ABSTRACT
The killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis led to sustained protests, rallies and public outcry against systemic racism in the US. People turned out in public spaces, and they also took action to contest and transform those public spaces both literally and symbolically. What these recent flash points have in common is that they are using the heritage landscape of the city – its collection of commemorative street names, places and monuments – as a site of contestation. Why has the heritage landscape, typically part of the unobtrusive backdrop of urban space, become such a locus of collective attention? Drawing from literature on critical toponymies and Black and Indigenous feminism, we connect the heritage landscape in the US to larger patterns of settler colonialism, white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy. We introduce the idea of auditing the heritage landscape – creating databases, lists and visualizations which highlight and quantify unequal public memory as well as the persistent elevation of perpetrators of violence in the landscape. Three case studies, including one about the coauthors’ work, demonstrate the variation of existing auditing practices and raise critical questions about the feasibility of audits, their means and ends, as well as what they hope to achieve and for whom. We conclude that audits are provisional tools for collective political education and for beginning to hold settler structures accountable for their role in the ongoing disruption of Black and Indigenous people’s relationships to the land. Yet the work of audits toward liberation and justice is by no means guaranteed.
