By Jack Bankowsky, Thomas Crow, David Getsy, Andrea Gyorody, Nate Lippens, Sianne Ngai, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Purtill Family Business, Kathryn Scanlan, Barry Schwabsky, Ira Silverberg, Joe Westmoreland, John Yau, Mi You
My Selection: Dan Hicks, Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting (Hutchinson Heinemann. 592 pages)
How times change. In 2002, the directors of several of the largest museums in Europe and the United States, among the most consequential and revered voices in scholarship, told us that the so-called universal museums had a kind of manifest destiny to keep the best examples of the world’s art and cultural heritage in perpetuity; never mind that a good portion of them were taken through spectacular acts of military violence, diplomatic subterfuge, suspicious bargains, ingenious chicanery, and simple or elaborate theft. The defenders of institutions mostly forged by imperialism had reason to raise the ramparts against the advancing hordes from the postcolony. In 2020, Dan Hicks, the British archaeologist and curator at Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum, a veritable insider, fired a discursive bazooka against imperial collections in his wickedly titled book The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, focusing his lens on looted treasures of the Benin Kingdom held in British museums. That book called for the return of everything in museums that had been stolen or looted by agents of empire and their accomplices to their original owners. Now, in his latest book, Hicks wields his critical sledgehammer against one of the most visible subjects of the contemporary culture wars: monuments.
As the book’s title proclaims, “Every monument will fall.” What does Hicks mean by this? Well, it’s complicated. Like the dogged archaeologist he is, Hicks meticulously digs through the layered and fraught histories of monumental sculptures and structures built by empire’s agents and institutions for self-perpetuation, often at the expense and in suppression of subject peoples’ imaginaries and aspirations of selfhood. Then, he proposes the deconstruction—or, better, demolishing—of the logic, politics, and ideologies behind the creation, maintenance, and mythologizing of hegemonic monuments and their enabling institutions. In this passionate and searing call for cleansing the hurtful and oppressive accretions of history that we call monuments, Hicks pulls no punches.
Chika Okeke-Agulu
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