Border Straddling Heritages

The twin effects of ever-increasing mobility and rising globalization have done much to dislodge formerly stable social relations and our sense of time and place. In this exacting and geographically wide-ranging reassessment of the overlap between borders and heritage, Ali Mozaffari and David C. Harvey interrogate how this “hyperglobalization” has simultaneously challenged and intensified notions of sovereignty and nationality. Ranging from the impact of empathy in border-heritage work, to the Europeanization of war heritage narratives and border-heritage complexes in the Middle East, this volume illuminates the methodological implications of viewing heritage as both an engagement with the borders of the past and an activity that continually creates them. 

Ali Mozaffari is Honorary Senior Fellow with the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, a former Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, and serves as Vice President (Communications) of the Association for Critical Heritage Studies. He researches the geopolitics of the past, culture, and the built environment in West Asia. His publications include Heritage Movements in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2020), Development, Architecture and the Formation of Heritage in Late-Twentieth Century Iran (Manchester University Press, 2020), and World Heritage in Iran (Routledge, 2016). He co-edits Berghahn’s Explorations in Heritage Studies and co-founded the Heritage and Transnationalism Network (ACHS).

David C. Harvey is Associate Professor in Critical Heritage Studies at Aarhus University, Denmark. He focuses on the geographies of heritage, including processual conceptions, heritage-landscape relations, climate change, remembrance, oral history, and farming practice. He is currently researching “heritage border complexes,” “peaceful/pacific heritage,” and “heritage, walking and everyday landscapes.” His recent publications include The Future of Heritage as Climates Change: Loss, Adaptation and Creativity (Routledge, 2015), Commemorative Spaces of the First World War (Routledge, 2018), Creating Heritage: Unrecognised Pasts and Rejected Futures (Routledge 2020) and The Real Agricultural Revolution: The Transformation of English Farming (1939-1985) (Boydell 2023).

“This is an excellent collection of essays on the mutual constitution of heritage and bordering practices, with a wide-ranging geographical and geopolitical scope. The book manages a careful balance of theoretical richness and clear positioning in the field.” • Chris Whitehead, Newcastle University