Symbols of Exclusion: The Semiotics of Race in Public Spaces, October 2014, University of Mississippi (original) (raw)
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HolocaustMahnmal(Memorial): Monumental Memory amidst Contemporary Race
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2010
This essay examines the relationship between contemporary racialized subjects in Germany and the process of Holocaust memorialization. I ask why youths from these contexts fail to see themselves in the process of Holocaust memorialization, and why that process fails to see them in it. My argument is not about equivalences, but instead I examine the ways in which the monumentalization of Holocaust memory has inadvertently worked to exclude both relevant subjects and potential participants from the process of memorialization. That process as a monumental enterprise has also worked to sever connections between racialist memory and contemporary racism. The monumental display of what presents itself, at times, as moral superiority does not adequately attend to the everyday, mundane, repeatable qualities of racialized exclusion today, or in the past.
Faculty of Humanities, 2019
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 literature understanding what the politics of statue removal tell us about not only the American and South African commemorative landscapes, but the nations' interpretations of the past and societies themselves. Therefore, this thesis uses descriptive comparative analysis to compare two case studies where the debate over statue removal has surfaced most vehemently: Rhodes' statue at the University of Cape Town and Lee's statue in Charlottesville. Ultimately, this dissertation finds that the calls for the removal of statues are part of a wider change in tenor towards understanding and disrupting prevailing hegemonic narratives of white supremacy, in both society and its symbolic landscape. The phenomena demonstrates that heterogeneous societies with pasts marred by segregation and racism are moving to reject and renegotiate these histories and their symbols, a move that has elicited deeply divided, emotional responses. Despite waning attention to monument removals, the issue remains unresolved, contentious, and capable of re-igniting.
Architectures of Pain: Racism and Monuments Removal Activism in the "New" New Orleans
In 2017, the City of New Orleans removed four segregation-era monuments celebrating the Southern Confederacy and valorizing white supremacist ideology. As in other cities, efforts to remove such monuments are not new, and historically have been connected to collective challenges to racialized inequality, and more recently to transna-tional postcolonial struggles. Given the longstanding activism in favor of removing such monuments I ask, Why now? In exploring this question, I examine the circulation of images, talk, and text about the monuments in relation to the city's post-2005 political economy and find that people's expressed sentiments regarding the statues illuminate the ongoing challenges faced by New Orleans' multiracial working-class and poor residents .
The Geopolitics of White Supremacy: A Case Study on Monuments and Monumental Rhetoric
The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, 2022
Recent national racist and anti-racist movements tied to the protection or removal of Confederate monuments across the United States speaks to the significance of these multimodal objects in our public memory. This article traces the historically dominant social energy, the cultural commonplaces or topoi responsible for producing, organizing, and animating communities, in Gainesville, Florida-a small college town with a long Confederate history-as it materializes through the creation and recent removal of a local Confederate monument nicknamed "Old Joe." Exploring how "Old Joe" and similar monuments frame and contribute to cultural topographies as active agents of white supremacy has the potential to enrich national discourse(s) on the Confederacy by better representing our local communities and their situated topoi. At the same time, understanding how monuments create different publics by inducing affirmative or dissonant activity offers an avenue for breaking away from violent historical patterns echoing into the present.
The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of the Contemporary World, eds. Paul Graves-Brown, Rodney Harrison, and Angela Piccini, pp.508-520., 2013
Race has long been rendered invisible in everyday materiality or remade to mask the relationship between material things and the color line. This paper focuses on a public sculpture project in Indianapolis, Indiana that aspired to reinterpret a little-recognized 1890s statue of an Emancipated captive. The case reveals how racist privileges and African-American heritage are at the heart of American experience even as the racial dimensions of seemingly mundane materiality are unseen or concealed, even in the case of a monumental public statue. The Indianapolis experience reflects the ways many communities struggle to simultaneously remember, displace, and memorialize African-American heritage and race in cities where there appear to be no contemporary material traces of the color line.
Black Lives Matter: Race Discourse and the Semiotics of History Reconstruction
Journal of History Culture and Art Research
The death of unarmed black male George Floyd, who was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis, May 25, 2020, has given momentum to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement whose activists rallied in different parts of the world to remove or deface monuments to historic figures associated with racism, slavery, and colonialism. These social practices of toppling statues have a discursive value and, since they are meant to communicate a message to the broader society, these actions are incorporated into a semiotic system. This study examines signs and, therefore, the system of representations involved in toppling statues performed by BLM activists and documented in photos. The research employs a critical approach to semiotics based on Roland Barthes' (1964) semiotic model of levels of signification. However, for a comprehensive analytical understanding, the study also makes use of a multidisciplinary Critical Discourse Analysis CDA approach which provides a systematic method to examine and expose power relations, inequality, dominance, and oppression in social practices. Besides its general analytical framework, the integrated CDA approach combines Fairclough's (1995) three-dimensional analytical approach, which presupposes examining text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice, with Reisigl and Wodak's (2001, 2017) Discourse Historical Analysis (DHA), which investigates ideology and racism within their socio-cultural and historic context. The analysis of the images reveals a common thematic structure and encoded messages produced in order to change the cultural and social norms of the USA national discourse generated and cultivated within a specific ideological and historical context. These social actions consist of signs that make up a coherent communicative system which provides BLM activists with instruments in the struggle over the memory of slavery, white supremacy and oppression of the past for the rights of the black minority in the present in a better society of racial equality, human rights, and liberation.