Overview

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. 'Powerful... Hicks is a gifted guide' Times Literary Supplement 'Thought-provoking, informative and vigorous' Observer 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 of all kinds 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.

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9781529152753

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Reviews

Hicks’ must-read book describes how it was possible for a human skull to be made into a drinking cup and used in a genteel Oxford college, well into the 21st century, as if empire were an eternal state of nature. Read it to see why the media adulation of aristocracy and monarchy conceals the long history of British state violence, slavery and racism. Read it to learn new ways to be anti-racist, abolitionist and to tell other stories than those commemorated by the monuments that surround us, from statues, to museums and the police. -- Nicholas Mirzoeff, author of WHITE SIGHT and Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU Steinhardt Every Monument Will Fall is an extraordinary intervention. If you want to understand the stakes and the limitations of contemporary conflict over culture and colonial history this bold, provocative book is an indispensable resource. -- Paul Gilroy

Author Information

Dan Hicks is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at Oxford University, Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. Dan has written widely on art, archaeology, architecture and anthropology for a variety of journals, magazines and newspapers, ranging from Art Review and Texte Zur Kunst to Architectural Review, Museums Journal and The Guardian. This is his second major authored book. Instagram/Bluesky- @ProfDanHicks

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