The elephant in the room: heritage, affect and emotion

Affect and emotion, like memory before them, have recently become a focus of discussion in the social sciences. This chapter reviews the way emotion has been addressed in heritage studies: we argue that any engagement with affect and emotion needs to be based on a pragmatic approach, which starts from an understanding that emotions are not only culturally, historically, and socially mediated, but also have moral and political consequences and impacts. If we accept that heritage is a political resource used in claims for recognition and struggles against misrecognition, then understanding how the interplay between emotions and remembering are informed by people's culturally and socially diverse affective responses must become central in a politically informed critical heritage studies.