Thoughts on the fate of public monuments during the Black Lives Matter movement: a request for epuration in the decolonial era (original) (raw)
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History Australia , 2021
The #BlackLivesMatter protests in Australia in 2020 at the monument of Captain Cook erupted amid the toppling of monuments all over the United States and the United Kingdom, as part of a highly mobile wave of transnational activism. Such protests, I argue, compel us to look beyond national frameworks to the transnational or ‘transcultural’ politics of memorialisation and mediatised protest, and to examine the ways in which public monuments can be placed on trial and re-storied in theatrical and performative spaces of creative protest that draw on modern discourses of justice and the idiom of human rights. This article examines two protests at monuments as case studies – the figure of slaver Edward Colston in Bristol that was pulled down by #BLM protestors, and, 25 years earlier, the figure of John Batman in Melbourne who was put on trial by Aboriginal activists. Through these cases I consider concepts of ‘travelling’, ‘transcultural’, and ‘multidirectional’ memory, and argue for recognising the generative nature of ‘mnemonic movements’ in order to understand the forms of political translation which occur within these dense, discursively packed protests that are too often deemed separate (e.g. ‘colonialism’ and ‘slavery’). Such approaches offer ways to understand the #BLM protests, as well as others where the fluid interplay between the local and the global, and bloody histories of slavery, settler colonialism, the Holocaust and other forms of mass violence occurs.
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...
Heritage "vandalism" and the echoes of silenced memories
Alice News, 2020
While the world witnesses a widespread uprising against racism, the role of memory and its public representation have come to the centre of the dispute. The homicide of George Floyd by a police of cer in the USA has instigated protests by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) anti-racist movement especially in the global North. Political elites and the media have been divided on their commenting on the movement: while extreme-right (and some right wing) leaders negate that racism exists, leftist leaders tend to super cially support the anti-racist movement but they rarely engage in racism eradication. This is done by using a moralising approach that avoids questioning the historical roots of racism, the dynamics that support its endurance, and white privilege. Super cial anti-racism reinforces the positions of those who negate the existence of racism as can be seen in present day contested interventions of heritage sites. In Europe and the USA, people are protesting against the violence of a social hierarchy that is based upon skin colour and thus they are promoting and seeking a truer social justice. As a part of this struggle, they occupy streets and squares that are populated with monuments, buildings and other heritage sites that celebrate the societies and the people that have historically created this race-based social order. As history stories in textbooks endorse the narrative that economic, political and cultural expansion occurred under colonialism, so too does the heritage landscape. The symbolism of the public space in former colonial hubs reproduce the narrative of domination in which the creation of race, racism and its institutionalisation is framed within the "democratic" narrative. This is due to the fact that colonialism and modern day democracy are contemporary creations of the same Eurocentric This article is part of the Alice Comments series authored by the Epistemologies of the South Research Programme team, and published on a weekly basis.
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.
Journal of Pan African Studies, 2008
In the last thirty years, the June 16, 1976 student uprisings have been commemorated in various ways. The commemorations have taken the form of expression of grief, loss and the will to continue pursuing the liberation project in South Africa. These processes of commemoration have over the years been characterised by tradition, change and continuity. Underpinning the characteristics of tradition, change and continuity is a feature of memory as a site of struggle for liberation and ideological contestation amongst those engaging in the struggle for liberation. This struggle on the one hand took the form of political mobilisation against apartheid colonialism and on the other hand took the form of competition for ideological hegemony among the former liberation movements. All this was within the context of the pre-1994 political order that was bent on demonising the meaning, significance and legacy of the 1976 uprisings and in some instances even attempted to erase its memory from the popular consciousness and as public history without success. The 1980s saw the memory of the uprisings being continually contested and at the same time taking new forms of tangible and intangible public re-representations. The new forms of tangible memorialisation and re-representation would later be re-imagined as tourism attractions or destinations. The latter introduced further metamorphosis of commemoration turned into monument(al) re-representation concerned with the post 1994 'national interest' to create jobs and develop local economies using the heritage of the liberation struggle side by side with the public pressures and national and public interests in symbolic reparations and social justice.
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...
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.
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.