Monuments as Cultural and Critical Objects

This book traces historical developments in monuments alongside contemporary movements such as Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter. It 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. This book traces the potential for monuments to exert great influence over our sense of self, nation, community, sexuality, and place in the world. Explores the psychic and physical spaces these objects occupy—their aesthetics, affects, politics, and powers.

The interdisciplinary nature of the book 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.