Colonialism as ‘shared history’? Negotiating European colonial heritage in Casablanca and beyond

While much attention has been devoted in Europe to other types of dissonant heritage such as the Holocaust, Nazism, fascism and socialism, colonialism and colonial heritage remain far more likely to be disremembered and forgotten. However, there have been some recent troubling attempts to reframe colonialism and colonial heritage as 'shared history' within European heritage diplomacy and foreign policy. This paper aims to unpack these officially sanctioned heritage discourses and the relationships of power characterising the turn towards 'colonialism as shared history' and the ambivalent place of colonial heritage within cultural diplomacy. While looking at the connections and disconnections between the European Union and Casablanca, I focus on the ways hegemonic and non-hegemonic perspectives operate at the level of heritage-making and identity building. Can colonial heritage be shared, and what are the implications of this framing? What heritage-making practices emerge in these contexts, particularly pursued by an emerging network of local policy actors? In the celebratory accounts of Casablanca as a laboratory of modernism and as an open-air Art Déco 'museum', this paper argues that the promotion of European colonial heritage addresses unapologetically the middle and upper classes and it can become an apparatus for the further marginalisation of already classed, racialised groups.