Daniel Herwitz: Heritage and Legacy in the South African State and University

Decolonizing states, like their European predecessors of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, deploy the heritage in turn, scripting the past into a time honored origin and set of values, codified in museums, courts of law, and universities.  They do so to empower the new nation with unity, longevity, origin, and legitimacy.  When former revolutionary organizations become the de facto state, as in the African National Congress now the South African government, they seek legitimacy through the cultural currency of heritage, but also through legacy: proof that they are not only born of a special, justice-seeking origin, but that they are also on the job continuing the project.  As the state becomes de-legitimated (through its failure of delivery and neo-liberal turn), the desire to demonstrate heritage and legacy becomes, at least for a time, more acute.  At the same time, universities, themselves the inheritors of activist, anti-apartheid legacies, turn to the past as perhaps the last place wherein a neo-liberal country the struggle for justice may be waged.  In both instances, heritage-making becomes the place where anti-apartheid legacies of struggle meet the contemporary world of marketing and profiling.

Daniel Herwitz is the author of books in aesthetics, politics, and modern and contemporary art, most recently Heritage, Culture and Politics in the Postcolony (2012) and The Star as Icon (2008).  From 1996 – 2002 he was Chair in Philosophy at the University of Natal, South Africa where he participated in the process of democratic transition, which led to his book of essays, Race and Reconciliation (2003).  From 2002 – 2012 he directed the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where he is now Frederic Huetwell Professor of Comparative Literature, History of Art and Philosophy.

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