Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting

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The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn't even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities - and one that has a deeper history than you might think. Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums - including the one in which he is a curator. Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford - revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Reviews

Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource. -- Paul Gilroy

Author Bio

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. The author of eight books, he has written articles, essays and op-eds for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, from the Times Literary Supplement to Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Artnet, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The Independent.