Derry~Londonderry

“…In this article we contribute to these deliberations through an examination of Derry~Londonderry (D~L) 1 as the UK's first ever City of Culture (CoC) in 2013. This was the then Labour Government's flagship cultural policy and so attracted a huge amount of international and national media attention and significant local interest (Boland, Murtagh & Shirlow, 2016;Murtagh, Boland & Shirlow 2017;Doak, 2014Doak, , 2018. In framing the paper we draw upon the theoretical scaffold of neoliberal urbanism; in augmentation, we present our own conceptual contribution in applying culturephilia 2 , impact inflation and the three Cs to the analysis of D~L.…”

Contested Heritage: An Analysis of the Physical Transformation of Derry/Londonderry’s Siege Monument

“…In part, this included redefining multiple readings of the city's character, history and heritage. The complete seventeenth-century circuit wall surrounding the post-conflict renaissance city had stood intact as a symbol of civilisation for hundreds of years (Murtagh, Boland, & Shirlow, 2017). The uninterrupted and continuous city wall is one of the oldest historic defensive walls to survive in Europe (Hume, 2002).…”