1st Edition

Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects From Mesolithic to Eco-queer

By Thomas Houlton Copyright 2022
294 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

294 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

294 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects explores monuments as political, psychical, social, and mystical objects. Incorporating autoethnography, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and queer ecology, Houlton argues for a radical, interdisciplinary approach to our monument-culture.  Tracing historical developments in monuments alongside contemporary movements such as Rhodes... Read more

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: ‘Face the Dark Confusion’: Experiencing Monuments

 

Part I. The Monument: Histories and Theories

 

1 The Monument and the Arts of Memory

2 Theorising the Monument

 

Part II. The Monument and Psychoanalysis

 

3 The Monument, the Holocaust, and the Crypt: Rachel Whiteread, Jacques Derrida, and Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s Cryptonymy

4 D.W. Winnicott and the Destruction of the Monument

5 Countermonuments, Transitional Objects, and the Fear of Breakdown

 

Part III. Monuments, Colonialism, and Imperial Spaces

 

6 Monuments and Colonial Domination

7 Cecil Rhodes, Oriel College, and the Will to Change

 

8 Decolonising Edward Colston in Bristol: The Contrapuntal Monument

 

Part IV: Queer Monuments

 

9 LGBTQIA+ Monuments, Sacred Heterotopias, and the Fantasy of Purity 

 

10 Stonewall, Political Visibility, and the Pressures of LGBTQIA+ Memorialisation

 

11 Paranoid Monuments, Eve Sedgwick, and Queer Remembrance: (Or, You Probably Think This Monument Is About You)

 

12 The Monument and Queer Ecology

 

Epilogue: Mesolithic Monuments, ecosystemic collapse, and Hope in the Time of Coronavirus

 

Index

Biography

Thomas Houlton is an academic, writer, and editor based in York, UK. Educated at the University of Cambridge and New York University, he gained his PhD from the University of Sussex, where he also worked at the Centre for the Study of Sexual Dissidence. He has had both critical and creative writing published in journals and magazines.