The Afterlives of Monuments

Cherry, Deborah

doi:10.1080/02666030.2013.772800

Cited by 15 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…They are simultaneously indexes of, and monuments to, the ongoing development of the city, of action to monitor public expenditure, mitigate against corruption, and deepen democracy. As monuments degraded by forces of decay and disintegration, they require that these processes of citizens’ vigilance and remediation be entered into and in the process develop what Cherry calls ‘afterlives’ as their continued existence becomes a site of contest or collaboration by actors ‘as much concerned with projections of a future, as with reconstructions of the past or mnemonic recollection’ (: 1). To further flesh out how the materiality and temporal orientation of the signs index the technomoral politics of transparency and accountability, it is worth considering the recent history of RTI activism in Delhi.…”

Section: Searching For Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeking signs of transparency: audit, materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

Webb

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

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In New Delhi, the Chief Information Commissioner has ordered that municipal councillors should 'proactively disclose' details of the amounts spent on public works via Hindi-language noticeboards displayed in every city ward. As 'appropriate' technology designed to reach out to the common people, the noticeboards are part of an ongoing technomoral project to develop and democratize citizen engagement with urban governance. An audit of the noticeboards carried out by Information Commission officials and 'right to information' activists reveals that many are badly positioned or assembled from inappropriate materials. As such, they are judged to be unreliable actants in the project to prefigure a more open and transparent city administration. A focus on the materiality and temporal orientation of the noticeboards, however, reveals them to be productive in other ways. We come to understand the noticeboards as monuments to earlier projects of active citizenship and as ongoing sites of contest or collaboration between actors concerned with their audit and remediation.

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Section: Searching For Signsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeking signs of transparency: audit, materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

Webb

2019

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…As a part of the symbolic nation, monuments have often been studied as public reflections of mnemonic practices and collective memories (Cherry, 2013; Schwartz, 1982; Wagner‐Pacifici & Schwartz, 1991; Young, 1994), national identity (Forest & Johnson, 2002; Schwartz, 1991) or political programmes and ideologies (Cummings, 2013). Focusing on the changing interpretations of monuments over time, or how they may be used to promote or legitimate political regimes, these studies often consider monuments after they have been created 5 .…”

Section: Theoretical Orientations Methods and Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

O'Shea

2023

Nations and Nationalism

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Scholars of nationalism have long looked to material forms of symbolic power to understand the politics and cultures of nations, and national monuments specifically have been studied as reflections of ideological programmes of political regimes. However, these approaches have paid insufficient attention to processes of creation. Given the importance of material symbols as sites through which the nation is understood, I argue that analysing the dynamics of creation expands our understanding of symbolic nation making. Using the case of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and focusing on moments of creation and the actors involved in them, I build a conceptual framework for understanding the construction of national symbols on the ground based on three interconnected and co‐constituting dynamics: spatial, temporal and aesthetic/semiotic. Using this framework, I demonstrate how meaning and materiality are related to one another both as component and consequent in the creation of national monuments and how it is their very imperfection as material representations that provides the context for the nation to emerge as a category of discourse.

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“…Contemporary understandings of monumentation are broader; they include various representations of cultures, as well as artistic depictions of certain historical events and peoples. Therefore, the term “monument” is treated as an umbrella concept that includes several subsets, one of which is iconography (Cherry, 2013).…”

Section: Debriefing Monumentationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Solidifying identity discourse through the politicized monumentation of struggle

Panossian

2022

Digest Mid East Studies

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This article investigates contemporary examples of monumentation and the extent to which they solidify and reproduce a politicized discourse on identities. Focusing predominantly on the representation of refugees and migrants, the article is broken down into four sections, the first of which looks into the challenges of monumentation and the discourse it represents. The second part includes three case studies, each representing a different vestige of the struggle with the discourse propagated by certain monuments. The core of the argument concerns the parameters of social representation of the suffering subject, be it the refugee, the asylum seeker, their mother, or the colonial subject. I propose an adaptation of Fairclough's model of language and power to include monuments as replicas of texts which can be analyzed at word, discursive and social levels.

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The Afterlives of Monuments

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Seeking signs of transparency: audit, materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

Seeking signs of transparency: audit, materiality, and monuments to active citizenship in New Delhi

The nation in bronze and granite: Creating national monuments in post‐Soviet Bishkek

Solidifying identity discourse through the politicized monumentation of struggle

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