"The Civic Work of Monuments," the Pembroke Seminar for 2025-26, will be led by Juliet Hooker, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence in Political Science.

Seminar description:

In her memoir, Lemon Swamp and Other Places, Mamie Garvin Fields [1888–1987], a Black clubwoman, public school teacher, and native Charlestonian, described the complex response of the city’s African American population to the decision by white Charlestonians to build a monument honoring pro-slavery advocate John C. Calhoun. Black Charlestonians understood very clearly the profound civic work those who put up the monument wished to accomplish through it: “As you passed by, here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you … you may not be a slave, but I am back to see you stay in your place. … I believe white people were talking to us about Jim Crow through that statue.” Nevertheless, Black residents, who could not prevent the statue from being built given their political disenfranchisement at the time, found ways to express their disdain for Calhoun even within the strictures of Jim Crow and post-Reconstruction racist violence. “Blacks took that statue personally … [we] didn’t like it. Even the … children didn’t like it. We used to carry something with us if we knew we would be passing that way in order to deface that statue—scratch up the coat, break the watch chain, try to knock off the nose.” The defacement of the statue was so pronounced that it had to be moved out of reach of Black residents: “Children and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him way high, so we couldn’t get to him. That’s where he stands today, on a tall pedestal. He’s so far away now …  you can hardly tell what he looks like.” The Calhoun monument no longer stands, even way up high where it was safe from unsanctioned contextualization by Black Charlestonians; it was removed in 2020 during the racial justice protests that swept the country. But the contestation around Calhoun’s statue illustrates the civic work of monuments, the way they speak and the way citizens speak back to them. 

In this yearlong seminar, we will grapple with the civic work of monuments. Monuments are a form of “public speech,” according to Sanford Levinson. They are also examples of what Robin Bernstein calls “scriptive things”: elements of material culture that structure human actions. It thus matters who is able to speak through public monuments and what stories about the national past, present, and future we choose to tell through them. As Kirk Savage has argued, “to commemorate is to seek historical closure.” Yet, although monuments seek to enshrine a particular account of the past, citizens can resist their intended lessons, as Black Charlestonians did. Monuments are didactic, but their meanings are not set in stone. This agonistic potential is vividly captured by Socrates’ description (in Plato’s Meno) of the works of the sculptor Daedalus as so lifelike that they seem poised to “play truant and run away.” Monuments seek to fasten the political imaginations of citizens, but they can also be made to play truant, their speech hijacked and transformed into something other than didactic monologue. 

Debates over public commemoration and the kind of narratives we choose to etch onto the public landscape matter because they depict and shape the body politic. The Mellon Foundation’s Monument Project, for example, is an ambitious effort to reimagine the US public landscape, to correct the fact that “our public realm disproportionately celebrates a limited few and overlooks the multitudes who have made and shaped our society, limiting our understanding of our collective history.” Memorialization has privileged certain stories and members of the body politic. According to a recent audit of public monuments in the US by Monument Lab, for example, the list of Top 50 figures commemorated included no US-born Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, or self-identified LGBTQ+ people, only five who were Black/Indigenous, and only three women. Looking at patterns of public commemoration worldwide, we see a preponderance of war memorials and male citizen soldier monuments. The very form of monuments thus reflects a certain gendered conception of the citizen and of the important civic virtues worth honoring and remembering, such as heroic valor and sacrifice in war. At the same time, official public memories can enshrine sanitized versions of the past. The most significant force behind Confederate monument building in the US, for example, were white Southern women who were members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. And the Stonewall Riots in 1969, a watershed event in the history of LGBTQ+ rights, are now commemorated globally via Gay Pride parades that seldom acknowledge either the police violence that precipitated the rebellion, or the key role of trans/working class/people of color in the uprising. While these examples are drawn from the history of the US, similar dynamics and patterns are salient in other national contexts. The aim of the seminar is thus to consider the civic work of monuments and commemoration globally.  

How does public art shape the political imagination and civic practices of citizens? Whose stories have we told and to what effects? How have citizens experienced, ignored, or contested efforts to shape the public landscapes of their cities, nations, and other locations such as universities? What should we do about oppressive monuments and disparities in public commemoration? How can we reimagine memorialization to tell a more capacious array of stories? What form can/should public monuments take? We will read the history of commemoration in light of Black political thought, Indigenous political thought, feminist theory, and queer theory, while analyzing the work of artists and activists who seek to reimagine who, what, and how we choose to remember.  

Drawing on a wide variety of fields and disciplines, such as political theory, philosophy, history, art and art history, visual culture, and anthropology, as well as the work of artists, philanthropic institutions, activists, and local and national governments, we will explore histories of commemoration and contestation, keeping in mind that public monuments are palimpsests of memory that seek to tell some stories and drown out others. Because commemoration shapes our everyday experience and local public landscapes, we will pay attention to memorialization at Brown and in the United States. At the same time, questions of monuments and commemoration are relevant globally, as societies grapple with how to remember unjust pasts, as in the case of the Holocaust in Germany and victims of state violence in Latin America and elsewhere. The politics of commemoration has also played an important role historically in official nationalisms and in moments of political upheaval when authoritarian and democratizing political projects seek to make use of the past. Projects that take up these issues in a variety of national/geographical contexts or that adopt a comparative approach are especially welcome. Seminar participants may come from the humanities, social sciences, arts, and sciences. 

The Pembroke Seminar meets on Wednesdays from 10:00 am – 12:30 pm EST.

For more information contact: Pembroke_Center@brown.edu or phone 401-863-2643.

Banner image attribution: Soniakapadia, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons