1st Edition
Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History
This book tackles the historical relationship between colonial violence and monuments in Africa, Europe, the Indian subcontinent, North America, and Australia.
In this volume, the authors ask similar questions about monuments in each location and answer them following a parallel structure that encourages comparison, highlighting common themes. The chapters track the contested histories of monuments, scrutinizing their narrative power and examining the violent events behind them. It is both about the history of monuments and the histories the monuments are meant to commemorate. It is interested in this nuanced relationship between violence, monuments, memory, and colonial legacies; the ways different facets of colonial violence—conquest, resistance, massacres, genocides, internments, and injustices—have been commemorated (or haven’t been), how they live in the present, and how pertinent they are in the present to different peoples. Legacies of colonial violence, and continued reinterpretations of the past and its meanings remain very much ongoing. They are still very much unsettled questions in large parts of the world.
Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History will be essential reading for students, scholars, and researchers of political science, history, sociology and colonial studies. The book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Introduction: Looking Globally at Monuments, Violence, and Colonial Legacies
Cynthia C. Prescott and Janne Lahti
1. Visualizing Juan de Oñate’s Colonial Legacies in New Mexico
Alison Fields
2. De-Colonizing Australia’s Commemorative Landscape: "Truth-Telling," Contestation and the Dialogical Turn
Bruce Scates and Peter Yu
3. The Pinjarra Massacre in the Age of the Statue Wars
Ann Curthoys and Shino Konishi
4. Südwester Reiter: Fear, Belonging, and Settler Colonial Violence in Namibia
Janne Lahti
5. South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and 1820 Settlers National Monument: Monuments to Cultural Violence
Rebecca Weaver-Hightower and Marcus B. Weaver-Hightower
6. The Ajnala Massacre of 1857 and the Politics of Colonial Violence and Commemoration in Contemporary India
Mark Condos
7. Belgian Monuments of Colonial Violence: the Commemoration of Martyred Missionaries
Idesbald Goddeeris
Biography
Cynthia C. Prescott is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota, USA. She is author of Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (2019), and Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (2007).
Janne Lahti is a historian working at the University of Helsinki as Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He has published seven books, including Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film, with Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (2020), and The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (2019).
"In recent years, debates over historical statues and monuments have been central to the struggle of former colonial powers, and former colonies, to come to term with their past – or to disavow it. With a genuinely global scope, this timely and exciting collection of case-studies examine how memorials both conceal and reveal contested histories of colonial violence, which refuse to be peacefully consigned to the past."
Kim A. Wagner, University of London, UK
"The global approach utilized by Cynthia Prescott and Janne Lahti reinforces the relationality of violence, monuments, memory, and legacy across time and place. This volume makes visible those histories and peoples erased by colonial violence and later settler colonial monuments. Prescott and Lahti’s volume provides necessary context for current contestations over public space and memory. Monuments matter. This volume is a must-read."
Elise Boxer, University of South Dakota, USA
"This compelling collection offers a truly global perspective on the relationship between colonial violence and monumentality. Contributions by scholars and community advocates map the ways colonial and postcolonial monuments have celebrated, concealed, and embodied the violence of empire in North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia over the last two centuries. Always insistent on the specific histories of both monuments and the acts they commemorate, these essays go beyond simple binaries to trace the multiple, shifting actions and experiences of colonizers, settlers, postcolonial states, and Indigenous peoples through time."
Jennifer Sessions, University of Virginia, USA
