Colonial Violence and Monuments in Global History

Cynthia C. Prescott is Professor of History at the University of North Dakota, USA. She is author of Pioneer Mother Monuments: Constructing Cultural Memory (2019), and Gender and Generation on the Far Western Frontier (2007).Janne Lahti is a historian working at the University of Helsinki as Academy of Finland Research Fellow. He has published seven books, including Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film, with Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (2020), and The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives (2019).

"In recent years, debates over historical statues and monuments have been central to the struggle of former colonial powers, and former colonies, to come to term with their past – or to disavow it. With a genuinely global scope, this timely and exciting collection of case-studies examine how memorials both conceal and reveal contested histories of colonial violence, which refuse to be peacefully consigned to the past."Kim A. Wagner, University of London, UK"The global approach utilized by Cynthia Prescott and Janne Lahti reinforces the relationality of violence, monuments, memory, and legacy across time and place. This volume makes visible those histories and peoples erased by colonial violence and later settler colonial monuments. Prescott and Lahti’s volume provides necessary context for current contestations over public space and memory. Monuments matter. This volume is a must-read."Elise Boxer, University of South Dakota, USA"This compelling collection offers a truly global perspective on the relationship between colonial violence and monumentality. Contributions by scholars and community advocates map the ways colonial and postcolonial monuments have celebrated, concealed, and embodied the violence of empire in North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia over the last two centuries. Always insistent on the specific histories of both monuments and the acts they commemorate, these essays go beyond simple binaries to trace the multiple, shifting actions and experiences of colonizers, settlers, postcolonial states, and Indigenous peoples through time."Jennifer Sessions, University of Virginia, USA

• Introduction: Looking Globally at Monuments, Violence, and Colonial Legacies 1. Visualizing Juan de Oñate’s Colonial Legacies in New Mexico 2. De-Colonizing Australia’s Commemorative Landscape: “Truth-Telling,” Contestation and the Dialogical Turn 3. The Pinjarra Massacre in the Age of the Statue Wars 4. Südwester Reiter: Fear, Belonging, and Settler Colonial Violence in Namibia 5. South Africa’s Voortrekker Monument and 1820 Settlers National Monument: Monuments to Cultural Violence 6. The Ajnala Massacre of 1857 and the Politics of Colonial Violence and Commemoration in Contemporary India 7. Belgian Monuments of Colonial Violence: the Commemoration of Martyred Missionaries