Ambivalent Heritage

Between Affect and Ideology in a Colonial Cemetery

Bibliographic Data

ID2390885
AuthorsAshish Chadha (Stanford University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume11
Issue3
Pages339-363
Publication date2006-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1359183506068809
OpenAlexW2113266351
LanguageEN
Citations received27
References cited25

This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the post-colonial. It argues that the discard and abandonment of colonial cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs - Kristeva's genotext and phenotext; Freud's melancholy and mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy - I demonstrate that this ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement

Abandonment (legal · Aesthetics · Ambivalence · Archaeology · Art · Artifact (error · Colonialism · Ideology · Metaphor · Political science · Politics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Anthropology · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration · Philosophy · Psychology