Contesting monuments: Heritage and historical geographies of inequality, an introduction

Abstract

This paper introduces a virtual special issue that explores how monuments have been contested in the past and how they continue to be so in the present. A survey of papers published in this journal from the 1990s to the early-2000s demonstrates an ongoing and rich interest in the interconnections between nationalism, landscape and ritual, with some emphasis on resistance but little sense of the contemporary lives of these historic monuments. Broader geographical scholarship in the mid-2000s evidenced the memory boom that was taking place across the discipline, beyond historical geography. A second survey of papers in this journal, published from 2012 to 2021, evidences a richer engagement with post-colonial, post-Soviet and post-slavery periods and perspectives, and with a broader range of sites beyond Europe and North America. More recent scholarship has focused on participatory geography, calls for statues to fall, and for more experimental, non-representational methods. This introduction concludes by summarising the papers in this special issue and reflecting on the relationships between monuments and contestation that they create, namely: monuments to contestation; the historic contestation of monuments; and the ongoing contestation of monuments as heritage spaces (attacks and felling, retaining and explaining, re-using, creating counter-monuments, artistically re-symbolising and re-imagining monuments, and contestatory scholarship).