ABSTRACT
The 2010s and early 2020s have witnessed a surge of activist and artistic projects interrogating the after-effects of past violence and injustice, especially colonial legacies. This chapter argues that some of these struggles relate to the contemporary problem space of postmigration. It explores how art has become the fulcrum of the disputes over whose voices should be heard and whose histories represented in public space. Like Chapter 6, it seeks to provide some answers to the question of the much debated yet crucial role of public art in democratic societies, particularly how works of art may generate postmigrant public spaces and enable us to imagine national and urban communities otherwise, that is, as postmigrant communities. More specifically, this chapter introduces the concept of postmigrant re-memorialization as a lens on how old and new monuments have become embroiled in the disputes over heritage and identity. In addition to discussing the struggles over historical monuments and public markers of recent years, the chapter examines La Vaughn Belle and Jeannette Ehlers’s collaboration on their sculpture project I Am Queen Mary (2018). Critically commemorating Danish colonialism, this memorial provides an opportunity to examine important intersections of postmigrant and postcolonial perspectives in art.
