ABSTRACT
The concept of modern heritage in Kuwait has its historical roots in the emergence of an eighteenth-century political entity that linked space and place with the ideas of community, power, and culture. This chapter describes Kuwait within a much larger debate on modern cultural production, engaging briefly with the connected terms of modernity and modernism as they relate to public and private spaces of culture. This context provides the historical supports that anchor more recent calls to engage with modern heritage in ways that ensure its survival and put an end to its destruction. Scholars of Gulf studies have to contend with the displacement of their field from the centre of knowledge production. Standardization of new construction methods and building techniques facilitated rapid growth of Kuwait’s mid-twentieth-century modern heritage. Known as al-‘imara al-haditha, modern architecture emerged as the signifier of cultural expression, shaping various narratives of progress.
