Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In his pivotal study on ‘statuemania’ in France, Agulhon (1978:145) demonstrates that the construction of monuments belongs to the history of urban decoration. Indeed, the enlarged and aerated city of the 19th century called for creating monuments to fill and decorate the space. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (1983) shows that nations are created based on the imagination of a community: citizens are gathered around a shared past and a set of shared values derived from it. Thanks to this collective memory, heterogeneous subjects recognise their membership in the nation as a unifying project, the belief in a shared origin legitimising the acceptance of a common present and future. Monuments, imposing objects built to remain, are part of the state paraphernalia aimed at inscribing the nation’s shared history in the public space. Hence, statues celebrating colonisation were built both to fill the space and assert the importance of colonial values for the nation’s development. This narrative is, however, disrupted when looking at the specific histories of those who ordered and built these monuments. The talk I would like to deliver will be based on my initial archive findings – looking at monuments built by France and Britain in their Caribbean colonies. I will first shed light on what type of emotions and feelings have animated those who created these colonial landscapes. Examining these feelings, I will then establish how they contrast with the way post-colonial and racialised communities feel the city today and highlight the power of these emotional responses.