Memory over Forgetting: Monuments, Memorials, and Intangible Heritage

Abstract The Black Lives Matter social movement in the United States reverberated worldwide and spurred renewed attention by antiracist activists to memorials—and by counterprotestors who supported the memorials. These “memorial wars” built on a half century of emergent community activism and a legacy of a triumphalist tradition of war monuments and celebrations of typically male political leaders. In the revolutionary struggles of 1989 to 1992, corresponding to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the end of apartheid in South Africa, “fallism”—the uprooting of discredited old regimes—inaugurated a convention of tearing down memorials. The eleven contributions in this issue reflect a post-BLM iteration of this past marked by bottom-up social movement memory activism with expanded memorial subjects that invite audiences into the memory project.