Heritage, culture, and politics in the postcolony / / Daniel Herwitz

• Autore: Herwitz Daniel Alan <1955->
• Pubblicazione: New York, : Columbia University Press, c2012
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (233 p.)
• Disciplina: 907.2
• Soggetto topico: Social sciences and history; National characteristics, East Indian; National characteristics, South African; National characteristics, American; Postcolonialism - India; Postcolonialism - South Africa; Postcolonialism - United States
• Soggetto geografico: India Historiography Social aspects; South Africa Historiography Social aspects; United States Historiography Social aspects
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- One. The Heritage of Heritage -- Two. Recovering and Inventing the Past: M. F. Husain's Live Action Heritage -- Three. Sustaining Heritage Off the Road to Kruger Park -- Four. Monument, Ruin, and Redress in South African Heritage -- Five. Renaissance and Pandemic -- Six. Tocqueville on the Bridge to Nowhere -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: 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.
• Titolo autorizzato: Heritage, culture, and politics in the postcolony
• ISBN: 0-231-53072-2
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Record Nr.: 9910812396803321
• Lo trovi qui: Univ. Federico II