The Historical Narration of Rights in South Africa: Past, Present, and Future Tense

Abstract

Human rights and cultural heritage emerge within different contexts of national, cosmopolitan, and local practice. The Liberation Heritage Route in South Africa is proposed at the cosmopolitan level, enacted at the national level, and contested at the informal, urban level. The concept of liberation bridges these different contexts for human rights in cultural heritage, illustrating different concepts of freedom and rights at play within heritage. Development and new social movements in particular demonstrate diverging contexts for imaging heritage as a site of socio-economic capacitation or recognition. The example of the Liberation Heritage Route underscores the importance of specifying what the concept of cultural rights actually capacitates in terms of concrete delivery. Because the discourse of human rights tends to exceed the mechanisms of its implementation, a heritage of human rights should start from a critical awareness of how the recognition of rights practices resonates with local communities.

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