Elif Kalaycioglu, "The Politics of World Heritage: Visions, Custodians, and Futures of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Elif Kalaycioglu, "The Politics of World Heritage: Visions, Custodians, and Futures of Humanity" (Oxford UP, 2025)

What does it take to construct humanity's cultural history and what do these efforts produce in the world? In The Politics of World Heritage (Oxford UP, 2025), Elif Kalaycioglu analyzes UNESCO's flagship regime, which seeks to curate a cultural history of humanity, attached to "outstanding universal value" and tethered to goals of peace and solidarity. Kalaycioglu's analysis tracks that construction across fifty years of the regime and maps it onto three distinct visions: humanity as a rarified transhistorical subject, humanity as a diverse subject, and humanity as a subject that is adequately represented by the community of nation states. In each of these constructions, experts and states take up the cultural and historical resources that circulate within the regime to narrate a humanity into being, and position themselves as its adjudicators, contributors and custodians. Each construction comes with remainders, that is, parts of humanity excluded from this cultural history, and internal hierarchies between those at its center and others that remain on the margins.These hierarchies challenge the aspiration to peace and solidarity. While these aspirations have changed across the three iterations of humanity, across the different forms, the regime's structures and participants have been ill-equipped and hesitant to engage with the underbellies of humanity towards robust visions of peace and solidarity. In contrast to this general tendency, Kalaycioglu excavates from select nomination files nested constructions of humanity that hold onto the globality and unevenness of its political conditions and presents the possibility of robust visions of peace and solidarity, and humanity's different futures. Elif Kalaycioglu is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science at The University of Alabama. Jen Hoyer is Technical Services and Electronic Resources Librarian at CUNY New York City College of Technology. She is co-author of What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom (2022) and The Social Movement Archive (2021), and co-editor of Armed By Design: Posters and Publications of Cuba’s Organization of Solidarity of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (2025). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory

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Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

Martin Shuster, “Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism and Modernity” (U of Chicago Press, 2014)

The work of Theodore Adorno is well established as a crucial resource for understanding the complexities of contemporary capitalism, playing a foundational role in Critical Theory. Dialectic of Enligh...

2 Helmi 201547min

Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

Steven Shaviro, “The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism” (University of Minnesota Press, 2014)

Steven Shaviro‘s new book is a wonderfully engaging study of speculative realism, new materialism, and the ways in which those fields can speak to and be informed by the philosophy of Alfred North Whi...

16 Tammi 20151h 3min

Robert Hewison, “Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain” (Verso, 2014)

Robert Hewison, “Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain” (Verso, 2014)

How did a golden age of cultural funding in UK turn to lead? This is the subject of a new cultural history by Robert Hewison. Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain (Verso, 2014) cha...

19 Joulu 201454min

Steven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

Steven Fielding, “A State of Play” (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)

To understand contemporary politics we must understand how it is represented in fiction. This is the main argument in A State of Play: British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page, from Anthony Trollop...

12 Joulu 20141h 2min

Beth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014)

Beth Driscoll, “The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty-First Century” (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014)

It is a cliche to suggest we are what we read, but it is also an important insight. In The New Literary Middlebrow: Readers and Tastemaking in the Twenty First Century (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), Beth...

3 Joulu 201441min

Sam Friedman, “Comedy and Distinction” (Routledge, 2014)

Sam Friedman, “Comedy and Distinction” (Routledge, 2014)

What is funny? What makes you laugh? We think of laughter as being universal idea that applies to everyone, no matter their age, ethnicity, gender or social class. In Comedy and Distinction: The Cultu...

21 Marras 201447min

Bruce Fink, “Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key” (Routledge, 2014)

Bruce Fink, “Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian Key” (Routledge, 2014)

What can possibly be wrong with the process of understanding in psychoanalytic treatment? Everything, according to Bruce Fink. In Against Understanding. Volume 1: Commentary and Critique in a Lacanian...

17 Marras 20141h 2min

Randal Marlin, “Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion” (Broadview Press, 2013)

Randal Marlin, “Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion” (Broadview Press, 2013)

It’s been 100 years since the start of the First World War, a conflict that cost millions of lives. In his recently revised book, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (2013), Randal Marlin writes t...

17 Marras 201441min

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