(Un)drawing Belgium’s colonial monuments: Comics’ engagement with decolonial debates

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1185-1207
Author(s):  
Véronique Bragard ◽  
Alicia Lambert
Keyword(s):  
Public Monuments

As a response to the debates around colonial statues and glorifying forms of memorialization, comics provide one with plurivocal possibilities to decolonize monuments and epistemologies. This article analyzes a number of recent comics/panels (Charles & Bihel, Stassen, Kannemeyer, Baruti, Lambé, a.o.) that de-center perspectives so as to visibilize the violence of the Belgian colonial system that public monuments invisibilize. This analysis focuses on the medium-specific features that depetrify (in)famous statues, draw back to iconic figures like the Leopard-Man, and redraw iconic sites with multilayered temporalities and geographies to enable viewers to move away from one-sided perspectives and consider present forms of discriminations as legacies of colonialism.

Dismantling White Privilege: The Black Lives Matter Movement and Environmental Justice in Canada

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Teelucksingh
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Critical Race Theory ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Jim Crow Era

On August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Virginia, alt-right/White supremacy groups and Black Lives Matter (BLM) supporters came face-to-face regarding what to do about public monuments that celebrate key figures from slavery and the Jim Crow era. White supremacists and White nationalists did not hide their racist ideologies as they demanded that their privileged place in history not be erased. The BLM movement, which challenges state-sanctioned anti-Black racism, was ready to confront themes of White discontent and reverse racism, critiques of political correctness, and the assumption that racialized people should know their place and be content to be the subordinate other.It is easy to frame the events in Charlottesville as indicative of US-specific race problems. However, a sense that White spaces should prevail and an ongoing history of anti-Black racism are not unique to the United States. The rise of Canadian activism under the BLM banner also signals a movement to change Canadian forms of institutional racism in policing, education, and the labor market. This article responds to perceptions that the BLM movement has given insufficient attention to environmental concerns (Pellow 2016; Halpern 2017). Drawing on critical race theory as a conceptual tool, this article focuses on the Canadian context as part of the author’s argument in favor of greater collaboration between BLM and the environmental justice (EJ) movement in Canada. This article also engages with the common stereotype that Blacks in Canada have it better than Blacks in the United States.

Crossing the Pomerium

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Koortbojian
Keyword(s):  
Social Practices ◽  
Civic Life ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Religion And Law ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
The Military ◽  
The City

The ancient Romans famously distinguished between civic life in Rome and military matters outside the city—a division marked by the pomerium, an abstract religious and legal boundary that was central to the myth of the city's foundation. This book explores, by means of images and texts, how the Romans used social practices and public monuments to assert their capital's distinction from its growing empire, to delimit the proper realms of religion and law from those of war and conquest, and to establish and disseminate so many fundamental Roman institutions across three centuries of imperial rule. The book probes such topics as the appearance in the city of Romans in armor, whether in representation or in life, the role of religious rites on the battlefield, and the military image of Constantine on the arch built in his name. Throughout, the book reveals how, in these instances and others, the ancient ideology of crossing the pomerium reflects the efforts of Romans not only to live up to the ideals they had inherited, but also to reconceive their past and to validate contemporary practices during a time when Rome enjoyed growing dominance in the Mediterranean world. The book explores a problem faced by generations of Romans—how to leave and return to hallowed city ground in the course of building an empire.

Competing Visions

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (3) ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
Matthew G. Stanard
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Free State ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Congo Free State

Studies of the visual culture of the Congo Free State (CFS) have focused overwhelmingly yet narrowly on the “atrocity” photograph used to criticize Leopold II’s colonial misrule. This article presents a new picture of the visual culture of Leopold II’s Congo Free State by examining a broader, more heterogeneous range of fin de siècle images of varied provenance that comprised the visual culture of the CFS. These include architecture, paintings, African artwork, and public monuments, many of which were positive, pro-Leopoldian images emphasizing a favorable view of colonialism. The visual culture of the CFS was imbued with recurring themes of violence, European heroism, and anti-Arab sentiment, and emerged from a unique, transnational, back-and-forth process whereby Leopold and his critics instrumentalized images to counter each other and achieve their goals.

Jozef Duysans gevecht met den engel. Schermutselingen rond het graf van Paul Van Ostaijen

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 299-328
Author(s):  
Armand Van Nimmen
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Nineteen Thirties ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Deep Waters ◽  
Original Idea ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

