Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials

Book excerpt: Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials examines how the modification, destruction, or absence of monuments and memorials can be viewed as performative acts that challenge prescribed, embodied narratives in the public realm. Bringing together international, multidisciplinary approaches, the chapters in this volume interrogate the ways in which memorial constructions disclose implicitly and explicitly the proxy battle for public memory and identity, particularly since 2015. Acknowledging the ways in which the past -- which is given agency through monuments and memorials -- intrudes into daily life, this volume offers perspectives from researchers that answer questions about the roles of monuments and memorials as persistent, yet mutable, works whose meanings are not fixed but are, rather, subject to processes of continual re-interpretation. By using monuments and memorials as lenses through which to view race, memory, and the legacies of war, power, and subjugation, this volume demonstrates how these works, and their visible representations of entitlement, possession, control, and authority, can offer the opportunity to pose and answer questions about whose memory matters and what our symbols say about who we are and what we value. Fallen Monuments and Contested Memorials is essential reading for scholars and students studying cultural heritage, history, art history, and public history. It will be particularly useful to those with an interest in public monuments and memorials; colonial and post-colonial history; memory studies; and nationalism, race, and ethnic studies.