The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: From Napoléon to ISIS

This dossier of original essays examines the demolition of monuments in the Middle East from the Napoléonic era to the present. The authors describe the impact of obliterating architecture on our psyches, cultures, philosophies, and historiographies. Tracing the mediatization of demolition, and its traps and tropes, such as sensationalism and anthropmorphization, these essays also explore the agencies and capacities of threatened monuments.

The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: Project Description• Pamela Karimi and Nasser Rabbat

Introduction

The Demise and Afterlife of Artifacts• Pamela Karimi and Nasser Rabbat

Part I: On Erasure and Its Aftermath

Exhibition and Erasure/Art and Politics• Annabel Wharton
Memento Mauri: The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba• Michele Lamprakos
DNA Damage: Violence Against Buildings• Sussan Babaie
Iconoclasm beyond Negation: Globalization and Image Production in Mosul• Thomas Stubblefield

Part II: On Civility, Barbarity and Acts of Violence Against Inanimate Objects

Artfare: Aesthetic Profiling from Napoléon to Neoliberalism• Kirsten Scheid
The Thing We Love(d): Little Girls, Inanimate Objects, and the Violence of a System• Talinn Grigor
Modernity as Perpetual War or Perpetual Peace?• Esra Akcan

Appendix: A Selection of News Articles on the Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East

This dossier of original essays examines the demolition of monuments in the Middle East from the Napoléonic era to the present. The authors describe the impact of obliterating architecture on our psyches, cultures, philosophies, and historiographies. Tracing the mediatization of demolition, and its traps and tropes, such as sensationalism and anthropmorphization, these essays also explore the agencies and capacities of threatened monuments.