The production of history is premised on the selective erasure of
certain pasts and the artifacts that stand witness to them. From
the elision of archival documents to the demolition of sacred and
secular spaces, each act of destruction is also an act of state
building. Following the 1991 Gulf War, political elites in Saudi
Arabia pursued these dual projects of historical commemoration and
state formation with greater fervor to enforce their postwar vision
for state, nation, and economy. Seeing Islamist movements as the
leading threat to state power, they sought to de-center religion
from educational, cultural, and spatial policies. With this book,
Rosie Bsheer explores the increasing secularization of the postwar
Saudi state and how it manifested in assembling a national archive
and reordering urban space in Riyadh and Mecca. The elites' project
was rife with ironies: in Riyadh, they employed world-renowned
experts to fashion an imagined history, while at the same time in
Mecca they were overseeing the obliteration of a thousand-year-old
topography and its replacement with commercial megaprojects.
Archive Wars shows how the Saudi state's response to the challenges
of the Gulf War served to historicize a national space,
territorialize a national history, and ultimately refract both
through new modes of capital accumulation.
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