Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony
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- 529,00 kr
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- 529,00 kr
Utgivarens beskrivning
The act of remaking one's history into a heritage, a conscientiously crafted narrative placed over the past, is a thriving industry in almost every postcolonial culture. This is surprising, given the tainted role of heritage in so much of colonialism's history. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, deploys heritage institutions and instruments, museums, courts of law, and universities to empower itself with unity, longevity, exaltation of value, origin, and destiny.
Bringing the eye of a philosopher, the pen of an essayist, and the experience of a public intellectual to the study of heritage, Daniel Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. In this absorbing book, he travels to South Africa and unpacks its controversial and robust confrontations with the colonial and apartheid past. He visits India and reads in its modern art the gesture of a newly minted heritage idealizing the precolonial world as the source of Indian modernity. He traverses the United States and finds in its heritage of incessant invention, small town exceptionalism, and settler destiny a key to contemporary American media-driven politics. Showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous heritage is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities, Herwitz captures its perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Herwitz, director of the University of Michigan s Institute for the Humanities, excavates the concept of "heritage" in postcolonial societies, specifically India, South Africa, and America in this convincing and provocative study. Herwitz (The Star as Icon: Celebrity in the Age of Mass Consumption) theorizes that postcolonies practice "live action heritage," constantly reimagining and rebranding their own heritages toward a variety of political and aesthetic ends. Through the lens of his revelatory introductory essay, Herwitz explores five divergent examples of these "heritage games:" in an India newly freed from British control, a group of artists struggle to invent modern Indian art, combining their vibrant culture with European modernism. In post-apartheid South Africa, exciting and problematic "national narratives" emerge in the wake of the Afrikaner cultural monolith perpetuated by apartheid. In the chapter on the United States, Herwitz s work takes on a more topical, left-leaning tone, exploring the media as the site for "restaging heritage in American politics," particularly in the cases of Obama and Palin in 2008. Navigating Herwitz s syntactical contortions and glut of information and references makes for athletic reading, but yields rewarding results for disciplined readers and students of the subject. Photos & illus.