In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the spring of 2020, a global movement led to the toppling of hundreds of monuments commemorating historical figures and events.<\/p>\n
The trend fascinated Professor Michael Ripmeester in Brock\u2019s Department of Geography and Tourism Studies, who, along with Associate Professor Russell Johnston in the Department of Communication, Popular Culture and Film, has been studying memory and the ways in which people engage with the landscape since about 2003. Ripmeester says that while the act of removing or destroying monuments to affect public memory is nothing new, the wave of reckoning with landscapes that spread around the world last year was different.<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople have been toppling monuments since ancient times, often related to regime changes \u2014 so, for example, statues of the former leader get destroyed and replaced with statues of the new leader,\u201d says Ripmeester. \u201cBut over the last year, there has been a global recognition of the legacies of colonialism and racism, and that has sparked a massive reconsideration of monuments all over the globe.\u201d<\/p>\n
To delve deeper into the movement, Ripmeester teamed up with colleague Matthew Rofe of the University of South Australia to collect essays that critically engaged with how landscapes are contested by individuals, groups and institutions for a future special issue of the journal Landscape Research<\/em>.<\/p>\n But when response to their call for papers quickly outsized the available space in the journal, Ripmeester and Rofe decided to explore the possibility of a book project.<\/p>\n To that end, they hosted a virtual authors\u2019 workshop in late July entitled \u201cGlobal Iconoclasm: Contesting \u201cOfficial\u201d Mnemonic Landscapes.\u201d Using funding from the Council for Research in the Social Sciences (CRISS) and Brock\u2019s Social Justice Research Institute (SJRI) to support participants, they invited 10 authors to share their contributions and provide constructive feedback on each other\u2019s essays.<\/p>\n Some of the landscapes discussed during the workshop included monuments to fascism that remain standing in Italy, the contrast between monuments to British history and local usage of the heritage site at Victoria Falls in Africa and the Tsunami Museum in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, which doubles as an emergency shelter for future disasters while memorializing the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething that came out in a number of papers is how we need to ensure that we don’t go back to what we did before,\u201d says Ripmeester. \u201cMoreover, the papers explore how we can help people understand structural and systemic racism in ways that both acknowledge the harm done and allow people to move forward with a sense of seeking justice for people who have been marginalized by collective memory.\u201d<\/p>\n He explains that monuments and other historic sites are places where memory is stored, just as memory is stored in archives, museums and school curricula. Their authoritative weight as well as the intertextuality of the narratives they represent tell a common story about identity \u2014 but historically, they are rarely inclusive.<\/p>\n \u201cThose with time and political, cultural, social and economic power determine what monuments are created, so when you look at a monument or you look at a historic site, you’re looking at a very specific manifestation of power,\u201d he says. \u201cSome groups have been completely left out of contributing to public identity, but we\u2019re starting to see that change. For example, in Vancouver, Jim Deva Plaza was built and named in honour of one of the pioneers of LGBTQ rights in the city.\u201d<\/p>\n In addition to co-hosting the workshop, Ripmeester also presented a paper co-written with Johnston about the contested memorial to Pte. Alexander Watson at St. Catharines city hall.<\/p>\n