Provenance research is so much more than a search for origin: It offers new perspectives on objects, collections, their histories, and the multifaceted relationships embedded within them. The Museum der Kulturen Basel is systematically examining its collection for coloniality and highlighting the central importance of collaborating with communities in the Global South. This work also reveals how complex and demanding ethnological provenance research is. This volume "raises groundbreaking q...

A major new history of how African nations, starting in the 1960s, sought to reclaim the art looted by Western colonial powersFor decades, African nations have fought for the return of countless works of art stolen during the colonial era and placed in Western museums. In Africa’s Struggle for Its Art, Bénédicte Savoy brings to light this largely unknown but deeply important history. One of the world’s foremost experts on restitution and cultural heritage,...

This book examines contemporary artistic practices since 1990 that engage with, depict, and conceptualize history.Examining artworks by Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Zarina Bhimji, Michael Blum, Matthew Buckingham, Tacita Dean, Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujica, Omer Fast, Andrea Geyer, Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno, Hiwa K, Amar Kanwar, Bouchra Khalili, Deimantas Narkevičius, Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Walid Raad, Dierk Schmidt, Erika Tan, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Art, Hist...

The first edition of Architecture, Power, and National Identity, published in 1992, has become a classic, winning the prestigious Spiro Kostof award for the best book in architecture and urbanism. Lawrence Vale fully has fully updated the book, which focuses on the relationship between the design of national capitals across the world and the formation of national identity in modernity. Tied to this, it explains the role that architecture and planning play in the forceful assertion of state...

A comprehensive history and examination of global infrastructures and the outsized role they play in our lives.Infrastructure is essential to defining how the public functions, yet there is little public knowledge regarding why and how it became today’s strongest global force over government and individual lives. Who should build and maintain infrastructures? How are they to be protected? And why are they all in such bad shape? In Lifelines of Our Society,...

The UNESCO World Heritage Convention is one of the most widely ratified international treaties, and a place on the World Heritage List is a widely coveted mark of distinction. Building on ethnographic fieldwork at Committee sessions, interviews and documentary study, the book links the change in operations of the World Heritage Committee with structural nation-centeredness, vulnerable procedures for evaluation, monitoring and decision-making, and loose heritage conceptions that have been i...

'A rich and readable account **of left-wing activism in the West and opposition to Soviet-style communism in the East' Katja Hoyer, The Spectator'****A dream, perhaps, but one that still sounds worth fighting for, even beautiful' Stuart Jeffries, The Observer'An** ambitious and masterly account of utopian protest in Europe ... Fast-paced, with an eye for telling detail and written with a light touch' Robert Gildea

An "eminently readable" collection of essays exploring what happens when cultural heritage meets commerce ( Asian Ethnology).When heritage becomes a commodity, when culture is instrumental in driving tourism, and when individuals assert ownership over either, social, ideological, political, and economic motivations intertwine. Bestowing value on "culture" is itself a culturally rooted act, and the essays gathered in Culture and Value focus on the m...

During World War I, thousands of young African men conscripted to fight for France and Britain were captured and held as prisoners of war in Germany, where their stories and songs were recorded and archived by German linguists. In Knowing by Ear, Anette Hoffmann demonstrates that listening to these acoustic recordings as historical sources, rather than linguistic samples, opens up possibilities for new historical perspectives and the formation of alternate archival practices and k...

The Art of Assembly surveys theatre today to demonstrate its political potential in both form and content. Drawing on numerous examples from around the world in performance, visual art, and activist art, curator and author Florian Malzacher examines works that draw on the particular possibilities of theatre to navigate the space between representation and participation, at once playfully and with sincerity. In a time of wide-ranging crisis, The Art of Assembly is a plea for a strong defini...

States without former colonies, it has been argued, were intensely involved in colonial practices. This anthology looks at Switzerland, which, by its very strong economic involvements with colonialism, its doctrine of neutrality, and its transnationally entangled scientific community, constitutes a perfect case in point.

In Architecture in Translation, Esra Akcan offers a way to understand the global circulation of culture that extends the notion of translation beyond language to visual fields. She shows how members of the ruling Kemalist elite in Turkey further aligned themselves with Europe by choosing German-speaking architects to oversee much of the design of modern cities. Focusing on the period from the 1920s through the 1950s, Akcan traces the geographical circulation of modern residential ...