Once great among the nations: women on rubble

This article discusses colonialism and the reuse of visuality that supports it through a comparison of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptures and contemporary photographs of women sitting on rubble. Jerusalem in her Desolation by William Wetmore Story (1873) and Deborah by Giovanni Battista Lombardi (1873) are discussed in relation to contemporary news photographs of women in Gaza. Commissioned for the 1876 inauguration of the Frank Furness building for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the sculptures were celebrated as the height of artistic achievement in the groundbreaking new ‘Temple of Art’. For attendees, these sculptures symbolized the imagined destiny of the United States; an ascending power rising from the ruins of ancient civilizations at the beginning of an American Empire. But tastes change, and Jerusalem and Deborah were not destined to live in the Temple forever; one was destroyed, and one was banished for thirty years before returning. The lives of these sculptures are connected to the enduring and recurring contemporary images of displaced women seated amid the ruins of their homes destroyed by war. Across continents and time – seen and unseen, banished and recalled, destroyed and rebuilt – they haunt coloniality.