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A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage?

The ‘Past’ and the Politics of Affect
Emma Waterton*
Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney

Abstract
This review examines debates situated at the intersection between heritage studies and geography, particu-
larly those that revolve around more-than-representational theories. These theories, the review suggests,
advance recent developments within the heritage field concerned with those senses of ‘the now’ so often
left neglected by conventional understandings of heritage. The intellectual traditions underpinning this
contribution draw primarily from the field of cultural geography, especially those that touch upon the
tactile, experiential, aural, emotional and sonic. What this lends to the field of heritage studies is a vigorous
and distinct way of conceptualising heritage in terms of the body, practice and performativity, together
with an insistence that our engagements with it occur through a range of embodied dispositions and in-
teractions. In other words, it insists that we, as heritage researchers, become more attentive to different
possibilities for knowing and doing heritage: the ways in which it makes sense or answers back to a fuller
range of people (after Thrift 2008).

‘Is there anyone’, asks Teresa Brennan (2004, p. 1), ‘who has not, at least once, walked into a
room and “felt the atmosphere” ’? Is there anyone who has not felt it pressing in, weighing
heavy? For me, the clearest memory of experiencing such a density of feeling occurred in
September 1999, when I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Part of that museum
houses the relocated remains of a small section of wall and two adjoining stone steps. Both the
wall and steps are marked with visible reminders of heat and trauma but impressed into their
fabric there is something else: a smudge, a smear, a shadow. It is all that is left of a man
who was sitting on those steps waiting for the Sumitomo Bank to open at the precise moment
an atomic bomb was unleashed onto the city. I remember it taking me a few heartbeats to reg-
ister, and recognise, what I was seeing – to really understand. I remember, too, being bodily
interrupted in ways I hesitate to put into words. I have carried that atmosphere with me ever
since. It has a lived duration. Indeed, it haunts me at times, though it is more muted now than
it was. But it came back with a vengeance in 2006 when I visited Auschwitz. I was standing in
Block 5, frozen in front of display cases filled with battered and ageing shoes, suitcases, spectacles
and prosthetic limbs. Frozen on the outside, that is, on the inside, I was being pummelled by a
thickening wave of sensations. On that visit, the frigid weather, naked trees and an absence of
wildlife seemed to work together with Block 5 to get under my skin, gathering and assembling
a silent heaviness that induced sadness: one that ached, often too much. This was an ache that
both enveloped and permeated – it circled around and in me, and I could sense it radiating from
one visitor to the next. Neither in 1999, when I had just finished my undergraduate degree, nor
in 2006, when I was halfway through my doctoral research, did I have the vocabulary to name
what I was experiencing. Only more recently have I come to know it as a more-than-
representational way of understanding heritage.
Starting a review article with such a personal account of my encounters with two
recognisable spaces of heritage may seem strange: neither my experiences, nor heritage itself,

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824 A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage?

would necessarily seem an obvious area of debate for this readership. After all, heritage is a term
that conventionally calls to mind archaeological sites, museums, stately homes or ancient
monuments, and issues of their conservation and/or touristic value. But it is also called upon
in far broader determinations over claims to identity and belonging, particularly in politically
expedient moments such as the aftermath of 9/11 and the current climate of a fear of difference
(Meskell 2012). In this review, then, I take heritage to encompass not only museums, monu-
ments, landscapes, battlefields, sites and places but also the feelings of affinity we might have
with them – the empathy and connection – as well as their counterparts: the alienation,
boredom, anger and rejection. In other words, I am interested in the situational affective
contexts of heritage. This is because it is the spaces of heritage – as with the train station, the
shopping centre, the prison and so forth – that garner the affective and emotive values that
shape the possibilities for our bodily movements and capacities. This is particularly so when
it comes to practices of inclusivity and participation. Indeed, there is a link here to be made
with the identity politics articulated by Stuart Hall well over a decade ago, when he argued that
‘those who cannot see themselves ref lected in its [heritage] mirror cannot properly “belong” ’
(1999, p. 4). We can now add to this the proposition that narratives of heritage are mediated
in affective worlds that shape their reception, tapping into everyday emotional resonances
and circulations of feelings of inclusion and exclusion. Indeed, as Crang and Tolia-Kelly
(2010, p. 2316) point out, memory and heritage are embedded in ‘… the affective infrastructure
that Thrift (2004) argues drives, shapes, mobilises, and motivates the national economies and
body politic’.
As such, I want to use this review to think about the relationship between heritage and
geography. It is to a more-than-representational understanding of heritage to which I turn, as
I see this as a key meeting point between the two and usefully animates the literature that lies
at their intersection. This is a style of thinking that foregrounds explorations of feeling, emotion
and affect and places emphasis on how these are negotiated and experienced through a re-
centred imagining of the body. To f lesh this out, I consider some of the broader debates to
which this style of thinking might lend itself by tracking the many ways that power works
through the affective dimensions of heritage to shape or disrupt both individuals and wider social
collectives.