Deze bijdrage handelt over de perikelen in de jaren dertig rond het plan om het lichamelijk overschot van de Vlaamse dichter Paul Van Ostaijen over te brengen uit het klein Waals dorp waar hij in vergetelheid begraven lag onder een houten kruis naar zijn geboortestad Antwerpen. Daar zou hij herbegraven worden op de stedelijke begraafplaats Schoonselhof onder een gepaste denksteen. Zoals meermaals het geval is bij het oprichten van publieke monumenten, verliepen – wegens onderling gekibbel en gebrek aan financiële middelen – meer dan zes jaren vooraleer de oorspronkelijke idee kon verwezenlijkt worden.Aandacht in dit artikel gaat naar Jozef Duysan, bewonderaar van de dichter en uitgesproken flamingant, die een cruciale rol speelde in de conceptie en uitvoering van het initiatief. Ten slotte beschrijft het artikel hoe deze nu bijna totaal vergeten man tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog in het vaarwater geraakte van de collaboratie, fungeerde als directeur van het Arbeidsamt in Antwerpen, na de oorlog veroordeeld werd en jaren lang ondergedoken leefde in die stad.________Jozef Duysan’s battle with the angel: Skirmishes around the tomb of Paul Van OstaijenThis contribution reports the vicissitudes concerning the plan dating from the nineteen thirties to transfer the mortal remains of the Flemish poet Paul Van Ostaijen from the small Walloon village where he was buried in oblivion under a wooden cross to Antwerp, the city of his birth. He was to be reburied there on the municipal cemetery Schoonselhof under a fitting memorial headstone. As frequently happens on the occasion of creating public monuments, more than six years passed before the original idea could be carried out – because of internal bickering and lack of financial means. This article focuses on Jozef Duysan, an admirer of the poet and an explicit Flemish militant, who played a crucial role in the concept and realisation of the initiative. In conclusion the article recounts how this man who has been practically completely forgotten now,  ventured into the deep waters of the collaboration during the Second World War, how he acted as director of the Arbeidsamt in Antwerp and how he was convicted after the war and lived for many years in hiding in that city.

Roma and Constantinopolis in Late-Antique Art From 312 to 365

1947 ◽  
Vol 37 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. C. Toynbee
Keyword(s):  
Religious Belief ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Complex Problem ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Antique ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
The One ◽  
Independent Existence ◽  
Res Publica

Little more than a decade after Constantine's conversion to Christianity the ancient gods and goddesses of the Graeco-Roman pantheon ceased to appear upon the official coinage and public monuments of the Empire. The personifications—Victoria, Virtus, Pax, Libertas, Securitas, etc., and the ‘geographical’ figures of Res Publica, Roma, Tellus, cities, countries, and tribes—remained. Yet some of these had, up to that very time, received, like the Olympians, their shrines and altars and other honours associated with pagan cultus; and we ask ourselves how it was that a Christian State, while rejecting the one, could retain and ‘baptize’ the other. The answer to this question, which involves the whole complex problem of the nature of pagan religious belief under the later Empire, can only be tentatively suggested here. The pantheon had eventually to go because its denizens had possessed, for the great majority of pagans, a real, objective, and independent existence.

HEROIC DEMOCRACY IN HIGH RELIEF: POLITICAL LEGITIMACY AND MONUMENTAL IMAGERY IN FIFTH-CENTURY ATHENS

Ramus ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 169-188
Author(s):  
Mark Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Ethical Life ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Civic Spaces ◽  
Verbal Content ◽  
Political Understanding

In recent decades, political theorists have significantly revised their understanding of Athenian democratic thinking. By opening up the canon, shifting their focus from abstract principles to democratic practices, and employing an increasingly diverse range of interpretive approaches, they have collectively reconstructed a more robust and multi-faceted account of the Athenian democratic public sphere. Despite its ecumenical ambitions and manifest successes, however, this project has been fettered by a singular focus on language as the medium of democratic politics. As can be seen in the gloss of one of its contributors, this body of work effectively limits the democratic public sphere to ‘the domain in which judgments and public opinion are shaped and formed through speech’. This logocentric demarcation of democratic practice does not harmonize well with our own experience of modern politics, however, where public monuments, political imagery, and civic spaces play a critical role in the formation of political understanding and judgment, as well as starting points for discussion, debate, and disagreement. It seems similarly out of tune with what we know about the ancient Greeks, who demonstrated a readiness to move between visual and verbal content in reflecting on political and ethical life, and who developed the very idea of theôria out of an extension of the process of seeing. If, as political theorists, we can temper our habitual logocentrism and learn to attend more closely to the visual culture of Athenian democracy, we stand to add new dimensions to our collective reconstruction of the democratic public sphere and, in turn, to enhance our understanding of those texts that have long preoccupied our attention.

Heráldica gentilicia de Alcaraz : Biografía urbana, Siglos XVI-XVII

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elvira Valero de la Rosa
Keyword(s):  
Medieval History ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Urban Heritage ◽  
The City

Alcaraz, with a vast historical and patrimonial legacy, has public monuments of great beauty. Its weight in medieval history was due to the strategic place it occupied in the Reconquest. It became an ideal city for the emergence and consolidation of a powerful nobility. This work constitutes the first attempt to identify the gentile heraldry of Alcaraz, the urban heritage of the local elites, the topographical evolution of the city and the genealogy of the most notorious noblemen.

Sugar Plantations in the French West Indies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth G. Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
West Indies ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Archaeological Research ◽  
Public Monuments ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
History Of ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
Official Recognition

The French West Indian colonial possessions of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint Domingue were among the most valuable overseas European colonies due to the production of the tropical commodities of coffee, cocoa, and in particular, sugar. The crops were raised on plantations through the labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans and their descendants between the mid 17th century and the mid 19th century. In spite of the importance of this heritage to the history of the French colonial enterprise, and more importantly, the history of the descendant populations, commemoration of this chapter of history has only recently begun. This commemoration includes public monuments, official recognition, and archaeological research. Historical archaeology contributes a perspective that sheds light on otherwise undocumented or poorly-documented aspects of the slavery era, such as the organization of villages, the housing within them, and the ways in which enslaved people saw to their needs for food.

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