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.
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