What future for toppled statues?

Blog post by Meghan Tinsley, University of Manchester, UK; Sadia Habib, University of Manchester, UK; Chloe Peacock, University of Sheffield, UK; Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany; and Gary Younge, University of Manchester, UK
 
Toppling a monumental, public statue may be powerful, cathartic, or even jarring for those who witness it. As sites of memory and public art, statues are imposing, apparently permanent figures that claim a prominent place in both urban space and collective memory. Toppling these statues overthrows the appearance of stability and authority. It is at least partly because this act was so visually striking that images of cultural activists toppling statues were among the most iconic symbols of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the globe in the summer of 2020.
 
Far less public attention, however, has focused on what has happened to public space since the statues were toppled. Certainly, dethroning slavers and colonisers is an important first step of decolonising history, but it also introduces the question of who, or what, should replace their stories and voices. Similarly, toppling statues of slavers and colonisers in 2020 signalled the beginning of an equally fraught – and ongoing – debate over what to do with newly emptied pedestals and public squares. 

Our Identities article, ‘Toppling statues and making space: prospects for anti-racist cultural activism’, picks up at that point of the debate. We consider what happened to nine empty plinths across five countries after statues were removed or toppled. Among them are infamous cases—Rhodes in Cape Town, Colston in Bristol – as well as lesser known cases like Lincoln in Boston and Leopold II in Antwerp.
 
Whereas anti-racist cultural activists (that is, anti-racist activists who focus on cultural heritage) were largely united in their belief that statues of slavers and colonisers should fall, their opinions on the decisions that followed were more contentious. Some activists wanted the statues to be obliterated, and indeed, this was the outcome for two statues in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Others wanted the statues removed from the public eye, leading some statues to be stored in museum basements, or even (in the case of a Confederate statue in Lake Charles, Louisiana) moved to an undisclosed location until a decision could be reached. Perhaps the most common call, from cultural activists and local authorities alike, was to ‘put it in a museum’. Yet this, too, raised additional questions for stakeholders: Which museum should house the statue? Should it be displayed upright, in a position of honour, or laid horizontally and covered with anti-racist graffiti? What should the descriptive text say? And who, crucially, had the right to make all of these decisions?
 
Four years after the statues were toppled, these questions remain. Whilst none of the nine statues have returned to their former plinths, most do not yet have a permanent home, as stakeholders debate their future. Yet this, in itself, signals an important shift in public debates: after a statue is toppled, the horizon of public memory expands. Official histories are no longer set in stone; instead, ordinary people weigh in on how the past should be remembered and displayed. This may change over time, with rotating public art installations and temporary museum exhibitions. It is also not immune to racialised, classed, and gendered power dynamics: the financial resources and political will that exhibitions require mean that some stakeholders, including academics and public officials, are able to express and impose their views more loudly than others.
 
It is unlikely that any single future for toppled statues would be either desirable or feasible. In that vein, we caution against attempting to impose any singular narrative on contested public space. Equally, we reflect on the promise of empty plinths, which carry the memories of racist histories and the contested present, as well as the possibility of an anti-racist future.

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​Image credit: Bärbel Miemietz, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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Read the Identities article:
Tinsley, Meghan; Peacock, Chloe; Habib, Sadia; Ramsden-Karelse, Ruth; & Younge, Gary. (2024). Toppling statues and making space: prospects for anti-racist cultural activism. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2344938   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities: 

Introducing radical democratic citizenship: from practice to theory   OPEN ACCESS

The politics of identity: from potential to pitfalls, and symbols to substance

Power/identity/resistance