Introduction: US Cities’ Agentic Role in Twenty-First-Century Memory and Monument Wars

Abstract

This introductory chapter situates our work at the nexus of urban studies, critical rhetoric, political geography, and memory studies, and presents readers with a view on cities as agentic actors that traverse various memoryscapes for strategic uses in the present. Assembling human and non-human actors across dense cityscapes, we set up our analyses of “monument wars” in New York, Charlottesville, and Montgomery with a posthuman view on rhetoric, agency, and memory.