Iconoclash in the Age of Heritage

Abstract

In 2002, a number of scholars around the French sociologist Bruno Latour, the American art historian Peter Galison, and the Austrian theorist/artist Peter Weibel curated an influential exhibition, which explored the range of actions and attitudes geared towards images, or “mediators” as Latour called them. By introducing the notion of “iconoclash,” the idea was to provide an alternative term to “iconoclasm” that would place less emphasis on the negative breaking (clasm) and suggest the more open possibilities of clash. The exhibit thus focused on “sites, objects, and situations where there is an ambiguity, a hesitation, an iconoclash on how to interpret image-making and image-breaking” (Latour 2002:22). Following the spirit of open inquiry which informed the exhibition, the articles in this special issue intend to focus on the ambiguity of a certain genre of images: images of heritage. The topic is timely. From the inauguration of the Festival of the Dhow Countries in Zanzibar and the introduction of a new multicultural independence commemoration in civil-war-torn Cote d’Ivoire, to the tombs of the Buganda kings turned into a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the celebration of heritage has become a major factor in the cultural economies of many African states today. A heritage fever has set in. With the help of supranational agencies like UNESCO, heritage has become a new technology, preserving and safeguarding the present past. As a result, images of the past—all of them endlessly reproduced and remediated on canvas, photographs, and film—have become omnipresent, thus effectively portraying heritage as being first and foremost ruled by an image economy. Why this fixation on things past? Why images? In the African context, the importance of the question looms large. Postcolonial studies on collective memory have long pointed to the frictions between public and popular memory, how the state instrumentalizes, manipulates, suppresses, and at times even abuses local memories in order to overcome its still fragile and fragmented nature (e.g. Werbner 1998, Mbembe 2001). Lately, the focus has shifted to “alternative imaginaries” and the “reclaiming of heritage” (De Jong and Rowlands 2007) thus opening up the “landscape of memory” (Marschall 2010). We don’t dispute the relevance of these debates. In fact, some of the contributions presented here do speak to them directly. Our discussion starts with a different question though: where do images of heritage actually come from? With respect to Africa, the answer is most often a story about iconoclasm. What we find here is not only the destruction and devaluation of old images through colonialism, religious movements, or periods of civil war, but also the imposition of new images. Indeed, iconoclasm does not only preserve memory, as Ramon Sarro (2008) and others have shown so convincingly. It also triggers new images, in effect iconoclastic icons, images of images, which were once destroyed and abused, as well as images taken over from hegemonic cultures. Resonating with Latour’s notion of iconoclash, all too often the result has been a clash of conflicting visual traditions, which might explain why heritage in postcolonial and post-conflict societies is at times perceived as an “ambivalent heritage” (Chadha 2006) loaded with doubt and uncertainty regarding the meaning of its pictorial referents.1 The contributions gathered here seek to address this clash. Following up on my own work on heritage politics in Nigeria (Probst 2011), the aim here is to come to a more nuanced picture