ABSTRACT
Global protests under the label of #BlackLivesMatter (BLM) flared up again after the violent killing of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis/US on 25 May 2020. Spreading particularly through social media, the international scale of the protests also drew media attention to urban “fallist movements”, which had been advocating for the removal of monuments in public spaces associated with “difficult heritage”. The contestation of monuments, and statues in particular, glorifying a certain version of the past is not a new one—as proven by the century-old history of iconoclasm in its various forms. Yet, while local movements have been voicing calls for the removal of statues for decades, the issue has only very recently started to draw increasing public and academic attention, as captured by the recently coined concept of “urban fallism”. Against this backdrop and drawing on conceptualizations of activism and “fallist” movements as translocal assemblages, this paper analyzes the diverse contentions around statues of Mahatma Gandhi. By doing so, the paper explores how a powerful translocal activist network such as Black Lives Matter (BLM) serves as a frame and catalyzer for the smaller, local Gandhi Must Fall movements. Based on discourse analysis of the recent disputes aroused in press and social media sources around the erection of Gandhi statues in public spaces globally, the chapter analyzes the entanglements between the larger BLM activist network and the smaller fallist movements, as well as the arguments and the different contentions surrounding the Gandhi statues. The paper comes to show, that while large translocal activist networks are instrumental for smaller fallist movements as a source of legitimation and power, on the other hand, their misappropriation can lead to hinder productive and inclusive debates around the rearrangement of contested urban heritage landscapes.
