Heritage, Culture, and Politics in the Postcolony

The act of remaking ones 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 the history of colonialism. Yet the postcolonial state, like its European predecessor of the eighteenth or 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, Herwitz reveals the febrile pitch at which heritage is staked. Herwitz takes the temperature of heritage, showing how destabilizing, ambivalent, and potentially dangerous it is as a producer of contemporary social, aesthetic, and political realities. Heritage is the perfect embodiment of the struggle to seize culture and society at moments of profound social change.