Monuments of shameful histories should be removed and left to rot, says Erika Doss, a professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame.
Doss delivered a lecture focused on the movement to remove Confederate monuments from public places on campus Thursday.
The lecture, titled “Troubling Memorials: Reckoning with Problematic Public Art in America,” explored how public art becomes controversial as societies change and how those societies reckon with that controversy. Doss was quick to bring the current controversy regarding Confederate monuments into the discussion.
“Confederate monuments are at the top of the list when we think about troubling memorials today,” said Doss. “And partly, this is because there are so many of them.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has estimated that, while more than 100 Confederate monuments have been removed in recent years, at least 1,700 remain in place nationwide.
Both the existence and removal of these memorials have become flashpoints for controversy and even violence in recent years. On August 11 and 12, 2017, white supremacists and neo-Nazis gathered in Charlottesville for the now-infamous “Unite the Right” rally that resulted in the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer.
“Significantly, this ‘Unite the Right’ rally was held to protest the Charlottesville City Council’s decision to remove that city’s Confederate memorials and to rename a local park ‘Emancipation Park,’” said Doss.
But the presence of troubling monuments in the U.S. extends beyond symbols of the Confederacy. Doss also referenced the destruction of monuments to King George III during the American Revolution, one of which was melted down to make musket balls for Colonial troops.
The lecture also reflected on the Coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, when U.S. forces destroyed several monuments to the country’s then-leader Saddam Hussein.
“We have a heightened recognition of this, when certain examples of public art and that symbolic capital are perceived as the embodiment of histories, memories and politics that we deem abhorrent and treacherous,” Doss said about the destruction of monuments to Hussein. “Often, we choose to deface or remove that symbolic capital — erase it, render invisible its power, its influence.”
When society recognizes that a monument glorifies something terrible, it removes that monument from its place of prominence. Doss argued that Confederate monuments should be treated similarly but stopped short of suggesting that they be destroyed.
Instead, she proposed the statues be delivered to what she calls a “disgraced memorial park,” examples of which exist in Moscow, India and Taiwan.
“Removal paired with ruination distances monuments from their dominant symbolic authority, vanquishes their representative ideologies and permits audiences opportunities for felt experience on entirely different terms,” Doss said.
Doss’ proposal is simple: dump monuments of the Confederacy and of white supremacy in one location and to let them fall into ruin, taking them from places that convey power and importance and reducing them to what they are — relics of a shameful past. This way, she said, the history they represent is preserved without glorifying the ideologies they represent.
“Reckoning with troubling monuments in America today,” Doss said. “Might begin by reimagining them as ruins and usingtheir degradation and their decay as a prompt to rethink and reset out social and political priorities.”
