Review of The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations, edited by Bronwyn Carlson and Terri Farrelly

Communities around the world have been rethinking their commemoration landscapes over the past decade.While news of toppled monuments spread quickly online, thoughtful interpretation of those debates has been hampered by the very speed and global reach of important questions regarding public monuments' meaning and societal impact.Scholars of memory studies like myself have struggled to keep up with the speed with which monuments have been challenged, altered, and even removed, particularly as anti-colonial and anti-racist movements spread at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020-21.Researchers produced close studies of individual monuments and the individuals they commemorated, uncovering the creators' intentions and how public responses to those monuments have changed over time.But these efforts have been scattered geographically and divided disciplinarily, making meta-analysis challenging.The Palgrave Handbook on Rethinking Colonial Commemorations takes an important step toward synthesizing decolonizing efforts across academic disciplines.The volume brings together powerful stories of toppling monuments, renaming institutions, and artistic challenges to settler colonialism.Chapters range from narratives of individual monuments to broader categories of commemoration and reflections on the effectiveness of different decolonization approaches.Scholars of memory studies and postcolonial studies will appreciate the volume's rich case studies on diverse forms of commemoration.Not surprisingly, many of the essays address colonial monuments, but they approach these cultural artifacts in varied ways from different disciplinary perspectives.These range from histories of individual statues to informal conversations about renaming efforts.The volume includes several analyses of activist art and two essays analyzing a largely Indigenous-produced television show, as well as analyses of decolonization methods.This Handbook contains sound and diverse scholarship on settler colonialism in former British colonies, with a smattering of other perspectives mixed in.Two-thirds of its thirty chapters examine commemoration in the British Commonwealth; fully half focus on Australia, and another quarter on the United States or Canada.Treatments of churches in the Smi homeland of Finland, statue parks in eastern Europe, and extractivist (copper and coal) monuments around the world offer welcome contrasts to the volume's emphasis on British settler colonialism's erasure of Aboriginal and other Indigenous peoples.But these chapters' presence serves to highlight the absence of scholarship on other forms of colonialism.Scholarship on colonial commemoration in Southeast Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and Latin America could reveal differences between the legacies of different colonial powers and between settler-colonial states and internal colonialism.Work on historical memory in Israel and the Middle East could shed