Wednesday, 25 November 2020, 12:00-13:30 (Microsoft Teams)
Title: ‘Monuments & the Politics of Memory’
From the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol to those of Confederate generals in the United States, Christopher Columbus in Latin America and King Leopold II in Belgium, countless headlines in 2020 announce that monuments are the battleground where today’s ‘history wars’ are fought.
While current debates about monuments often prompt discussions about history in media and public debates, this Reading Group will focus on the politics of memory in relation to monuments, statues, and the use of public space more generally. We will consider academic papers which put the politics of memory at the heart of their analysis, to then examine how their views relate to unfolding events in the present.
Suggested Readings:
Katharyne Mitchell (2003) Monuments, Memorials, and the Politics of Memory, Urban Geography, 24:5, 442-459
Partha Mitter (2013) Monuments and Memory for Our Times, South Asian Studies, 29:1, 159-167
John Siblon, ‘“Monument Mania”? Public Space and the Black and Asian Presence in the London Landscape’, in: People and their Pasts: Public History Today, ed. by Paul Ashton and Hilda Kean (London: Palgrave, 2009: pp. 146-162. Free version available here: https://www.academia.edu/28066988/_Monument_Mania_Public_Space_and_the_Black_and_Asian_Presence_in_the_London_Landscape
*For extra readings, please check this list compiled by Prof Catherine O’Leary, CIMS’s director, and this one compiled by Dr Sarah Arens, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Modern Languages.
If you wish to illustrate a monument/statue in question, feel free to email the image to the Reading Group convenor, Jorge Sarasola (js227), who can share it with members during the meeting.
UGs, PGTs, PGRs, and academics from all schools are welcome.
The event will take place on Teams. Please email [email protected] to receive the link.
Summary of the event (written by Jorge Sarasola):
After overcoming some initial technical difficulties, the Reading Group took off with every participant sharing a monument/statue/memorial they were interested in, prompting the rest of us to reflect on them in light of the readings.
The examples includes: photography of Italian monuments related to the fascist past; the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe; the Walter Scott monument in Edinburgh; statues commemorating nineteenth century black Uruguayan heroes; the toppling of a statue to Diego de Mazariegos (founder of Chiapas, Mexico); and the memorialisation of an engine commemorating the solidarity of Scottish factory-workers with victims of the Pinochet dictatorship.
Among some of the main topics discussed where: are we criticizing the act of memorialising in bronze per se as a flawed system, or are we simply criticizing the choice of figures who are memorialised in bronze? What other ways of memorialising the past in public space are effective? Are there countries that are better at this than others? What should the most effective measures be when it comes to acknowledging the involvement of memorialised figures in the slave trade?