This is a dossier of original essays examining the demolition of monuments in the Middle East from the Napoléonic era to the present. The authors describe the impact of obliterating architecture on our psyches, cultures, philosophies, and historiographies. Tracing the mediatization of demolition, and its traps and tropes, such as sensationalism and anthropmorphization, these essays also explore the agencies and capacities of threatened monuments.

image: A building damaged by aerial attack during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), Abadan, Iran. Courtesy of the Organization for Cultural Heritage, Tehran, Iran.

The Destruction of Cultural Heritage: Project Description • Pamela Karimi and Nasser Rabbat

Introduction

The Demise and Afterlife of Artifacts • Pamela Karimi and Nasser Rabbat

Part I: On Erasure and Its Aftermath

Exhibition and Erasure/Art and Politics • Annabel Wharton

Memento Mauri: The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba • Michele Lamprakos

DNA Damage: Violence Against Buildings • Sussan Babaie

Iconoclasm beyond Negation: Globalization and Image Production in Mosul • Thomas Stubblefield

Part II: On Civility, Barbarity and Acts of Violence Against Inanimate Objects

Artfare: Aesthetic Profiling from Napoléon to Neoliberalism• Kirsten Scheid

The Thing We Love(d): Little Girls, Inanimate Objects, and the Violence of a System • Talinn Grigor

Modernity as Perpetual War or Perpetual Peace? • Esra Akcan

Appendix: A Selection of News Articles on the Destruction of Cultural Heritage in the Middle East