Session Organizers
Nour Munawar, University of Amsterdam (UvA), Netherlands & Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar
James Symonds, University of Amsterdam (UvA), Netherlands
José Antonio Gonzalez Zarandona, Newcastle University, United Kingdom
In recent years, the defacement and toppling of historic monuments by the BLM and other protest movements has filled the headlines and prompted public debates. Monuments are powerful and politicized physical structures that can endure for centuries in city centres.
As the passage of time obscures their original meaning, they can acquire a quality of benign anonymity. However, monuments often embody links to dark pasts and traumatic memory, particularly when statues commemorate one-sided narratives of war, colonization, and slavery.
In this session we will discuss the monument as a concept, using biographical and semiotic approaches to explore the changing lives, management practices, and embedded meanings that may be found in public monuments. Our starting point is the position that monuments are more than commemorative objects. Erected in ordinary and mundane locations, such as public squares and parks, monuments are integrated into the everyday lives of city and/or countryside dwellers. Monuments are sites of remembrance, although only if people recognize them as such. Often, their weathered stone facades and oxidized patina bestow a sense of historical time depth and continuity upon a place, creating ontological security. But as recent protests have shown, the latent powers associated with historic monuments can be re-exposed to kindle public outrage and dissent.
Our session invites contributions that investigate what a monument can be, reasons to build and/or remove them, and the meanings of its management acts. We welcome papers working on theories, methodologies, and case studies not only in Europe and North America, but also in the Global South. Our aim is study how the rise of voices that seek to decolonize urban space, as well as changes in global power dynamics and the efforts to promote multipolarity, may have the potential to transform the public perception of monuments to become potentially inclusive healing apparatus.
Please submit your abstract by February 8, 2024
https://submissions.e-a-a.org/eaa2024/
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