ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the relations between monuments and colonial domination. The chapter begins by detailing the Rhodes Must Fall and Black Lives Matter movements and their contribution to raising the need for a more critical approach to our monuments, public institutions, and spaces. This denkmalkultur (monument-culture) is, as Frantz Fanon recognises, integral to colonial power. This chapter also asks whether the monument is, as an object, colonial in intent, as well as content. This is explored through the writing of Achille Mbembe and Henri Lefebvre, whose theories of colonialism and space contribute to this argument. The chapter uses the example of global monuments to Queen Victoria to argue how this monumental colonialism forcibly overlays an alien coloniser culture onto indigenous spaces. This disruption of space, politics, and bodies and the mimicry such statues encourage in their subjects—as detailed by Homi K. Bhaba—is examined. The contrast between these monuments to Victoria in continents where she never set foot and the Eleanor Crosses erected by Edward I for Eleanor of Castile, which traced her funeral procession, is examined. The chapter concludes by showing this use of the monument as an expansive wielding of violent power and its attendant fantasies of whiteness.
