Every Monument Will Fall

The culture war is over. If you want it to be. It wasn''t even a culture war; it was a war on culture. A sustained attack, Dan Hicks argues, in the form of the weaponisation of civic museums, public art, and even universities - and one that has a deeper history than you might think. Tracing the origins of contemporary conflicts over art, heritage, memory, and colonialism, Every Monument Will Fall joins the dots between the building of statues, the founding of academic disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, and the warehousing of stolen art and human skulls in museums - including the one in which he is a curator. Part history, part biography, part excavation, the story runs from the Yorkshire wolds to the Crimean War, from southern Ireland to the frontline of the American Civil War, from the City of London to the University of Oxford - revealing enduring legacies of militarism, slavery, racism and white supremacy hardwired into the heart of our cultural institutions. Every Monument Will Fall offers an urgent reappraisal of how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past. Refusing to choose between pulling down every statue, or living in a past that we can never change, the book makes the case for allowing monuments to fall once in a while, even those that are hard to see as monuments, rebuilding a memory culture that is in step with our times.

Auteur
Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He has written widely on art, heritage, museums, colonialism, cultural memory, and the material culture of the recent past and the near-present. Dan has authored and edited eight books, and has written for a wide variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, from The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph to The Times Literary Supplement, Apollo Magazine, Art Review, Architectural Review and The Art Newspaper. Twitter/Instagram: @ProfDanHicks

Texte du rabat

Some historians write about the past as if they were erecting a monument, trying to breathe everlasting life into heroes. Such books often blend the subject with the author''s self-image, ratchetting and embedding old prejudices, as if each hagiographic turn of phrase is the turn of another steel screw sunk flush to fix a commemorative plaque that bears the name. Part Frankenstein, part Pygmalion, but rendered as words not things, such vicarious monuments to the author''s position and privilege, to their vision of civilisation anchored in the past, anchored in the bones of the dead, are executed not as if carving letters onto a tombstone or reading a eulogy, but as if slaughtering villagers in Afghanistan, starving millions in Benghal, fire-storming Dresden. They are written by tapping at the keyboard as if not just silencing the past, but speaking over the voices of the past. Voices the author wants the reader neither to hear nor to remember, blanked out in the lingering supersize shadow of the high-explosive narrative.

Every Monument Will Fall does the very opposite. It revitalises the genre of biography by producing the written equivalent of pulling down a statue - digging through the life of the Victorian archaeologist General Augustus Pitt-Rivers, dismantling the whole idea that whiteness is culturally superior.