Monuments Objects Histories

This book offers both an insider and outsider perspective, moving from a period that saw the consolidation of western expertise and custodianship of India's "antiquities," to the projection over the twentieth century of varying regional, nativist and national claims around the country's archaeological, architectural and artistic inheritance, into a present time that has pitted these objects and fields within a highly contentious politics of nationhood.

"Monuments, objects, histories surveys the practices of archaeology, art history, and museums in nineteenth- and twentieth-century India. It looks at processes by which 'lost pasts' came to be produced in India. Such lost pasts, the author shows, came to be imagined around a corpus of monuments, archaeological relics, and art objects." "In brief, this book traces the framing of an official national canon of Indian art through different periods, showing how the workings of disciplines and institutions have been linked with the authority of the nation." --book cover.

Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects explores monuments as political, psychical, social, and mystical objects. Incorporating autoethnography, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and queer ecology, Houlton argues for a radical, interdisciplinary approach to our monument-culture. Tracing historical developments in monuments alongside contemporary movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter, Houlton provides an in-depth critique of monument sites, as well as new critical and conceptual methodologies for thinking across the field. Alongside analysis of monuments to the Holocaust, colonial figures, and LGBTQIA+ subjects, this book provides new critical engagements with the work of D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Eve Sedgwick, and others. Houlton traces the potential for monuments to exert great influence over our sense of self, nation, community, sexuality, and place in the world. Exploring the psychic and physical spaces these objects occupy—their aesthetics, affects, politics, and powers—this book considers how monuments can challenge our identities, beliefs, and our very notions of remembrance. The interdisciplinary nature of Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects means that it is ideally placed to intervene across several critical fields, particularly museum and heritage studies. It will also prove invaluable to those engaged in the study of monuments, psychoanalytic object relations, decolonization, queer ecology, radical death studies, and affect theory.

Exploring the relationship between museums and biographies, this collection of essays examines examples from the early 19th century to the present day.

A leading expert on the past, present, and future of public monuments in America. An urgent and fractious national debate over public monuments has erupted in America. Some people risk imprisonment to tear down long-ignored hunks of marble; others form armed patrols to defend them. Why do we care so much about statues? Which ones should stay up and which should come down? Who should make these decisions, and how? Erin L. Thompson, the country’s leading expert in the tangled aesthetic, legal, political, and social issues involved in such battles, brings much-needed clarity in Smashing Statues. She lays bare the turbulent history of American monuments and its abundant ironies, from the enslaved man who helped make the statue of Freedom that tops the United States Capitol, to the fervent Klansman fired from sculpting the world’s largest Confederate monument—who went on to carve Mount Rushmore. And she explores the surprising motivations behind contemporary flashpoints, including the toppling of a statue of Columbus at the Minnesota State Capitol, the question of who should be represented on the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, and the decision by a museum of African American culture to display a Confederate monument removed from a public park. Written with great verve and informed by a keen sense of American history, Smashing Statues gives readers the context they need to consider the fundamental questions for rebuilding not only our public landscape but our nation as a whole: Whose voices must be heard, and whose pain must remain private?

Building Histories offers innovative accounts of five medieval monuments in Delhi—the Red Fort, Rasul Numa Dargah, Jama Masjid, Purana Qila, and the Qutb complex—tracing their modern lives from the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Mrinalini Rajagopalan argues that the modern construction of the history of these monuments entailed the careful selection, manipulation, and regulation of the past by both the colonial and later postcolonial states. Although framed as objective “archival” truths, these histories were meant to erase or marginalize the powerful and persistent affective appropriations of the monuments by groups who often existed outside the center of power. By analyzing these archival and affective histories together, Rajagopalan works to redefine the historic monument—far from a symbol of a specific past, the monument is shown in Building Histories to be a culturally mutable object with multiple stories to tell.

This collection of newly published essays examines our relationship to physical objects that invoke, commemorate, and honor the past. The recent destruction of cultural heritage in war and controversies over Civil War monuments in the US have foregrounded the importance of artifacts that embody history. The book invites us to ask: How do memorials convey their meanings? What is our responsibility for the preservation or reconstruction of historically significant structures? How should we respond when the public display of a monument divides a community? This anthology includes coverage of the destruction of Palmyra and the Bamiyan Buddhas, the loss of cultural heritage through war and natural disasters, the explosive controversies surrounding Confederate-era monuments, and the decay of industry in the U.S. Rust Belt. The authors consider issues of preservation and reconstruction, the nature of ruins, the aesthetic and ethical values of memorials, and the relationship of cultural memory to material artifacts that remain from the past. Written by a leading group of philosophers, art historians, and archeologists, the 23 chapters cover monuments and memorials from Dubai to Detroit, from the instant destruction of Hiroshima to the gradual sinking of Venice.

The essays in this volume bring together historians and anthropologists to reflect on the place of history within present-day conditions. The central focus here is on aspects of the popular, on the ways in which the popular relates to the scientific, the professional, the aesthetic, the religious, the legal and the political. These essays represent a critique of the disciplinary practices of history. They examine the historian's practices and assumptions, being mainly concerned with finding a set of practices of history-writing that are both truthful and ethical. They are united by the desire to find a way out of the self-constructed cage of scientific history that has made historians wary of the popular. In his introduction, Partha Chatterjee spells out some of the requirements for this new analysis of the popular. He stresses the fact that in contemporary industrializing societies the popular should not be taken to be a homogeneous mass. On the contrary, he states, an awareness of the variety and innovativeness of the contemporary popular could rejuvenate academic historiography.