Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue or living in a past that we can never change, Every Monument makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall, once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, to rebuild a memory culture that is in step with our times.
Following on from the success of his New York Times bestselling and award-winning Brutish Museums, this ambitious new work roves across history, biography, archaeology and anthropology in order to shine a light on the troubling legacies of militarism, slavery and white supremacy that are hardwired into the heart of our institutions. Hicks interrogates the culture war, arguing it was really just a war on culture, a sustained attack in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums and spaces, public art, and even universities, and one that has a deeper history than we may realise.
Every Monument Will Fall recognises that we hold onto what we collectively choose to from the past, and we choose who to remember and what to preserve. We need to reconnect with ideas of heritage that allow change to happen, objects to be returned once in a while, and monuments to be replaced or moved from time to time.
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College. Over the past twenty years Dan has published widely on colonialism, heritage, museums, art and culture, and has written for a range of newspapers and magazines from The Guardian to the Daily Telegraph, and from The Art Newspaper to Architectural Review. Including recent op-eds in the national broadsheets:
You may also like the following events from Five Leaves Bookshop:
- This Tuesday, 14th October, 07:00 pm, A Graphic Biography of Jane Austen, with Kate Evans in Nottingham
- This Saturday, 18th October, 11:00 am, Surrender and other work, with Cathy Grindrod @ Mickleover Library, Derby in Derby
- This Sunday, 19th October, 04:30 pm, The Ireland of Edna O’Brien with Deirdre O’Byrne in Nottingham
Also check out other
Arts events in Nottingham.
