It is striking that the series of Black Lives Matter protests, triggered in early summer 2020 by the murder of George Floyd, quickly turned to targeting public forms of commemoration. Statues of problematic figures of esteem where roundly assailed across the US, in the UK and in Europe. The phenomenon of the parallel, trans-regional targeting of material commemorative forms as a mode of contesting colonial legacies, racism and white supremacy calls for new approaches to transnational mnemonic entanglement.
This paper will explore the opportunities and limitations of thinking contested commemoration as a form of political, historical and sociomaterial convergence. In a dialogical format juxtaposing two case studies explored by field researchers in the UK and South Africa, the paper will explore commemorative contestation as analogous, yet multi-layered mnemonic phonomena. Spawned by a short online intervention, our paper expands on a series of evocative threads of convergence in the material handling, toppling, removal and drowning of the statues of Edward Colston in Bristol, England and Cecil John Rhodes in Cape Town, South Africa. We aim to shed light on the sociomaterialities of the treatment of the statues, the physical encounter between the object and multiple local actors, as well as the multi-directional forces that transformed the commemorative sites into 'eventful spaces' (Amin 2015). The materially–driven analysis will provide insight into the movements and activities mobilising contestation in situ, the various actors, 'detonators' and 'tipping points' of statue removal, the affective registers triggered by the contestation and the various afterlives of these dethroning events.
By bringing the cases of the removed-Rhodes and Colston into conversation, we prompt questions about the potential of transnational comparison and test the applicability of the often-evoked analogies of these two examples. This inquiry allows for exploration of the tensions that emerge from taking more particularised or more globalised approaches and for asking ethical questions arising from particular positionalities, conceptual frameworks or methodological scales. We argue thatsuch reflection is required for expanding the conceptual and methodological framework regarding certain mnemonic entanglements. Through these dialogic considerations, we hope to shed light into the ways of exploring the texture of social movements, memory constellations, affects and material practices that mobilise calls for transformation of urban cultures of memory in different settings.
Bibliography:
Amin, A. (2015). Animated space. Public culture, 27(2 (76)), 239-258.
