For this year, I happily accepted the invitation to deliver the keynote for the UU Heritage Lecture and the Dr. Albert van der Zeijden Thesis Award event organised yearly by Utrecht University and the Dutch Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage (KIEN). https://www.immaterieelerfgoed.nl/nl/activiteiten/uitreiking-dr-albert-van-der-zeijdenscriptieprijs-heritage-lecture

There is still time to register for this upcoming event taking place in exactly three week’s time on Friday 11 April 2025. Here is a link to register: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe41uJN-HUgmlq7moVkYza6A2kjBNJC5RDoU4SJpUgACEoBKg/viewform

I wrote up a short abstract on some of the main themes I want to touch on in my lecture.

“Selling the past to remember it: Tourism’s generative frictions of slavery and colonial heritage”

In this lecture, I offer an invitation and a provocation through this proposition: we need to sell the past in order to remember it.  A number of questions emerge from here not least that of which aspects of the past we need to sell, to whom, when, where and for how much.  To answer these question, I explore the ways in which tourism provides an avenue that generates (non-) value for those aspects of the past (heritage) we might want to sell. In particular, I focus on the generative frictions of tourism in relation to the shared slavery and colonial heritage traces in the Ghana-Suriname-Netherlands triangle. I will elaborate on how tourism’s packaging and selling of this heritage is essential to the social production, consumption and consequent remembrance  of this past. The more we sell the past, the more we are likely to remember it.