More-Than-Representational Theories of Heritage

The popularity of non-representational theory, or more-than-representational theories to use
Lorimer’s (2005) label, has gained considerably over the past two decades (see Dawney 2013;
Pedwell and Whitehead 2012). Much of the debate surrounding this ‘turn’ has taken place
within the humanities and social sciences, particularly those literatures associated with cultural
and feminist geography. Yet while it has been around for some time, there is scope to think
more carefully about its relationship with the politics of heritage. Three specific observations
lead to this conclusion. First, there has been a concomitant turn towards ‘practice’, which when
thinking about the spaces of heritage means shifting from static ‘site’ or ‘artefact’ to questions of
engagement, experience and performance (see Harrison 2013; Harvey 2001; Smith 2006).
Second, this shift has been accompanied by a broader retreat to phenomenological styles of
thinking, which means understanding heritage as a complex and embodied process of
meaning- and sense-making. Finally, there is the more recent injunction to take up an interest
in the ‘more-than-human’, through which we might recognise the spaces of heritage as agents
or co-participants/producers of a heritage experience (see Harrison 2013). Taken together, all
three reset the theoretical lenses onto not only what heritage might mean but also what it might
do, which simultaneously means foregrounding notions of ‘becoming’ and ‘embodiment’.

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At the same time, many of us have found ourselves attempting to attune to an ‘empiricism of
sensation’ (after Clough 2010, p. 224). Loosely latched across this interest can be read a concern
with the emotional potentialities of heritage, an idea recently f leshed out by Byrne (2013). Yet
to suggest that heritage has only just become ‘emotional’ would be false: it is a characteristic that
surely has always been there. Indeed, such are the passions surrounding our engagements with it
that sometimes we allow ourselves to quiver and erupt in violence – the fates of the Bamiyan
Buddhas and the Stari Most are testament to this. Clearly, these acts of violence carry a greater
amplification of the power of affect than do many of the engagements with heritage we might
draw to mind, but the point is that emotional responses, atmospheres and affective capacities are
part-and-parcel of it all.
Those that have engaged in some way with the relationship between heritage and affect have
done so in response to two growing tensions within the field: first, the dominant – and some-
what obdurate – notion that heritage can somehow be captured and understood as a thing to be
seen and gazed upon; and second, the ‘concomitant privileging in heritage practice of national
scale over local scale’, as pointed out by Byrne (2013, p. 596). Operating across the back of these
tensions is a third issue, which revolves around conventional academic practices and their re-
quirement that we, as academics, write at a distance. This is a tricky issue to discuss within a re-
view paper advocating the merits of recent debates around more-than-representational theory
and its utility for thinking about heritage. Why? Because many of the key words and concepts
found within the literature dealing with it are unsettling: words like connectivity, assemblage,
relationality, velocity and drive. These, to borrow from Thien (2005, p. 452), suggest an objec-
tive, masculinist distancing, which can be difficult to reconcile and support amidst agendas open
to more nuanced ideas of the embodied, sensual self. This is not a criticism that ought to be
levelled at more-than-representational writing alone, however. As Kathleen Stewart (2013,
p. 284) has argued, it is a symptom of many styles of what she terms ‘strong theory’ and all that
that entails. Instead, she seeks a writing style that moves:

… beyond the merely representational and the bad habits and bad politics of strong theory’s tendency
to beat its objects into submission to its dreamy arguments. It requires some dedramatization of aca-
demic thought and some writerly effort to approach its object slowly and enigmatically, looking for
the nonobvious ways it registers and what it makes matter.

