Once, following a public reading, legend has it that someone asked the American poet John Ashbery why his work only rarely takes on explicitly political topics and ignores the plight of the oppressed and the displaced. To which the poet replied, “I think you’re confusing poetry with the Red Cross.”

The authors of Cultural Emergency in Conflict and Disaster would disagree. For them, art is a “basic need,” one that “imbues life with a sense of worth” and that ought to be reckoned along with food, water, and medical supplies. “The vast majority of responses to emergencies continue to show little or no cultural sensitivity or regard for cultural heritage,” write the book’s editors, a triad of Dutch curators and conflict specialists. Working under the auspices of The Netherlands-based non-profit Prince Claus Fund, the writers attempt to tip the balance back in culture’s favor by making art a central component of international relief efforts in crisis-torn hotspots around the globe.

The mosque in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after the tsunami of December 26, 2004. One of the only buildings left standing in a desolate landscape, it constitutes a symbol of memory, hope and belief in a brighter future for the disaster-struck community. ©Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images.

The book begins in central Afghanistan, with the Taliban’s 2001 destruction of the colossal Buddhas of Bamiyan, and then goes on to document some of the worst examples of cultural destruction from the last several decades, both natural—a 2007 earthquake severely damaged the Church of El Carmen, in Chincha near Ica, Peru—as well as manmade travesties like the looting of the Iraqi National Museum in the chaos that followed the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. The twenty articles, from a variety of contributors, are augmented with photo essays that also offer stories of rehabilitation, as in the rebuilding of Mandalay’s shrines and pagodas after cyclone Nargis in 2008.

Cover of Cultural Emergency in Conflict and Emergency, which features a scratch-off cover depicting the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in central Afghanistan. Courtesy NAi Uitgevers/Publishers.

The writers remain sensitive to the problematic business of equating cultural preservation with other types of international intervention. In one essay, the writer David Lowenthal of University College London asks, “Who has the right to frame and interpret the past of others?” The editors might be forgiven for a little well-meaning paternalism; but design connoisseurs may find that the book has another, less negligible flaw: Despite a neat (and neatly symbolic) scratch-off cover, the monospaced, dispatch-from-the-field-style computer typeface is incredibly hard to read.            

NAi Publishers
Prince Claus Fund

Title image: The east front of the Villa Castel Fleuri on Avenue Christophe, a grand brick and rubble stone masonry house that suffered extensive damage during the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Many of these elegant villas date from the late 19th century and reflect a time of prosperity and creativity during which Haiti was a vibrant part of the international community. ©Randolph Langenbach/World Monuments Fund.