Memory, Reconstruction, and Ethics in Memorialization

This essay analyzes three highly-contested, sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. Each was consecrated by the blood o f the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative o f its history, and each has been the site o f sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation o f monuments, the functions o f argument in sacred space, the use o f sacred space to expand communal boundaries, the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration o f who is deemed human and worthy o f remembrance. By focusing on attempts to rebut specific arguments made by existing monuments, we uncover the possibilities o f memory technologies designed to correct, expand upon, or contradict previous monuments. We reveal oppositional memory practices by demon­ strating how public arguments, made on/with particular sacred spaces and in particular times, evolve. M onuments' attempts to stabilize particular histories can be refuted in diverse ways, including: interpretive plaques that access counterhistories and punctuate a space with interruptions; subsequent counter-monuments that " answer back " to the original; and even destruction and/or replacement. Our examples demonstrate that, often, monuments' arguments are answered by expanding the lives that count as griev able, thereby opening spaces in which public grief may be made more inclusive. K ey W ords: visual argument, m em ory, oppositional m em ory practice, grievability, Fetterm an Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National M onum ent, H aym arket Square On a windswept hill in Wyoming, a cairn lamenting that " there were no survivors " now stands corrected by historical plaques recognizing 1,500 Indian survivors. On the high plains of eastern Montana, a sea of white marble tombstones now is interspersed with red granite warrior markers. In bustling Chicago, a tall, bronze police officer, removed from his original location, loses a century-long standoff with a nearby sculpture of Justice placing a wreath on a fallen laborer. The monuments that occupy sacred sites make arguments about who is worthy of mourning, honor, and remembrance. The monuments themselves endure, but their arguments often are controversial and judgments of worthiness have proven far less permanent. In his influential work, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade (1959) offered an understanding of the sacred that still resonates within scholarship of sacred space. The sacred, he wrote, " reveals absolute reality and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and establishes the order of the world " (p. 31). Nowhere are these functions more apparent than in sacred spaces: spaces set apart from their surroundings, ritually dedicated to the memory of a particular event, hero, or victim, and frequently adorned with enduring markers—often for those who lost their lives there-that offer seemingly eternal narratives of origin and orientation (Foote, 2003, p. 8). By enshrining particular narratives on a sacred site, monuments suggest what is worthy of

Places, 2009

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1998

Culture, Theory and Critique, 2009

War memorials are amongst the oldest memorials in the world. This paper provides a brief history of the way their function has evolved, focusing in particular on European war memorials constructed after the First and Second World Wars. It argues that, generally speaking, war memorials before the First World War were celebratory in character and served to underpin the authority of victorious leaders or nations. After 1918, they functioned often as crystallization points for collective mourning and remembrance. But the political interest in constructing celebratory war memorials remained, not least after the Second World War, as the example of the many Soviet war memorials erected in Eastern European countries demonstrates. However, this paper warns against understanding war memorials as immutable statements. Many memorials have undergone rededication, alteration, removal and reconstruction, and relocation during their history. This makes them significant as markers of political and cultural change.

This article inspects the ways that spaces of war memorialization are organized and reorganized through official and unofficial meaning-making activities. It aims to contribute to the discussion of the ‘value’ of memorializing by examining a multifaceted space of remembrance and commemoration: the Chattri Indian Memorial built near Brighton, UK. The article brings postcolonial perspectives to explore how memorializing has been organized here, focusing on the activities of once-colonized people and the affective, embodied aspects of organizing practices. Built in 1921 to honour Indian soldiers who fought in WWI, the Chattri evolved from a colonial instrument to symbol and space for ethnic-Indian group activities. The study employed historical, visual and ethnographic methods to study the tangible monument and the changing nature of the memorializing activities carried out around the monument. Memorializing is conceptualized within three inter-related processes: colonizing, de-colonizing and re-colonizing to examine how forms and practices of memorialization constitute a values-laden organizing system.

Memorials in the Aftermath of Armed Conflict, 2019

The construction of memorials is a well-established cultural practice, widely recognised and expected. We hear about them; how they are planned, designed, debated, altered, and sometimes removed. They are celebrated, inaugurated, and critiqued; and they become the focal point for anniversaries and forms of memorialisation through which accounts of events are staged. Memorials have become a part of our cultural toolkit. It is taken for granted that major events need memorials, and it has also become commonplace to see such memorials being recast and reinterpreted to suit changing social conditions and needs including the vagaries of ideologies. On our TV screens, we have witnessed the removal of statues of leading communist figures, first from countries within the former communist bloc of Eastern Europe and then throughout the former Soviet Union. More recently, the removal of the Rhodes statue from the University of Cape Town in 2015 not only became internationally debated through t...

This essay analyzes three highly-contested sacred spaces: Fetterman Battlefield, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and Haymarket Square. Each was consecrated by the blood of the fallen, each was marked with a monument enshrining a particular narrative of its history, and each has been the site of sustained argument over who should be remembered. Therefore, each enables us to explore the visual argumentation of monuments, the functions of argument in sacred space, the use of sacred space to expand communal boundaries, the relation between mourning and blood consecration, and the ways in which visual argument may open, or close, consideration of who is deemed human and worthy of remembrance. Our examples demonstrate that, often, monuments' arguments are answered by expanding the lives that count as grievable, thereby opening spaces in which public grief may be made more inclusive.

Viso: cadernos de estética aplicada, 2019

Public memorials have in the last decades adopted abstraction instead of figurative representation to refer to the historical events they commemorate. This is specially the case of traumatic historical events, such as 9/11. While this stands in stark contrast to the tradition of war memorials, it connects them to a significant change in the way these events are conceptualized. As the victory over an enemy, as in war memorials, became a loss for all humanity, as in recent traumatic events, such as the paradigmatic case of the Holocaust, monuments opened themselves to critical interpretation. Thus, these monuments and memorials not only commemorate, but also comment or condemn the events they refer to. This is further complicated, however, when it comes to the boundaries between nations and communities of grief, such as in the aforementioned case of 9/11. In these cases, the rhetoric of favoring abstraction over figuration – which I call, drawing on Jacques Rancière, irrepresentation – places these events in a neutral zone, disconnecting them from their political consequences but also from a overall politics of the production and circulation of images. Drawing from Rancière but also from Reinhart Koselleck and Talal Asad, this paper addresses these issues through a critique of irrepresentation in contemporary public memorials, arguing that the collective celebration of private mourning cannot overshadow the political character of these events.