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Memory and Heritage as Geopolitical Actors and Markers
- Authors:
- Publisher:
- 2024
Summary
Heritage, history and geopolitics? — a question of great interest when it comes to understanding what is going on in the world today. How do states or communities use memory as an instrument of cultural influence? How is history instrumentalised for geopolitical ends? This book addresses these questions using case studies that take us to the heart of the heritage ecosystem, from the Statue of Liberty to the destruction of statues of Lenin in Ukraine. At a time when heritage has become a global phenomenon, it's time to question its uses and political misuses. Robert Belot, a graduate of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris, is a professor of contemporary history at Jean Monnet University (Saint-Etienne, France). Once the holder of a Jean Monnet European Chair (2013–2018), he is now the holder of the Jean Monnet European module ‘HISTEUROPA’ and director of the Erasmus mundus DYCLAM+ European Master's programme (2018–2024), which focuses on the geopolitical challenges of cultural heritage.
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Bibliographic data
- Copyright year
- 2024
- ISBN-Print
- 978-3-7560-2259-5
- ISBN-Online
- 978-3-7489-4911-4
- Publisher
- Nomos, Baden-Baden
- Language
- English
- Pages
- 0
- Product type
- Book Titles
Table of contents
ChapterPages
- Titelei/InhaltsverzeichnisPages 1 - 10 Download chapter (PDF)
- Presentation The Polysemy and Mutability of Heritage Pages 11 - 26 Download chapter (PDF)
- The city that saved the honour of France deserves a monumental tribute
- A politically correct lion: Bravery over revenge
- A divisive and arduous subscription
- The geopolitical context in Europe deprives the Lion of an inauguration
- After the offence of the inauguration, the insolence of the courts
- Would the barely erected Lion fall to ruin?
- The Lion reclaimed by nationalists
- Modern artists mock the Lion and reject ‘official’ heritage.
- Conclusion: The Monumental abuse
- Primitive inspiration: The technical revolution of the Statue of Liberty
- Engineer art
- New ‘artificial landscapes’
- A temporary installation to highlight the 1889 World Fair
- Bourgeois culture saw the Tower as a symbol of the ‘barbaric’ power of industry
- The dispute between the Ancients and the Moderns
- The Eiffel Tower as a spiritual threat to the Nation
- The Tower became the muse of modern painters and poets ‘weary of the old world’
- ‘Should the Eiffel Tower be knocked down?’ A look back at a survey from 1929
- Conclusion
- The French liberals' myth of Franco-American friendship
- Idealisation of the ‘great Republic’ under the Second Empire
- The American dream to forget France's defeat by Prussia
- Was America banking on a German Europe?
- The difficulties of implementing history's first bi-national ‘fund-raising’ campaign
- Indifference and ingratitude across the Atlantic
- An unwanted gift
- America threatened with ‘eternal shame’ and the French press disgusted
- The contemporary view of the meaning of the Statue of Liberty
- Conclusion: Popularity won at the cost of forgetting the work's original meaning
- Revolutionary Trade Unionist Culture and Pacifist Propaganda
- ‘War memorials: is that what the dead would have wanted?’
- The “Poilus” died for ‘interests and a cause that was not their own’
- A source of ‘shame’: The endless deliberations over the Saint-Étienne War Memorial
- Constructing War Heritage Outside Public Spaces
- Conflicts between monument committees and municipal councils
- Religious Symbols: A Source of Conflict
- ‘Politicians don’t understand the word “Fatherland”’
- Conclusion
- Western Indifference
- Geopolitics and Metaphysics of Fear and Shame
- Creating Heritage as Redemption
- Revisionism and Memory Wars
- Conclusion
- The ‘venom’ of ‘memorial correctness
- Reconsidering Le Corbusier's past
- Le Corbusier, ‘the dishonest Architect’
- Disregard for the academic ethos
- Le Corbusier ‘a notorious fascist and collaborator’?
- Demystifying the demystifiers
- The dangers of a decontextualised memory
- How to define ‘threats’ and ‘danger’?
- How to assess? The role of UNESCO's partner institutions and their limitations
- Why enter the ‘black’ list, and how to be removed from it?
- How to avoid the blacklist? Political manoeuvring
- The ‘blacklist’, a symbolic and geopolitical weapon?
- Conclusion
- June 1940: Winston Churchill welcomes Charles de Gaulle to London
- General de Gaulle’s Appeal of 18 June 1940 at the BBC was not recorded
- A (Self-)Censured Text?
- Can AI reproduce the truth?
- Conclusion
- The European Union's powerlessness to define the cultural ‘identity’ of Europe
- The challenge of creating a unitas multiplex heritage
- Can cultural heritage embody ‘the common value of Europe’?
- The challenge of the European narrative: The House of European History in Brussels
- Reclaiming heritage as a guarantee of authenticity and identity
- The Quai Branly Museum of Primitive Art, an untimely emergence
- The Declaration of Ouagadougou and the new topoi: ‘spoliation’
- The statue of ‘Champollion’ in the courtyard of the Collège de France
- Conclusion: The paradox of reclaiming heritage
- An example of historical ‘gaslighting’
- Ukraine’s ‘Memorial Building’
- Cultural war and battle for origins
- A divisive ‘common literary and cultural heritage’
- Putin: ‘de-Nazifier’ of Ukraine’s memory
- Conclusion
- ‘Resilience’ as a marker of a change in the relationship to memory
- The turn of the 1970s and the beginning of the ‘era of the victim’
- Turning violence, injustice, and loss into heritage to ward off pain
- Ruins as heritage-relics and involuntary monument
- The analgesic virtues of heritage action
- How to escape alibi and placebo heritage?
- The restitution of cultural property as reparation
- Demolition as ‘deconditioning’ of the public memorial space
- Conclusion