MORE-THAN-REPRESENTATIONAL THEORIES: A PRÉCIS

While there is little in the heritage literature that explicitly deals with and names non- or more-
than-representational theories, there is nonetheless a rich itinerary of sources that have pointed
to the centrality of emotion, affect and feeling. Indeed, one could trace this interest back as far as
the 1950s and Freeman Tilden’s principles of heritage interpretation, in which he pointed to the
need for interpretative provocations. A more pertinent example of an early engagement with
the affective response, however, comes from the work of David Uzzell and his theory of ‘hot
interpretation’, which he borrowed from Robert Abelson’s concept of ‘hot cognitions’ (Uzzell
1989, p. 34, p. 46). Uzzell was using the term ‘hot’ to point to the passions of being human,
arguing that in tandem with generating interesting and enjoyable information, heritage sites also
at times need to shock, to move and to be cathartic (1989, p. 46). Work by Bagnall (2003),
Macdonald (2013), Smith (2006, 2011), Beckstead et al. (2011), Byrne (2013) and Staiff
(2012) all offer useful examples of attempts to pinpoint, analytically, the emotional and affective
qualities of our engagements with, for example, Nazi heritage or slave trading heritage.
Whether through narrative, material culture approaches or sociological lines of inquiry, these

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scholars examine the ways in which heritage – as sites of memory – narrates frame and elicits
feelings of connection, pain, wonderment, love and so forth.
While others in the field have borrowed from cognitive and social psychology (Uzzell 1989),
anthropologies of emotion (Leavitt 1996), Butler’s (1997) loss and mourning and Bourdieu’s
(1999) social suffering or Freud’s psychoanalysis, I suggest that a more compelling route for un-
derstanding the relations between heritage and geography might be achieved by turning to
more-than-representational theories. This is a style of thinking that has been applied to numer-
ous issues, including race, difference, music, ethics, asylum seeking, gardening, walking and
travelling, to name a few. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is an approach that takes
inspiration from a highly interdisciplinary range of underpinnings, such as cultural geography,
performance studies, post-colonial studies, cultural studies and feminism. In common across this
breadth is an acknowledgement that our understandings of the world are lived and embodied,
inevitably tangled up with our doings and enactments in the moment. It is also a style of thinking
that draws attention to the corporeality of bodies and probes at the multi-sensuous places in
which we find ourselves.
These are underpinnings that find congruence with a number of approaches. What, then,
does more-than-representational thinking offer? I point to two key reasons for my turning to
this literature: it pushes beyond the idea of affect as precognitive, and thus unknowable, and
simultaneously takes up the notion of intersubjectivity, principally through the concept of
contagion. Of course, there is far more to more-than-representational approaches than these
two points, but for the sake of brevity, I can offer only a slim articulation, much slimmer than
the approach deserves. For readers interested in a more fulsome explanation, a good place to
start is with its key proponent, Nigel Thrift, whose early thoughts on the matter appear in
the volume Spatial Formations (1996; see also 1999, 2003, 2008).
Given its initial designation of ‘non-representational’, Thrift’s framing is often read as a response
against the privileging of discourse and the attendant presumption that human language could be
imagined as the ‘only meaningful model of communication’ (Thrift 2004, p. 59; see also Thrift
1996; Barnett 2008). But his is patently not an approach against representation, a point borne out
in the newer arrival of the phrase ‘more-than-representational’ (Anderson and Harrison 2010).
Thus, in order to take account of representations, more-than-representational approaches appre-
hend them ‘not as a code to be broken’ but as instances, events and practices that are ‘performative
in themselves; as doings’ (Dewsbury et al. 2002, p. 438). As Thrift (1999, p. 296) goes on to argue,

[n]on-representational theory arises from the simple (one might say almost commonplace) observation
that we cannot extract a representation of the world from the world because we are slap bang in the middle
of it (emphasis added; see also Thrift and Dewsbury 2000; Lorimer 2005; Simpson 2008).

