Anxious Politics: Contesting Fantasies Surrounding the Removal of Statues of Slavery and the Confederacy (original) (raw)

Toppling statues, affective publics and the lessons of the Black Lives Matter movement

Art & the Public Sphere, 2021

In this opening article, we explore how the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement challenges the traditional norms and conduct of the bourgeois public sphere. Ahmed argues how the White male body is abstracted in order to achieve a universal status (Ahmed) and how his ‘invisibility’ is his power; the socially constructed ‘invisibility’ of whiteness forces those people considered to be of colour to be ‘marked and highly visible’ (Purwar). We assert that this abstracting of whiteness, along with the dominance of rational debate leads to the patriarchal practices of the bourgeois public sphere. Utilizing Papacharissi’s concept of ‘Affective Publics’, we examine the extent to which the online and offline activities of the BLM movement – including the toppling of statues – charge social media with the capacity to act as a fully fledged public sphere. We conclude that the BLM movement exemplifies a mode of public participation that outstrips conventional thinking on the bourgeois public spher...

Black Lives Matter and the Removal of Racist Statues

2020

The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests have been accompanied by calls for the removal of statues of racists from public space. This has generated debate about the role of statues in the public sphere. I argue that statues are erected to represent a chosen narrative about history. The debate about the removal of statues is a controversy about history and how we relate to it. From this perspective, the Black Lives Matter movement is not a drive to remove or topple statues, but a call for an honest examination of systemic racism and the residual effects of slavery. This call can be a kairos to engage in a constructive dialogue about the societies we aspire to live in. The result of this dialogue, which includes a re-examination of dominant narratives, will decide which statues and monuments can occupy public space and represent our societies.

Juxtapositioned Memory: Lost Cause Statues and Sites of Lynching

Modern Languages Open, 2020

The paper explores both 'official' historical attempts to counter Lost Cause narratives of the former Confederacy, but also the moves towards re-memorialization in the form of statue removal as well as sites that bring forth what has been lost or excluded in Lost Cause accounts. It thus analyses the post-Reconstruction memorialization of Confederate soldiers via monuments throughout the former Confederacy, on the one hand, and the more recent moves (as seen in the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery) to document and commemorate the waves of lynchings which occurred during the same period of time (~1880s-1920s) in many of the same areas of the US South.

Black Lives Matter and the Removal of Racist Statues: Perspectives of an African

21: INQUIRIES INTO ART, HISTORY, AND THE VISUAL, 2020

The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests have been accompanied by calls for the removal of statues of racists from public space. This has generated debate about the role of statues in the public sphere. I argue that statues are erected to represent a chosen narrative about history. The debate about the removal of statues is a controversy about history and how we relate to it. From this perspective, the Black Lives Matter movement is not a drive to remove or topple statues, but a call for an honest examination of systemic racism and the residual effects of slavery. This call can be a kairos to engage in a constructive dialogue about the societies we aspire to live in. The result of this dialogue, which includes a re-examination of dominant narratives, will decide which statues and monuments can occupy public space and represent our societies. KEYWORDS Black Lives Matter; Statues; Racism; Slavery; Dialogue.

(De)Constructing symbols: Charlottesville, the confederate flag, and a case for disrupting symbolic meaning

Politics, Groups, and Identities, 2018

Political symbols such as the Confederate flag and Confederate monuments present a certain kind of "stickiness" in meaning, interpretation, and ownership. In some instances, a symbol is deeply tied to its referent, as is the case for the iconic "Hollywood sign" that sits atop the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles. In other instances, a symbol is only distantly connected to its referent and is more informed by emotion than by details or facts, as I argue is the case for the Confederate flag. These socalled "condensation symbols" take on meanings that are shaped by politics, communities, and myths making them difficult to challenge or reframe. Using the actions of rapper Kayne West as an abbreviated case study, this paper proposes the possibility of disrupting symbolic meanings in ways that could make Confederate symbols less sticky in meaning and ownership, and perhaps less politically divisive.

Toppled Monuments and Black Lives Matter: Race, Gender, and Decolonization in the Public Space. An Interview with Charmaine A. Nelson

Atlantis, 2021

This paper discusses the recent backlash against public monuments spurred by Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in North America and elsewhere following the killing by police of George Floyd, an unarmed African-American man in the United States. Since this event, protestors have taken to the streets to bring attention to police brutality, systemic racism, and racial injustice faced by Black and Indigenous people and people of colour in the United States, Canada, Great Britain and some European countries. In many of these protests, outraged citizens have torn down, toppled, or defaced monuments of well-known historic figures associated with colonialism, slavery, racism, and imperialism. Protestors have been demanding the removal of statues and monuments that symbolize slavery, colonial power, and systemic and historical racism. What makes these monuments problematic and what drives these deliberate and spectacular acts of defiance against these omnipresent monuments? Featuring an inte...

Memorialising White Supremacy: The Politics of Statue Removal: A Comparative Case Study of the Rhodes Statue at the University of Cape Town and the Lee Statue in Charlottesville, Virginia

2020

In April 2015, the bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes- notorious mining magnate, archimperialist and champion of a global Anglo-Saxon empire- was removed from its concrete plinth overlooking Cape Town, South Africa. This came as a result of the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement, a movement that would see statues questioned and vandalised across the country. Two years later, fierce contestation over the hegemonic narrative told through the American South’s symbolic landscape erupted over the proposed removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, resulting in the deaths of multiple people in Charlottesville, Virginia. Increasing research on the removal of Rhodes and the removal of Confederate statuary has emerged in recent years. However, previous scholarship has failed to compare the wider phenomena of the calls for removal, from the memorialised figures to their change in symbolic capital, the movements’ inception and its outcomes. There is subsequently a gap in the litera...

From Fear to Anxiety: An Exploration into a New Socio-Political Temporality

Law and Critique, 2017

Modern political reality is increasingly permeated with testimonies and representations of social and personal anxieties. Most often these narratives are accompanied with a desire to identify and implement a 'cure' that will either heal or eradicate the source of discomfort. In the political everyday such a 'cure' is disguised as a policy or a new law. Thus it comes as a little surprise that the term anxiety is increasingly used by politicians, policy-makers, legal and medical experts as well as scholars to explain an allegedly new social phenomenon. Relying on psychoanalysis and critical theory the contributions in this special issue tackle modern anxieties in the realms of politics and law, and in particular look into how anxiety is manifested in relation to resistance, immigration, nationalism and austerity measures. This introduction firstly, unpacks the idea of anxiety conceptually and offers different ways in which anxiety can be read politically, legally as well as theoretically; and secondly introduces the arguments put forward in individual contributions. Keywords Anxiety Á Psychoanalysis Á Jacques Lacan Á Socio-political order Á Modernity Á Identity Modern political reality is increasingly permeated with testimonies and representations of social and personal anxieties. Most often these narratives are accompanied This special issue originates in the discussions we had at a workshop organised in the Politics department at the University of Manchester in 2015 by Andreja Zevnik and Aoileann Ni Mhurchu. Since then we had ongoing discussions on the role of anxiety in the modern socio-political sphere, which also drew in new contributors. The presented issue is a testimony to the discussions we have had.