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.
There's a culture war, we're told. Or maybe it's a war on culture - a war with a deeper and more troubling history than you might think.
Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, colonialism and memory, Dan Hicks joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the acquisition of stolen art and ancestral human remains.
Part history, part biography, part excavation, Every Monument Will Fall pulls at a thread that runs through this history - from country houses in the Yorkshire Wolds to Caribbean plantations and from the battlefields of Crimea and the American Civil War to British colonial outposts in southern Ireland. The book holds the memorialisations of men like Cecil Rhodes and General Augustus Pitt-Rivers up against the writing of Sylvia Wynter, Stuart Hall and Ursula Le Guin, drawing together open secrets about dehumanisation and the redaction of public memory.
What emerges is a speculative history of inheritance, loss, collective mourning, and the possibility of a reconciliation that has not yet begun. This is a story about who gets named and who doesn't, who is remembered and who is forgotten; who has been treated as human and who has not.
Refusing to choose between pulling down every single statue, or holding onto every last vestige of a past that future generations could never change, Every Monument Will Fall makes the case for allowing monuments of all kinds to fall once in a while. The result is an urgent appeal to reassemble the fragments, listen to the silences, value life and humanity above material things - and to rebuild a new kind of memory culture.
About the Author
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. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, cultural memory, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan has authored and edited eight books, and has written for a wide variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph to The Times Literary Supplement, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Architectural Review and The Art Newspaper.
Industry 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
Hicks’ must-read book describes how it was possible for a human skull to be made into a drinking cup and used in a genteel Oxford college, well into the 21st century, as if empire were an eternal state of nature. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police.
-- Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of White Sight
