Maria Grever - Böcker

In 1898, the year Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was inaugurated, five hundred women organized an enormous public exhibition showcasing women’s contributions to Dutch society as workers in a strikingly broad array of professions. The National Exhibition of Women’s Labor, held in The Hague, was attended by more than ninety thousand visitors. Maria Grever and Berteke Waaldijk consider the exhibition in the international contexts of women’s history, visual culture, and imperialism. A comprehensive social history, Transforming the Public Sphere describes the planning and construction of the Exhibition of Women’s Labor and the event itself-the sights, the sounds, and the smells-as well as the role of exhibitions in late-nineteenth-century public culture. The authors discuss how the 1898 exhibition displayed the range and variety of women’s economic, intellectual, and artistic roles in Dutch culture, including their participation in such traditionally male professions as engineering, diamond-cutting, and printing and publishing. They examine how people and goods from the Dutch colonies were represented, most notably in an extensive open-air replica of a “Javanese village.” Grever and Waaldijk reveal the tensions the exhibition highlighted: between women of different economic classes; between the goal of equal rights for women and the display of imperial subjects and spoils; and between socialists and feminists, who competed fiercely with one another for working women’s support. Transforming the Public Sphere explores an event that served as the dress rehearsal for advances in women’s public participation during the twentieth century.

In the new millennium, many public monuments around the world have become the target of protests as part of social movements' struggles against inequality and discrimination. Despite research into the significance of toppled statues or damaged monuments and the motives of activists, little attention has been paid to the extent to which iconoclastic activism changes the narratives of public spaces or landscapes of memory. This Element approaches current conflicts over public monuments as an attempt to transform the mnemonic regime of public spaces. It examines global cases involving colonialism, Black slavery, world wars, and women's oppression. Using theoretical concepts, such as monumental narrativity, necropolitical space, white innocence, and the implicated subject, four current contexts of contestations will be highlighted: the fabric of landscapes of memory; the relationship between the living and the dead of a community; the power of visual language, iconography, and multiplication; the importance of dialogical monuments.

In the new millennium, many public monuments around the world have become the target of protests as part of social movements' struggles against inequality and discrimination. Despite research into the significance of toppled statues or damaged monuments and the motives of activists, little attention has been paid to the extent to which iconoclastic activism changes the narratives of public spaces or landscapes of memory. This Element approaches current conflicts over public monuments as an attempt to transform the mnemonic regime of public spaces. It examines global cases involving colonialism, Black slavery, world wars, and women's oppression. Using theoretical concepts, such as monumental narrativity, necropolitical space, white innocence, and the implicated subject, four current contexts of contestations will be highlighted: the fabric of landscapes of memory; the relationship between the living and the dead of a community; the power of visual language, iconography, and multiplication; the importance of dialogical monuments.

This volume comprises a broad interdisciplinary examination of the many different approaches by which contemporary scholars record our history.