Series: Elements in Critical Heritage Studies

This Element presents an alternative approach to critical heritage studies by attending to forgotten or transformed cultural, historical ideas of heritage. It focuses on the Chinese term guji (古迹 ancient traces or vestiges), perceived today as the same as the modern concept of cultural heritage. After a macroanalysis of how guji is understood differently in contemporary and historical China, it...

Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation—constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats—enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies...

Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation—constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats—enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies...