Friederike Landau-Donnelly (Nijmegen): Ghostly Heritage: Exploring Conflictual Sense(s) of Place in Vancouver’s Chinatown

In this exploratory talk, I examine the spectral contours of cultural heritage – I set out to meet the multiple ghosts of the past who dance in present urban spaces and memories. I reach out to encounter histories, herstories, their stories that have been invited and written into urban public space, but also those that have appeared unsolicitedly. By looking at recently commissioned public art pieces and murals, in particular, in the neighborhood of Chinatown in Vancouver, BC, Canada, located on the traditional lands of the First Nations of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh, I examine murals’ spatial, temporal and affective politics as ghostly cultural heritage. Such contested cultural fabric is made of bodies, places and things, smells, sounds, living/vibrant and deceased/seemingly inert matter. 
By drawing together notions from critical museum studies (Sternfeld 2018), performative accounts on memory (Munteán, Plate & Smelik, 2017), and hauntological notions of both time (Derrida 1994, Gordon 2008) and space (Wylie 2007), I develop the notion of ghostly cultural heritage, in which contingency and conflict have space to transpire. As part of my wider-ranging theoretical project to understand public space as contested (Landau 2021), I tease out tensions about the multiple ways to archive, keep and perform memories of the historical and to-so-far-away past, and the conflicts that results from some voices being absent, and others being hyper-present in urban public space and urban cultural policies. With regards to Vancouver’s Chinatown, this historical place has been home to contestations about propriety, property, belonging, and racism for over a century. In the framework of ghostly heritage, these lingering wounds of economic and emotional hardship and racial discrimination are conceptualized as shoring up against contemporary neoliberal urban development logics that seek to re-brand Chinatown as attractive location for new urban residents, tourists and upscale businesses. In sum, with this empirically grounded vignette, the talk seeks to stimulate debate about the role of conflict in an equitable conception of heritage.