His proposition, then, is that we think about processes of meaning-making as occurring within
action, context and interactions – with other people and the world around us – rather than
solely within the representational dimensions of discourse and structures of symbolic orders
(Anderson and Harrison 2010, p. 2). As a theory, it can therefore be read as an attempt to make
apparent, theoretically,

…a poetics of encounter which both conveys a sense of life in which meaning shows itself only in the
living, and which, belatedly, recognises that the unsayable has genuine value and can be ‘felt on our
pulses’ (Thrift 2008, p. 147).

This draws on a deeper concern with the separation of the ‘social’ from the ‘biological’, which
Thrift saw as preventing a clearer theorization of how the world works (2004, 2009; see also

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Anderson 2006). His turn to the more-than-representational, then, has deliberately brought
with it a re-melding of social, biological and psychosocial textures, entangled with a greater con-
sideration of technology and the non- or more-than-human (Wetherell 2012).

HERITAGE AND EMBODIED MEMORY

I have highlighted two elements of Thrift’s approach for the potential they offer to the task at
hand: his positioning of the body, which I term here ‘heritage and embodied memory’, and
his formulation of affect, which I term ‘heritage and affective relations’ (see below). In utilising
these two elements, I simultaneously deploy an understanding of ‘affect’ which is doubly lo-
cated, as Barnett (2008, p. 188) points out. First, affect references those impulses and nerve-
firings that sit within bodies, just below mindful consciousness. Second, it hints at the relational
interactions between bodies and places. In this context, then, I am concerned with exactly what
happens inside the body, as well as seeking to understand a little more the affective charges of
heritage spaces and how those charges circulate and interact. Bringing the two together is an im-
portant task because it reminds us that both are relational, and never neutral. As Ahmed (2004,
p. 10) points out, ‘[t]he moods we arrive with do affect what happens: which is not to say we
always keep our moods’.
It is difficult to find a precise definition of ‘affect’ in the more-than-representational litera-
ture, but there is a commonly held assumption that affect is transpersonal and exceeds cognition,
open, yet unfinished (Anderson 2014). Affect, then, is not something that we can easily put our
finger on or even put into words, yet it is something we are familiar with nonetheless. The fol-
lowing example offered by McCormack (2003: 489), which he in turn borrows from Lingis
(1994, p. 8), illustrates this point:

… the hand that rises to respond to a gesture hailing us in the crowd is not preceded and made possible
by a representation first formed of the identity of the one recognized. It is the hand that recognizes the
friend that is there, not as a named form represented, but as a movement and a cordiality that solicits –
soliciting not a cognitive representation from us, but a greeting, an interaction.

More than once, my own rising hand has been followed by a f lush of embarrassment when
realising I do not know the person at all – they were waving at someone else. And so, in this
example, we glimpse an affective event, or circulation, linked to f lushes of feeling and emotion.
Hayden Lorimer (2008, p. 2) extends this with his own illustrative list:

…they were shamed at the loss…

the chill was everywhere…
she glowed all over…
…once hope had evaporated,
there was some sort of release…

I have aligned my understanding of affect with that employed by Anderson (2006, 2014),
who proposes affect to be f luid, mobile and, importantly, always ‘inexpressible: unable to be
brought into representation’ (Pile 2010: 8; see also Solomon 2012). Simply put, this is because
‘the skin is faster than the word’ (Massumi 2002, p. 25, cited in McCormack 2003, p. 495). Af-
fect becomes something akin to sensation, registered by the body but not necessarily translated
into consciousness (Thrift 2009). Rather than see affect and our responses to its production and
radiation as neutral, Anderson (2014: 82) draws attention to the body’s geo-historicity in his dis-
cussion of a body’s ‘charge of affect’: ‘[s]omething of the past persists in an encounter, any

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encounter contains reference to past encounters, and encounters are made through accumulated
relations, dispositions and habits’. In addition to making central the concept of the body, ‘em-
bodied memory’ also requires a greater sensitivity towards memory. This is a term that is quite a
home in the heritage literature. In fact, there is no shortage of attempts to draw links between
heritage and memory – implicitly or explicitly. More-than-representational theories accord best
with Bergsonian ideas of memory as f low, working at different paces, as habituated, archived,
interrupted and frozen (Waterton and Dittmer 2014). As Bergson (1911: 24, cited in Degen
and Rose 2012: 3282) argues:

There is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our
senses, we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.

