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ABSTRACT
Rights to heritage are often understood in heritage scholarship to derive from aspects of cultural identity, such as descent or affiliation, but other registers are also available to rights claimants. Centring around a campaign to ‘save’ a museum made of a former sugar plantation in St. Croix, US Virgin Islands, this article explores a different mode of staking claims to heritage rights. Attending to the discourses used by the two primary factions in conflict over the right to manage this site, the article examines legitimising arguments about care, labour, and sacrifice, as well as delegitimising arguments about exploitation. Underlain by issues of race, class, and migration, these discourses are also shaped by histories of extraction, both past and present. Taken together, they suggest a register of heritage rights claims that focuses not only on the value of heritage to a group but rather on the group’s value to heritage itself.
Acknowledgements
This research was conducted as part of the Enduring Materialities of Colonialism research project funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark, which underwent ethical approval processes at the Independent Research Fund Denmark and follows European General Data Protection Regulation standards. Thank you to Laura McAtackney, Meredith Reifschneider, and Pardis Zahedi, who read and commented on earlier versions of this article, and to two anonymous reviewers. I am enormously grateful to the many generous interlocutors on St. Croix who spoke with me on heritage and related topics in 2022-24. All interpretations and any errors are my own.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. Instagram post, @thenativeson_usvi, 03/08/23.
2. Several of the highest-profile heritage sites on the island are managed by the National Park Service (US federal government), and USVI government-managed archives, at the time of writing, remain inaccessible post-Hurricane Maria. The vast majority of heritage structures on the island are in private hands.
3. This article is based on field research on St. Croix in October 2022, February 2023, July–August 2023, and November 2023. I conducted site visits and interviews with people involved in heritage on the island, including heritage professionals, USVI and US government employees, non-profit leaders and board members, private owners of built heritage, educators, activists, and community members; I also drew on interpretive materials at heritage sites, media coverage, marketing material, and social media. Interviewees gave written informed consent and were provided an opportunity to review the quotations used in this article.
4. A proposed USVI constitution with specific rights and exemptions for ancestral native Virgin Islanders and native Virgin Islanders was rejected by the US federal government on equal protection grounds (Andersen Citation2018, 112; US Department of Justice, Citation2010).
5. By capitalising White, which is more rarely capitalised than Black, I aim to denaturalise Whiteness as a default ‘unmarked category’ (Lipsitz Citation1995, 369). As Nguyễn and Pendleton (Citation2020) argue, ‘[t]o not name “White” as a race’, such as through capitalising it, ‘is, in fact, an anti-Black act which frames Whiteness as both neutral and the standard’.
6. Interview, non-aligned observer, 03/08/23.
7. See McKay (Citation2021) as well as Brown’s Instagram account, @chalana_vi.
8. In interviews in 2023, SLCS leadership quoted widely ranging estimates from US$1.4 million to $12 million.
9. SCLS members donate money to the organisation; I use the term ‘member’ about Save Whim as well to denote participants in this more loosely organised activist group.
10. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
11. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership A, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
12. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
13. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership B, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
14. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership A, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
15. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
16. Save Whim online letter, 2023.
17. Interview, Save Whim member, 27/07/23.
18. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
19. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
20. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
21. Interview, Save Whim member, 27/07/23.
22. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership A, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
23. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership A, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
24. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership A, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
25. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 08/11/23.
26. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 08/11/23.
27. Radio interview, member of SCLS leadership A, Abdul Ali’s Community Digest, WSTX, 10/06/23.
28. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 08/11/23.
29. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
30. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
31. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
32. Interview, Save Whim member, 01/08/23.
33. Interview, Save Whim member, 27/07/23.
34. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
35. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
36. Interview, Save Whim member, 28/07/23.
37. Interview, non-aligned observer, 25/07/23.
38. Interview, non-aligned observer, 31/07/23.
39. Interview, Save Whim member, 27/07/23.
40. Interview, Save Whim member, 01/08/23.
41. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
42. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
43. Interview, non-aligned observer, 25/07/23.
44. Interview, member of SCLS leadership, 01/08/23.
45. Interview, Save Whim member, 27/07/23.
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Annalisa Bolin
Annalisa Bolin has been a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies at Aarhus University (Denmark) and the UNESCO Chair on Heritage Futures at Linnaeus University (Sweden), as well as a research associate at the Social Science Research Council (USA). With field projects in Rwanda and the US Virgin Islands, her research examines the politics of heritage in post-conflict, post-colonial contexts, focusing especially on rights and ethics, development, and diplomacy. She holds a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University.