The Multiple Heritage Landscapes of the Grand Canal

Project Team: Jianing Wang, Emma Waterton and Hayley Saul.

This project explores heritage practices that can participate in building a sustainable future in the context of the Anthropocene. The heritage of the Anthropocene is an entangled history of the modern world, a more-than-human story shared by capitalist resource extraction, marginalised voices and non-human agency. Using three of the Grand Canal’s multispecies landscapes that overlaid multiple human and non-human living spaces as case-sites, this project excavates the traces and signs of more-than-human presence over the past century and reimagines alternative posthumanist models of inheritance, which relegates humanity back to one of other life forms and decenters the placement of humans above other species. This project tries to combine a micro-politics of counterheritage with a vision that turns away from the precariousness and impacts caused by anthropocentric memories. At the same time, responding to the recent maritime turn in critical heritage theory which moves beyond land-centred perspectives and embrace a multivalent heritage politics, this project introduces the perspectives of wet ontology and thalassic colonisation logics to understand the entangled and dialogical nature of heritage processes by exploring narratives of caring, inheritance, connectivity, and marginalised lives in more-than-human worlds. Generally, in the heritage discourse of the Grand Canal, elements closely related to water, such as aquatic organisms, riparian zones, as well as wetlands, have received less attention compared to remains on land. The dark past associated with the colonial history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has also received relatively little attention. Therefore, the focus of this project will be on water-related counterheritage – the less authorised narratives about people and their relationships to liquid pasts -, and how these can be brought to bear in the creation of sustainable futures in the face of the Anthropocene and post-colonial crises.