Setting Empire in Stone: Commemoration and the Crisis of Historical Subjectivity

Abstract The global wave of anti-racist social movements in the summer of 2020 was marked by calls for the removal or recontextualization of statues in public space. Conservative politicians and pundits, in turn, framed cultural activism as a “culture war” and a crisis that entailed “erasing history” by calling national heroes into question. I argue that framing the toppling of statues as a historical crisis derives from a colonial understanding of knowledge as singular, universal, and fundamentally European. This understanding of knowledge analytically bifurcates the past and refuses anti-colonial histories of insurgency and contestation. To counter this approach, I engage with the concept of postcolonial critical realism, which theorizes the power of colonial discourses to shape material institutions and esthetic forms, as well as the anti-colonial potential of counter-discourses. To illustrate this argument, I consider the history of two contested statues: Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, and Joséphine de Beauharnais in Fort-de-France, Martinique. By revisiting this crisis and the responses it engendered, we can make sense of the present “culture war” not as a contemporary crisis but as a response to a longer historical crisis.