UNESCO aims to tackle Africa’s under-representation on its World Heritage List by inscribing instances of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modern architecture and urban planning there. But; what is one to make of the utopias of progress and development for which these buildings and sites stand? After all; concern for ‘modern heritage’ invariably—and paradoxically it seems—has to reckon with those utopias as problematic futures of the past; a circumstance complicating intentions to preserve a recent ‘culture’ of modernization on the African continent.This book; a new title in Routledge’s Studies in Culture and Development series; introduces the concept of ‘global heritage assemblages’ to analyse that problem. Based on extensive anthropological fieldwork; it describes how various governmental; intergovernmental; and non-governmental actors engage with colonial and post-colonial built heritage found in Eritrea; Tanzania; Niger; and the Republic of the Congo. Rausch argues that the global heritage assemblages emerging from those examples produce problematizations of the modern’; which ultimately indicate a contemporary need to rescue modernity from its dominant conception as an all-encompassing; epochal; and spatial culture.
2016-11-21 2016-11-21File Name: B01N68CV1Y
Review
