Re-Assembling Memory: Monument Removal and Refusal in Democratic Memory Politics

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Abstract

The recent spectacle of removing monuments, such as the marking of Robert E. Lee’s statue in Richmond with graffiti, dumping Edward Colston in a Bristol harbor, or the decapitations of Cecil Rhodes in Cape Town, has functioned in popular media like a prism, refracting public discussions across a wide range of ethical, historical, and political issues. While some commentators focus on pluralizing public memory, many Black and Indigenous activists pursue the removal of monuments as broader protest against contemporary regimes of racialized domination. This paper argues that removal activism stands in tension with historical policies of dispossession. Instead, calls for the removal of venerated public monuments signals a transfiguration of those policies by the communities they targeted. Monument removal activism aims to remember how the past being made present requires transformations of the way power is distributed through multiple registers of public life; not merely accessing narratives about national values, or performing healing by “forgetting” figures of the past, removal insists on refusal of monumental pasts. Incorporating removal as political act of refusal means unearthing the racialized tools of monumentality by re-assembling bodies marked for perpetual exclusion. These “forgotten” communities participating in the removal of statues erected to eternalize racial violence reveals the political imperatives of such entangled, fractured timelines: not to pluralize or repair accounts of national origins, but to reconstruct democratic participation around the unsettling urgency of removal coming too late for many, even among those assembled.

To investigate these claims in context, this paper considers the #RhodesMustFall movement, which reflects a transnational coalition of student-activists primarily in South Africa and the United Kingdom. Activists in South Africa marked statues for removal through symbolic dramatization of the linkages between histories of progressive aspirations and racial dispossession. These removal protests publically present the persistent legacies of white supremacy that are otherwise treated as subdued. Chumani Maxwele’s “poo protest,” which is credited with first targeting the Cecil Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town for removal, drew on numerous points of protest between the unrealized promises of post-apartheid transformation and the lived experiences of neoliberal public austerity and white supremacy. Protestors also invoked rallying cries, songs, and locating historical markers that reactivated solidaristic blocs from previous anticolonial struggles, both within and between colonial networks that manifested among student-activists.

And through these symbolic deployments, removal provided a grammar for connecting these expressive set of actions with refusal in democratic practices. Activists who collaborate with Maxwele’s dramatization rely on framing removals of Rhodes at UCT and Oxford as decolonizing the university circuits which “produce, profit, and memorialize” colonial violence. Demonstrators defaced Rhodes, imagined spaces of removal anew with dance and other public artistic performances, and occupied administration buildings or meetings until their demands were heard. This started with the statue’s removal, but soon became about tuition decreases, public access to housing, as well as other university reforms.

Mapping these sites of removal across colonial histories and democratic solidarities reframes monument removal as part of a wider challenge to transnational regimes of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and colonial rule. Their divergent networks and historical contexts shape a new globally contested vision of what it means to participate in memory politics. The symbolic and structural connections enacted through monument removal draws our attention to the temporal dynamism illuminated through expressive protest and monumental refusal. At its core, this remembering insists on reconstituting the terms of democratic participation as a re-assembly of bodies, not to display defiant champions who outlasted historical figures of domination, but ones still marked for dispossession without radical intervention.

Author

• Matthew D Frierdich, University of Virginia