Introduction: Heritage Outside In

'Heritage' is one social imaginary used by people to define identity in relation to ideas about the past. But global flows of people, ideas, imaginations and technologies (Appadurai 1996; Urry 2007) are challenging established group/community/national identities and the dominating systems and discourses of power that constitute heritage. This special issue offers a range of insights about those challenges to the nature and importance of heritage and identities from the perspectives of those 'outside' the authorised realm of heritage discourse (Smith 2006) Important to us are the power relations that constitute the shifting, contested and puzzling assumptions of difference used to define 'inside' and 'outside' positionality (Hall 1999; Littler 2005) We see 'heritage making' as a process of cultural production in relation to the past by which people make sense of their world and their place within it, as well as strategically assert their voices in the public sphere. Heritage is interpreted not as an intrinsic quality possessed by objects, buildings or places or even intangible practices, but a signification or valuation of the past undertaken by all humans to give meaning to their lives. Heritage as 'making' is a performative act; an active and affective expression of individual and community senses of self (Robertson 2012) Performative heritage seen as an act of voice infers a more political expressing of opinion, being heard, and registering that opinion in a way that is recognised and valued in democratised world making. Heritage expression as 'world making' draws on Arendt (1958) who passionately argued for a public realm with the power to gather strangers together, mobilising both semblance and difference in order to confront the complexities and uncertainties of human life in diverse communities (Simon and Ashley 2010) In this process, peoples will seek to retain the ability to make worlds (choose, express and change their rooted identities) in ways that they control socially, economically and politically. By making heritage, 'outside' or minority individuals and groups represent their own cultural difference, but also articulate their relationship to the collective polity in their home/place/nation (Shryock 2004) Much international academic research about heritage and marginalised or minority peoples situates such peoples as 'beneficiaries' of mainstream institutional social inclusion activities (Lynch and Alberti 2010) This special issue takes the 'outsider' perspective, inspecting independent heritage making actions and projects driven by ethnic, racial and other (sub)cultural groups and individuals. The research topics presented here aim to understand heritage making activities as phenomena within globalisation and de colonialisation, bound up in the negotiation of identities and subjectivities by marginalised or migratory peoples, thus shaped by the social, cultural and political ecologies of signification on the ground. The 'outside in' approach is an essential component of critical heritage studies, which advocates a theoretically and politically informed analysis of the processes in society that produce and consume the past, often from a bottom up perspective (Smith 2012; Winter 2013; Witcomb and Buckley 2013) While heritage scholars have long included critical perspectives (e.g. Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1996) critical heritage theorists foreground power relations and invite 'the active participation of people and communities who to date have been marginalised in the creation and management of "heritage" (Smith 2012, 534) This special issue looks at those multifaceted power relations that ground in transcontinental