Thrift (2003, 2020), likewise, makes the point that,

…this historically sedimented ‘unconscious’ ranges all the way from the simple facts of how we mea-
sure out the world so as to ensure that we are in the right place at the right time to the way that our
bodies are fired up by body disciplines often learnt in childhood and which push us in particular ways
even before cognition begins to have its say.

This means thinking about ‘what things “do” to us’ (Zembylas 2006, p. 309). In terms of
heritage, this type of theory means accepting that the spaces of heritage – each heritage place,
landscape, site or experience – are simultaneously two: past and present, elsewhere and else-
when, to borrow from Anderson (2014). They will always be in a process of becoming, such
that if the two eventually superimpose, it will never be in a fixed or entirely anticipated way
(after Reynaud 2004). Our abilities to respond to, and be affected by, spaces of heritage emerge,
then, from the ways in which we have already reconciled previous experiences. It is through
bodily remembering, as Waterton and Watson (2014, p. 76, emphasis in original) argue,

…that our engagements with heritage spill out beyond representation, with memories being remembered
and moving through our bodies, where they are expressed once again and come to affect ourselves,
other bodies and other representations.

This means that a visitor’s capacity to be affected by heritage is qualified by the experiences
inevitably and already encoded in their person, as well as their responses to its already circulating
representations. These, in turn, will trigger a range of kinaesthetic senses and f lows that act as
entry points for the retrieval or (re)emergence of memories in a cycle of affective contagion.
Importantly, while these moments will occur outside of representational space – within
sensations, encounters, feelings and atmospheres – they nonetheless unfold against or within
the patterns of affordances circumscribed by their representations and materialities. As Anderson
(2014: 85) puts it,

…a body’s ‘charge of affect’ is a function of both a series of immediate encounters and the geo-
historicity of the body – the manner in which capacities have been formed through past encounters
that repeat, with variation, in the habits, repertoires and dispositions of bodies.

The potentialities of the embodied memory of heritage I am articulating here are thus limited.
We do indeed have our own perceptions of heritage, but these are formed in relation to ‘sen-
suous dispositions’ that are themselves culturally, economically, politically and historically me-
diated (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 2010). It is here that memory – both personal and

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collective – comes to act as a key register, offering a sort of historical sedimentation. As a con-
sequence, affect does not spread freely. Not everyone will – or can – be open to the same affec-
tive transfers: different bodies, differently imagined, will have certain affective responses already
mapped onto them, defined by social expectations and structures of feelings that have built up
around issues of gender, class, race and so forth (see Tolia-Kelly 2010, 2012).

