Rosa De Jorio's monograph, Cultural Heritage in Mali in the Neoliberal Era, is a much anticipated, fascinating, and timely account of the contested politics of public culture in a time of turbulent and sometimes violent change in Mali. It is anticipated as a summative work, bringing together 15 years of ethnographic and historical scholarship on Mali's (post)colonial cultural heritage, expanded to address the country's current socio-political crossroads. The book fascinates with its dexterous application of social thought and theory, particularly the way De Jorio extracts Foucault's concept of ‘governmentality’ from the nation-state to analyse popular modes of citizenship fashioned by transnational governance and nongovernmental politics. Cultural Heritage is timely for its commentary on the uncertain future of Mali's post-crisis present, examining the possibilities and constraints of politics – cultural or otherwise – in the wake of a March 2012 coup d’état and subsequent internecine conflict, events that have significantly fragmented and greatly diminished the state of the Malian nation.

The book opens with a conceptually rich introductory chapter that triangulates Foucaultian theories of political subjectivity and power with anthropological scholarship on public culture and social memory. Through thoughtful and efficient prose, De Jorio argues that the multifaceted and contested space of public culture, in which state, quasi-state and non-state heritage initiatives figure prominently, represents a key site through which ‘neoliberal’ modes of governance and identification may be observed, analysed and critiqued. For De Jorio, the neoliberal constitutes a historical moment, emerging alongside the waning years of autocratic rule in Mali and characterised by a politics of decentralisation and radical divestment in the public sector. She then applies this approach to postcolonial memory, culture and power in neoliberal Mali to a series of five ethnographic and historical case studies, each one the subject of a chapter.

The first three chapters address cases of monumental, memorial and museum culture. Chapter 1 sets the historical stage for the text, analysing the politics of cultural commemoration initiated and developed during the first two decades of Mali's democratic Third Republic (1992–2012). Here, De Jorio emphasises narratives of postcolonial and post-autocratic subjectivity mobilised by the Malian state, but also highlights popular and oppositional voices that promote contrasting visions of Malian cultural heritage. Chapter 2 tells the fateful story of a monument to French colonial officer Louis Archinard in the riverine town of Ségou, the contestations over which reveal the varying positions and projects of local, regional, and national political constituencies, and the tensions that emerge between them. Chapter 3 closely reads the heterotopic space of Muso Kunda, a quasi-state sponsored museum highlighting the roles and historical significance of Malian women, subject to multiple regimes of knowledge and interpretive practice.

Chapters 4 and 5 focus on UNESCO-sponsored heritage projects that have come to define the socioeconomic and political life of two Malian cities: the preservation of neo-Sudanese architecture in Djenné (Chapter 4), and efforts to restore Sufi mausoleums and shrines destroyed by an Islamist occupation in Timbuktu (Chapter 5). Both chapters illustrate the various and often-conflicting perspectives of city dwellers, domestic politicians and international agencies on the status and identity of local material culture repurposed as global cultural heritage. The final chapter, surveying the social and material effects of Timbuktu's ruinous occupation (April 2012 through January 2013), brings Cultural Heritage to Mali's fraught socio-political present, a time of ongoing violence and intensified debate about Malian futures. In concluding, De Jorio does not prescribe solutions to Mali's persistent problems, but she does illuminate them, drawing our attention yet again to the ways public culture in the guise of heritage clarifies the complexity of the contemporary, in Mali as elsewhere.