About the UK Community of Practice Knowledge Production Series
This essay is part of the Liberatory Archives and Memory (LAMy) UK Community of Practice knowledge production series. Together, memory workers, artists, and archivists share reflections, research, and creative practices that reimagine archives as living, collective spaces of resistance, healing, and liberation.
By Dr. Lisa Amanda Palmer
In Stuart Hall’s keynote talk entitled, ‘Whose Heritage? Un-settling ‘The heritage’, Re-imaging the Post-nation’, the Jamaican born scholar and pioneer of cultural studies asked his audience to take seriously the question of heritage – who has the right to one and whose heritage can too easily become unrecorded, unanalysed and consigned to be expendable.
‘Heritage’ and Birmingham Central Library (Now the Library of Birmingham)
I had frequently encountered the term ‘heritage’ working as a library assistant in Birmingham Central Library in the late 1990s. During this period, if anyone visited Central Library, travelled on the escalator up to the third floor to the Arts, Languages and Literature section, you might have caught my colleagues and me on the counter taking request slips for items kept in the corridors and rows of rolling shelves behind the ‘staff only’ entrance to the stacks. This area was strictly off-limits to the public and as such, it embodied the idea that ‘heritage’ is both controlled and guarded by institutions.
Many enquiries from enthusiastic public library users, required a trip to this restricted section of the library. On what sometimes felt like a quest to find an item in a maze of shelves, books, trolleys and boxes, I could be asked to retrieve anything from a copy of an art exhibition catalogue to booking an appointment to view a rare copy of Shakespeare’s first folio. Whatever the request, the idea of ‘heritage’ deemed these items worthy of storage, protection and preservation.
Stuart Hall and the politics of memory
My experiences as a librarian prompted me to reflect on whose stories and artifacts were considered valuable and in need of conservation and care for future generations. I began to question what counted as heritage and who held the authority to decide its importance, shaping my perspective on the politics of memory. As Hall wrote, the quaintness of the term, ‘heritage’ had slipped ‘so innocently into everyday speech’ to refer to a complex set of organisations, institutions and practices devoted to the preservation and presentation of culture and the arts as sites of special historical interest (Hall 1999).
Hall’s curiosity and speculative assessment of ‘heritage’ addresses key critical themes that run through nearly all of his writings, specifically questions about power and authority. As he observed, ‘cultural artefacts and works of art have also been closely associated with informal public education. They have become part, not simply of ‘governing’, but of the broader practices of ‘governmentality’ — how the state indirectly and at a distance induces and solicits appropriate attitudes and forms of conduct from its citizens’ (Hall 1999). Heritage through Hall’s analysis is not simply benign, it is always working and tracing the contours of power.
Valuing ephemera
As a librarian, I also encountered the term ‘ephemera’ as well as items of ephemera within the archive. In contrast to the seemingly robust nature of ‘heritage’, the definition of ‘ephemera’ has a more fleeting quality. Its meaning is rooted in things that were not meant to exist for too long but to be enjoyed for a short time, a short life span, and for a short-term purpose. Think of the disposable nature of business cards, leaflets, pamphlets, menus, bus tickets, postcards and the broader spectrum of what is more likely to end up in our rubbish or waste rather than stored and archived. Ephemera’s short-lived nature means these objects can be overlooked in official archives, raising important questions about whose experiences are preserved and whose are lost to time.
In this short article, I invite us to think about ephemera and ephemerality as they exist in relation to documenting, preserving and presenting contemporary histories of race and resistance, specifically archives that capture the lives of African Caribbean people in Britain and how our stories relate to and move beyond the rigid boundaries of heritage.
Vanley Burke’s Archive
For example, Vanley Burke’s archive, held in the Library of Birmingham, is internationally renowned for its collection of photographs documenting Caribbean communities in Birmingham since the 1970s. Alongside his photography, Burke’s archive contains ephemeral materials that he collected in Birmingham, including Caribbean takeaway menus, local business cards, posters and flyers found in telephone boxes and food shops. These disposable materials not only provide a rich contextual and intertextual layer to Burke’s photographs, they also record the everyday events that mark how African Caribbean people were negotiating, making and creating their own Black diasporic cultural spaces, social events and political movements in the post-industrial heartlands of Britain.
Ephemerality and Black popular culture
In ‘Whose heritage?’, Hall was concerned about the ephemerality of African Caribbean cultures in Britain. He referred to African Caribbean young people during the 1990s as being, for a time, the vanguards of cultural practices, the ‘multi’ in multiculturalism. He saw them as ‘cultural navigators,’ moving between music genres such as ‘ragga, jungle, scratch, rap and electro-funk.’ However, Hall was also concerned about the politics of archives and heritage in relation to engaging with these new forms of Black diasporic popular culture. Noting that these forms of popular culture were some of the most important cultural developments in shaping and defining modern Britain, he speculated as to whether these cultural practices would be ‘archived’ or become part of a ‘post-nation’ narrative that needed to reimagine heritage. Hall was certainly concerned that these new cultural forms needed to be documented by apprehending that they were at risk of being, ‘consigned to the ephemera of [their] day – expendable’ (Hall 1999).
I would hope that the recent groundbreaking success of the Beyond the Baseline exhibition held at the British Library in 2024, led and curated by Aleema Gray and Mykaell Riley, would provide some relief in response to Hall’s question. It may also offer answers to his assessment of the politics of heritage as it relates to documenting aspects of Black peoples’ histories, lives, and outputs of cultural production in the UK. However, the urgency of Hall’s question of whose heritage remains a pressing concern.
My aim here is to invite us to think about questions of ephemerality and heritage as they relate to the precarity of funding, documenting and preserving marginalised and radical histories and the symbiotic relationships between ephemerality, marginality and Black people’s everyday lives. We might even think of the practice of archiving Caribbean histories in Britain as an inherently ephemeral practice in the sense that unless we act not only to protect and preserve our heritage, but to also do so critically in radically different ways, our stories and our narratives are still at risk of becoming ephemeral and expendable.
Whose heritage? Our heritage?
Hall’s prescient question, “Whose heritage?”, is not merely an academic exercise. It is an urgent call to action that echoes in the disposable menus, the faded flyers, and the cherished photographs that document lives otherwise on the verge of being forgotten. These items are not always disposable; they can be the very texts of a living history, recording how Caribbean people, and indeed all marginalised communities, have negotiated, made, and created their own ways of doing heritage in the face of consistent erasure. Without deliberate, community-led action (see DTA, Opal22, Dig Where You Stand, Nottingham Black Archive), they vanish, taking irreplaceable chapters of our collective stories with them.
The corridors and stacks of the old Birmingham Central Library, with their imposing silence and regulated access, are now gone, proving that what once seemed robust can also crumble. That specific architecture of official heritage has been demolished, both literally and figuratively. But as Stuart Hall anticipated, the work of memory, heritage and identity continues, not in those hallowed halls, but in the vibrant, often precarious spaces created in and by communities.
Reference
Stuart Hall (1999) Un-settling ‘the heritage’, re-imaging the post-nation Whose Heritage?, Third Text, 3-13. https://doi.org/10.1080/09528829908576818
Dr Lisa Amanda Palmer is cultural theorist and independent scholar. Her writing is interdisciplinary and includes the gendered and sexual politics of Lovers Rock music, the production of local community archives, blackness and green spaces, racism and the misogynoir faced by Black women in British public life. She has a keen interest in working with community archives, specifically, the Vanley Burke Archive in Birmingham.