Creativity and resistance: heritage and hostile environments

British heritage, as an inviolable national asset, is undergirded by whiteness. It is no surprise that campaigns such as Why is my curriculum white, or Rhodes Must Fall, have been met with so much vitriol in the popular media, as at their centre is an uncomfortable truth: the building blocks of our ideas about heritage and belonging are racially exclusive. What does it mean to be involved in anti-racist activism and scholarship in different kinds of ‘hostile’ environments? What are the institutional and disciplinary mechanism for rerouting this work? How do the arts and humanities critique heritage while protecting elitist narratives around areas like history and literature? As a case study, I’ll be focussing on my work on the AHRC project Creative Interruptions in post-Partition Punjab as an example of how interdisciplinary work informed by social justice, can begin to unpick the racist seams that form conventional disciplinary knowing in the arts and humanities.