Shanade Barnabas

My work broadly explores heritage-making and its links to nationalism, myth-making, representation, identity, memory-work, communal histories, and inclusion and exclusion. In the next three to five years my work will focus on the heritage landscape as a place of ideological tensions, culture wars, and memory making. Of particular interest to me is the handling of traumatic and difficult heritage (where contending narratives about the past exist), in a postcolonial milieu. I aim for my work to postulate possibilities for multivocal heritage narratives and different ways in which to think about, represent, and in some cases ‘perform’ heritage. In addition, I am interested in the ways in which heritage plays a role in shaping society as well as the ways in which societal change impacts conceptions of heritage. As such, some questions that I ask are: i) Can divergent heritage artefacts from contending constituencies be reconciled into unifying discourse? and ii) Can such discourses hold the tension between peace-making and the critique of difficult histories? Part of my goal is to bring marginalized, historically oppressed voices into the academic record.