Colonial Redux: When Re-naming Silences (original) (raw)
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Colonial Redux: When Re-naming Silences - Antonio Lopez y Lopez and Nelson Mandela
borderlands e-journal, 2017
This article challenges dominant narratives of colonial monuments and aims to problematize some local political initiatives and responses raised in the processes of renaming said monuments. We focus on a recent struggle in Barcelona, Spain, to highlight the unresolved tensions and multi-layered silences amongst groups who share the objective of revisiting their city space and its racial/colonial history. While city officials and mainstream anti-racist activists make appeals to universal human rights, communities of color emphasize continuities of racial/colonial injustice and contemporary implications. Erasure of colonial violence through memorialization is made visible by acknowledging the necessity for renaming. Yet we argue a second type of erasure occurs in the process of re-naming, where resistance by communities of color is equally neglected. Consequently, what is presented as progressive anti-racist responses and engaged commitment to diversity and tolerance rests on notions of a deferred politics of aspiration rather than a politics of action.
Re-Placing race in the public space: borders, translation and globalization
Culture Unbound, 2024
In this article I engage with the un- and re-making of monuments in the context of the globalization and mediatization of Black Lives Matter and anti-racist activism. I analyze in particular two examples that display transcultural negotiations of antiracism against the background of different colonial histories and postcolonial trajectories: 1. The induction of Josephine Baker to the French Pantheon in November 2021, which opens the space of a key monument of French heritage to a black woman for the first time. 2. The defacing of the statue of the Italian journalist and prominent intellectual Indro Montanelli in Milan in June 2020. The analysis emphasizes, on the one hand, the fluidity characterizing the transnational circulation of language, media and spatial practices. On the other, it shows how the transnational circulation of Black Lives Matter activism, by impacting on different colonial histories and postcolonial realities, stimulates distinctive processes of re-making heritage at the local and national level. In order to take into account both the fluidity and the asymmetries, I expand the category of ‘monument’ to consider discursive and material spaces of representation. Lastly, by emphasizing significant differences between French and Italian post-coloniality, the article contributes to differentiate ‘European’ (post)colonialism and to integrate non-Anglophone voices into Anglophone postcolonial theory.
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...
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...
Performance 'Art' -Dismantling Structural Racism in Colonial Monuments
NaKan: A Journal of Cultural Studies, 2022
This paper is an exploration of protests in defacing colonial monuments around the world following the killing of George Floyd, a Black man by a police officer on May 25, 2020 in the United States. My study examines protests on colonial statues as performances of resistance that signify a legacy of slavery and colonialism leading to the tragic end of Black lives. Performance is any act, behavior, or presentation done in everyday life and social interactions. Using performance as a methodology, I focus on activists removing the seventeenth century statue of the slave merchant Edward Colston from its plinth in Bristol, England. One activist Jen Reid climbed to the top of the Colston plinth to pose as a new and living statue. I analyze this moment as a performance to understand whether or not protestors are reacting to symbolic representations, literally or figuratively, in ending racism.
From Colston to Montanelli: public memory and counter-monuments in the era of Black Lives Matter
FROM THE EUROPEAN SOUTH 9, 99-113, 2021
During the protests that occurred in Bristol in June 2020, in the name of Black Lives Matter, the statue of the slave-owner Edward Colston was pulled down by protestors and thrown into the river Avon. A week later, in Milan, the statue of the journalist Indro Montanelli was spray-painted with the words "racist" and "rapist" due to his sexual relationship with an Eritrean child-bride he bought in the 1930s while fighting as a camicia nera (black shirt) for Mussolini. These two acts caused heated debates on both mainstream/traditional media and social media, producing that hybridisation of culture theorised by Henry Jenkins. As feminist scholars, we were directly involved in these debates as we publicly shared some critical reflections on the use of monuments in connection with race, gender and colonialism in Italy. Using collaborative autoethnographic approaches and thematic analysis, we discuss our own experiences within a wider investigation, concerning Italy and the UK, on the use of social media (Twitter and Facebook) as tools that shape specific forms of public memory at the expense of others. Yet, drawing from Linda Alcoff's "epistemologies of ignorance" and Charles Mills' "white ignorance," we also highlight the importance of counter-memories and practices of decolonisation of public spaces in order to challenge hegemonic forms of white amnesia.
The Ethics of Racist Monuments
In this chapter we focus on the debate over publicly-maintained racist monuments as it manifests in the mid-2010s Anglosphere, primarily in the US (chiefly regarding the over 700 monuments devoted to the Confederacy), but to some degree also in Britain and Commonwealth countries, especially South Africa (chiefly regarding monuments devoted to figures and events associated with colonialism and apartheid). After pointing to some representative examples of racist monuments, we discuss ways a monument can be thought racist, and neutrally categorize removalist and preservationist arguments heard in the monument debate. We suggest that both extremist and moderate removalist goals are likely to be self-defeating, and that when concerns of civic sustainability are put on moral par with those of fairness and justice, something like a Mandela-era preservationist policy is best: one which removes the most offensive of the minor racist monuments, but which focuses on closing the monumentary gap between peoples and reframing existing racist monuments.