Harnessing memory to re-discovered heritage: hybridizing affect through a “shatter zone” collection”. Conference Theme 8: Memory, Time, Forgetting: Session 012: Conceptual Crossroads, Shatter Zones and Borderlands between Memory Studies and Heritage Studies

This paper explores the uses of Autoethnography as a method for generating actorship in relation to a newly discovered Chinese and European collection of artefacts and archives. The author’s research focuses upon the interplay of her personal memories of rural Northern Ireland with those of former generations in Hong Kong that are trapped within and embodied by objects. In her presentation, she will discuss the ways in which these unfamiliar, tangible things, mobilise affect to unfold intangible inheritance of forgotten colonial identities. The route from Ireland to this inheritance, being located in Hong Kong, is stalled by linguistic and geographical barriers and by unowned changes in the decolonised region. Thus, the subjective values of the collection shift as through the process of research she begins to cross the frontiers of family and between generations, the boundaries of place and hiatuses of world events. As a result, the collection is in itself a microcosmic shatter zone (Ethridge 2006, Kaplan 2009); a fragmented juncture between self, family and society, and between cherished places, and those known only at a distance. However, rather than marking the geographies of conflict, here, material heritage is harnessed to memories to provide liminal space for the examination of hybrid identities, that could itself become a “contact zone” (Pratt 1991, Clifford 1997) to facilitate broader enquiry and new collaborations.