HERITAGE AND AFFECTIVE RELATIONS

Key to the above theorization is the understanding that affect is not confined to the individual
body or people at all: it is transmitted, moves, circulates and f lows outside and between bodies,
incorporating a range of things, places and technologies (Lorimer 2008). It is in motion and in-
tersubjective. Significant here is Thrift’s notion of affective contagion, for affect spreads, he ar-
gues, ‘sometimes like wildfire’ (2009, p. 88). It is precisely with this concept of contagion that
‘affect’ takes up a political bent, thereby giving us the phrase ‘the politics of affect’. There are a
number of ways to view this that draw upon the expressions of memory outlaid above and si-
multaneously reference the workings of power. First, at an individual level, the idea of conta-
gion is necessarily limited: as people, we may have sensations, but we also have sensuous
dispositions and a sort of historical sedimentation – as argued in the preceding section – that me-
diates our capacity to act and/or react. A single woman striding home from the bus stop late one
night will feel the night in ways that differ to a single man or a group of women. This occurs not
simply because she is a person, alone, but because she is a gendered subject who may recall other
encounters, in different spaces, at different times, of a single woman, walking late at night. The
second point to make about contagion is that it ought to be read against the broader social level,
too, where technological and mediatised advances are being used more and more deliberately to
engineer affective responses and affective relations from a range of audiences (Thrift 2004,
p. 58). One need only think of the circulation of fear following 9/11 to realise the links between
politics, media and affect, links which are also amplified in film, books, art, museums, television
and range of other popular cultures.
Though concepts of affect and contagion are not always easy to work with, there remains
much to be gained from more-than-representational approaches as through them we can really
start to emphasise the ways in which people interact – routinely and creatively – with heritage,
both in the grander settings of large museum spaces and in everyday life. Importantly, this
embodied approach also allows us to address critiques of heritage practice from gendered,
non-elite, vernacular and post-colonial perspectives. This is because although there may be tacit
understandings at the level of management and curatorship about the sorts of emotional
responses and feelings a place ought to engender, there are no universal or automatic responses
(Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010). There is always, as Anderson (2014, p. 82) points out, only a
‘margin of manoeuvrability’, and that margin is always mediated by the social, personal, histor-
ical or psychological. Another visitor to Auschwitz Birkenau, for example, may sail past Block 5
without feeling the same sense of despair, without interrupting their visit so profoundly that
they feared they could not go on. That visitor may still have been affected, only in different
ways. Likewise, the heritage spaces they draw to mind after their visit will almost certainly be
different to my own. Though by no means universal in terms of outcome, the pulsing move-
ment between person, context and feelings outlaid earlier serves as a useful reminder that the
spaces of heritage are often designed to evoke affective responses. This notion of provoking
affect has been evident at a number of heritage sites I have conducted fieldwork at recently,
including the Gladstone Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent, UK; the Pearl Harbor Visitor
Center (particularly the Arizona Memorial) in Honolulu, USA; Sovereign Hill, in Ballarat,
Australia; and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia. At all four, the other visitors

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I spoke to hinted at processes of encountering their surroundings through their bodies. These are all
multi-sensual sites, alive with intense and often lingering sounds, smells and sights. In them, the
body and its reactions are central, with visitors frequently remarking upon the rush of emerging
goose-pimples, hair standing taut, jerked surprise, a hollowing stomach or the painful fight to
hold back tears. These are examples that ref lect both internal and external responses, ricocheting
between individual bodies, groups and the very parameters of a heritage space. They are, as Staiff
(2012, p. 44) points out, the excesses of heritage, and they have a very different kind of materiality.
This is a point that resonates not only with researchers interested in what people do as heritage
users but those investigating how sites might capture or engender that excess in the first place.
This is grist for the mill in terms of those arguments proposing that heritage is far more than its
tangibility: it is made in its meanings and, importantly, through its relations. Our engagements
with heritage are thus vulnerable, changing, contested and, ultimately, contingent – upon our his-
tories, memories, the nuances of our personalities, our social positions, cultural affiliations, eth-
nic backgrounds and the discursive realms within which we operate and to which we respond
(see Staiff et al. 2013). But they are contingent not only on the human. Think for a moment
about the affective capacities of a heritage site that pushes forward a narrative of the past that
is almost entirely white and based on the privileged classes. If these narratives are being consumed
by an overwhelmingly white audience who have the capacity to be affected, we then need to
think politically. In this particular context, only certain grammars of the body are recognised:
thus, as quickly as that past is pulled into view and remembered, alternatives slip away and are
forgotten. This occurs by virtue not only of the interpretative content located within, and
about, a site of heritage but as a response to the affective capacities it affords its visitors – that
confidence and feeling of having the right (or not) to fill its space, to belong.
Similar observations can be made of the ways heritage is manipulated more broadly in iden-
tity politics, and here I am returning to the observations of Stuart Hall I opened this review with.
He was referring to the spaces of heritage in the United Kingdom and the affordances they open
up for feelings of national belonging. Hall’s commentary pointed to the limited range of
heritage sites imagined as forming part of a national suite of places capable of communicating
‘Britishness’, shared values and cohesion – sites that speak to, and on behalf of, the nation. Some
affective capacities, such as the feeling of ‘belonging’, are made particularly acute in these spaces:
we can look to those heritages to communicate our place, or so the assumption goes. Yet, at the
same time, other capacities are neglected, such as the more negatively felt responses and feelings
of exclusion that are conjured by the same representations of heritage. The very idea of heritage
mobilised here plays a key role, differentially enabling some citizens to feel connected while
others cannot. As Crang and Tolia-Kelly (2010, p. 2316) point out, this ‘privileging of one form
of affective response as universal has been the hallmark of exclusive heritages’.

