Overview

The Bibliotheca Alexandrina was launched with great fanfare in the 1990s, a project of UNESCO and the Egyptian government to recreate the glory of the Alexandria Library and Museion of the ancient world. The project and its timing were curious—it coincided with scholarship moving away from the dominance of the western tradition; it privileged Alexandria’s Greek heritage over 1500 years of Islamic scholarship; and it established an island for the cultural elite in an urban slum. Beverley Butler’s ethnography of the project explores these contradictions, and the challenges faced by Egyptian and international scholars in overcoming them. Her critique of the underlying foundational concepts and values behind the Library is of equal importance, a nuanced postcolonial examination of memory, cultural revival, and homecoming. In this, she draws upon a wide array of thinkers: Freud, Derrida, Said, and Bernal, among others. Butler’s book will be of great value to museologists, historians, archaeologists, cultural scholars, and heritage professionals.

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9781598741902

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Reviews

'Return to Alexandria is an outstanding, utterly original achievement. Beverley Butler has not merely provided the missing case-study which shows finally how 'revivalism' works. In her rare combination of reportage, theoretical discussion and often witty analysis, she also brings together almost for the first time the successive 'Western' treatments of the past with the whole discourse of post-colonial culture.' Neal Ascherson, author, journalist and editor of the journal Public Archaeology 'A tremendous piece of work. I would think it is destined to become a classic. It is a powerful analysis of the multiple conflicting forces through which culture is produced. This book establishes a new direction for museum studies.' Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, University of Leicester 'Beverley Butler's Return to Alexandria is a fine-grained analysis of what happens when the 30-year dream of reviving a beacon of universal learning becomes a reality... Return to Alexandria is an ambitious study, by a clever and extremely well-read museologist whom Neal Ascherson hails as a worthy successor to no less than Edward Said.' Antiquity

Author Information

Dr Beverley Butler Coordinates an M.A. in Cultural Heritage Studies and lectures in Cultural Heritage Studies, Museum History and Theory, and Cultural Memory at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London. Her interests are alternative theorisations and reconceptualisation of cultural heritage studies; museum historiography and museological theory; and the application of intellectual history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, postcolonial theory, deconstruction, and memory-studies to cultural heritage/museum studies.Her recent research work has focused on the application of ethnographic methods and anthropological theory to cultural heritage/museum studies; themes of cultural loss and revivalism; critical studies of the archive and cultural transmission; postcolonial politics of memory-work; reconceptualisations of cosmopolitanism and humanism within cultural heritage discourse; and cultural/human rights and marginalised histories/memory. Her special focus is on North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean and on Alexandrian/Egyptian and Palestinian cultural heritage and cultural politics.

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