Making or Breaking Colonial Heritage Spaces

This issue focuses on spatial, architectural and landscape heritage produced in "colonial situations," 1 exploring the contact, friction and tension between ideology, cultural exchange, ideas of modernity and societal impacts.Architectural and built spaces, as well as certain landscapes, reveal enduring colonial power relations long after independence and the fall of empires.From a decolonial perspective born in Latin America, this is what Anibal Quijano (2005) calls the "coloniality of power"; that is, a power structure persisting below the surface. 2 Him and others, like Walter Mignolo (2011) and Arturo Escobar (2003), agree that coloniality refers to colonial dominance, emerging with the conquest of the Americas and progressively emanating on an international scale to impose a global hierarchy of peoples based on race, sex, epistemology, spirituality, linguistics, and so on. 32 While various debates surround decolonial approaches, 4 this current issue upholds the idea of ongoing political, economic, cultural, racial and epistemological power relations.It puts forth a situated analysis whereby each context is complexified by case.Thus, instead of using top-down approaches, it seeks to "provincialize" 5 and "de-Westernize" 6 reflections on spatial production and legacy through in-depth fieldwork.It also aims to reflect on a range of situated knowledge, linked to other epistemological foundations that reveal "emergence" and "absence." 7Trajectories of concepts as they appear in non-Western contexts is also up for consideration, such as the word "decolonial" in English and French-speaking Africa.For some, decoloniality does not Making or Breaking Colonial Heritage Spaces

Archaeology · Colonialism · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History