Conclusion
I have used this review of more-than-representational theories to think more carefully about the
spaces of heritage and their intersection with geographical thinking. In so doing, I have sug-
gested that these are styles of thinking that might allow us to grasp an understanding of heritage
that reimagines the body, memory and intersubjectivity. Key here has been an urging to give
weight to heritage spaces in ways that mean, to borrow from Thrift (2008, p. 9), that we as
researchers are prepared for them to ‘answer back’. I started the review with a short narrative
on my own experiences and how, for me, they have shed light on some of the affective capac-
ities of heritage. There are parts of both visits that I cannot remember at all, but there will always
be those that linger: they are part of my historical sedimentation. But I don’t recall anything
about the colour of the walls or much about the f looring in Block 5, nor do I recall how those

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evocative displays were configured and ordered. What I do remember is that heavy sensation
firing up in what I shall call ‘the pit of my stomach’ and seeping outwards to the very tips of
my fingers. It’s an embodied memory. And I remember walking quickly out of the building
and leaning up against a wall outside, trying to catch something – my breath? I’m not sure. I also
remember trying to name how I felt: drained and ashamed – drained by the horror and shamed
because I found myself wanting to leave and, worse still, knowing that I could. Those two
words, ‘drained’ and ‘ashamed’, will never adequately communicate how I was affected, but
they speak at least of a visceral process, and they help me and my friends try to put into words
something of what we’d been feeling.
My thoughts on Hiroshima and Auschwitz are but one version of those spaces; a version nar-
rated by a White, female, middle-class academic – that of the privileged. With that privilege in
mind, I want to close this review by replaying the word of caution originally offered by Stuart
Hall. At essence, he is remarking upon the tendency to think about heritage in ways that oc-
clude issues of marginalisation and difference. This has been achieved through the persistent ges-
turing towards a dominant and universalist conceptualization of heritage, to which all visitors are
assumed to be contextually and historically White and middle-class. In these imaginings, ‘the
visitor’ appears to f loat free of a whole range of mediated subject-positions and their attendant
capacities to act. My observations of a more-than-representational rendering of heritage serve as
a reminder that in addition to radiating a connection that might lend a person or given group
their identity, status and access to resources, it may simultaneously resonate with alienation, ner-
vousness and rage. What all this means for understanding the spaces of heritage is that there is a
reinvigorated axis along which to consider and engage with the complex relations of power to
which they are attached: the evocation of affect. This axis is crucial if we are to grasp more fully
the work that heritage sites, places and experiences do in wider social and political life, particu-
larly in terms of producing feelings of belonging, identity, inclusion, and by corollary,
marginalisation, subjugation and exclusion (see Crang and Tolia-Kelly 2010). Carrying out re-
search at the affective level thus means thinking about how affective politics are reproduced in
the context of debates about multiculturalism or social exclusion, for example, or how the con-
ventional boundaries between us/them, self/other ought to be reconceived. As an approach, it
sits comfortably alongside already existing studies, which seek to reveal the discursive workings
of power embedded in heritage narratives and places, but brings with it a scope that incorporates
questions of how that power is felt.

Short Biography

Emma Waterton is a Associate Professor and DECRA Fellow based at the University of West-
ern Sydney in the Institute for Culture and Society. Her research explores the interface between
heritage, identity, memory and affect. Her current project, ‘Photos of the Past’, is a 3-year
examination of all four concepts at a range of Australian heritage tourism sites, including Uluru
Kata-Tjuta National Park, Sovereign Hill, the Blue Mountains National Park and Kakadu
National Park. She is an author of Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain
(2010, Palgrave Macmillan) and a co-author of Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (with
Laurajane Smith; 2009, Duckworth) and The Semiotics of Heritage Tourism (with Steve Watson;
2014, Channel View Publications).

Note
* Correspondence address: Emma Waterton, Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Locked Bag
1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia. E-mail: e.waterton@uws.edu.au

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832 A More-Than-Representational Understanding of Heritage?

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