On 22 October, Maria Grever (Professor Emeritus from our History Department), published a book in the Cambridge Elements series entitled “Contested Public Monuments – Global perspectives on landscapes of memory”. Grever’s book shows how global protests over monuments are transforming public memory by challenging historical narratives of power and promoting more inclusive ways of remembering.
In the new millennium, many public monuments around the world have become the target of protests as part of social movements' struggles against inequality and discrimination. Despite research into the significance of toppled statues or damaged monuments and the motives of activists, little attention has been paid to the extent to which iconoclastic activism changes the narratives of public spaces or landscapes of memory.
This Elements book approaches current conflicts over public monuments as an attempt to transform the mnemonic regime of public spaces. It examines global cases involving colonialism, Black slavery, world wars, and women's oppression. Using theoretical concepts, such as monumental narrativity, necropolitical space, white innocence, and the implicated subject, four current contexts of contestations will be highlighted: the fabric of landscapes of memory; the relationship between the living and the dead of a community; the power of visual language, iconography, and multiplication; the importance of dialogical monuments.
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You can find the publication on the website of Cambridge University Press.
